OUR MISSION
• In Japan, 352 chimpanzees reside in 57 institutes. Our project started in the hope of providing physical and psychological well-being for all chimpanzees. Our goal is to solve the problems of breeding and surplus individuals who cannot be introduced to a group.
One way to do this is by establishing the "Chimpanzee Sanctuary". We also feel obligated to educate the public.

• We aim to provide an enriching habitat for individually kept chimpanzees and surplus chimpanzees by establishing this sanctuary.

Why are there individually kept chimpanzees and surplus chimpanzees?

1. Each chimpanzee has a unique personality and sometimes is unable to get along well with others.
Just like us humans, chimpanzees have unique personalities. Sometimes, they cannot be friendly to each other. Especially under captivity, serious injury occurs due to the difficulty of escaping or the lack of appropriate hiding places during conflicts. To prevent such incidences, the bully or the weak individual may be isolated and forced to live alone.
Also, under the captive environment where space is limited, it is physically difficult to keep several adult males together. When growing up, males try to become the dominant in a group. They start showing display behaviors such as banging on things or running around dragging things. They may start to fight with specific individuals but this may end up involving unrelated individuals. Again, in captive environments where space is limited, serious injury can occur and to avoid this, adult males may have to be isolated from each other.
Such isolated individuals are treated as "surplus" and wait in line to be transferred to other institutions. However, considering sex, age and subspecies of such isolated individual, transfers can be difficult and take much time.

2. A chimpanzee may have spent too much time with humans making it difficult for them to learn to live with other chimpanzees.
After retiring from use in the entertainment industry, a chimpanzee is often kept alone.

In general, chimpanzees we see on TV shows or events are 2-6 years old. A retired chimp(this decided by humans) is usually transferred to a zoo or kept alone away from the public.
In order to train a chimp to be used in a show, it is isolated from its mother while still an infant and hand raised so that they are comfortable with humans. They establish a one-on-one relationship with a trainer. However, the time that they are "cute and cuddly" and safe to humans is very short. By 10years of age, a chimp's strength becomes more powerful than a human's and is hard to have control over. When we feel we don't have the control over them, chimps are retired. There are cases that such chimpanzees are introduced to groups, but most of the time, since they spent much of their time with humans from a very young age, they never have a chance to learn the rules of chimpanzee society, and cannot be introduced to groups. If this is the case, they are forced to spend the rest of their life in isolation. Considering that chimps live 40-50 years, they must spend the majority of their life in such small cage.
It is undoubtedly adorable to see dressed-up chimps behaving like humans. Yet, it is merely selfish entertainment to please the human ego. More importantly, we do not learn anything from watching such dressed-up cuddly chimpanzees. Is it morally acceptable to use chimpanzees who have emotions like us, just for such entertainment reasons? The hidden consequence is that many chimpanzees will spend the remaining of their life alone.

3. The institution is too small to keep chimpanzees in groups.
Traditionally, zoos kept animals in lined up cages just like show window displays. Animals were kept alone or in pairs. Care management started to change as we became aware of how animals live in the wild.
Chimpanzees in the wild live in "groups" and have a strong social life. Institutions that can afford to, alter their exhibits so that they can keep chimps in "groups". However, this involves altering the exhibit, and that costs a lot of money. There are still many institutions who keep animals in the traditional way.

Difficulties that each institutions face are most of the time not overcome by the institution alone. Slowly, nation wide collaboration is beginning to take place, yet even such collaboration within Japan is not enough to solve many of the problems that exist.

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