<p>As super predators, humans commonly create a landscape of fear for wild animals. In rural areas of East Asia, including Japan, declining human populations have recently led to reduced anthropogenic pressures on wildlife. It is likely that these unprecedented social changes in turn reduced fear of humans, resulting in expanding ecosystem disservices such as agricultural damage affecting rural residents. Unfortunately, few studies have quantitatively examined the influence of social and environmental changes associated with human depopulation on animal behavior. This study aimed to measure how present culling and landscape structure observed in rural Japan could create landscape of fear for Japanese macaques (<i>Macaca fuscata</i>). We observed the flight behavior of 10 macaque troops in response to audio stimuli and identified social and environmental factors influencing those responses using a Bayesian cumulative link mixed model. Our key findings are as follows: (1) targeted macaques in open areas were 2.83 times more likely to flee than those in forests; (2) macaques with animal-proof fences were 0.22 times less likely to escape than macaques in unfenced areas; (3) the flight behavior of macaques was not affected by the experiences of past culling activities by residents; and (4) the reduction in troop size decreased their flight responses. These results suggest that, for targeted macaques, habitat management could be more effective than increasing culling pressure to reinforce risk perception toward humans. The extensive animal-proof fences often observed in depopulating communities could result in the ironic consequence of disappearance of the landscape of fear for macaques.</p>