Patchwork Yokohama
22. Creepy Crawly Yokohama
by Pencil Louis
In June, Vince visited Shiki No Mori Koen near Nakayama.
While the Four Seasons park was short on sakura, it had an
abundance of shobu or irises. It was a ranging park, large
by any standards in Japan, with different areas for this and
that. There was a marsh-like area for catching insects and
near here, you could see the iris garden. The irises were
awash with rainfall and sunlight, but looked drab all the
same. There was something fetid and decaying about the shobu
for Vince - you could see and smell it. The blooms looked to
him nothing so much like melted plastic in blue, white,
purple, cherry, mauve and violet.
At the same time as the shobu, the hotaru or fire flies
abounded in Shiki No Mori. Salarymen smoking on the outside
balconies were often compared to hotaru. Osamu, who didn't
smoke at all, had told Vince often enough that the fields of
Midori Ward had once abounded with fireflies, but now there
were hardly any and you had to go to special parks like this
one to see the hotaru. Osamu, a farmer himself, blamed
farmers for using new chemicals on the rice paddies and
killing off the tiny fish, kawanina, the main source of food
for the hotaru.
You could still see them in the forests of Shiki No Mori
Koen and there was a week set aside for viewing the tiny
insects. A display told Vince that there were two major
types of hotaru - the Genji hotaru and the Heikei hotaru,
but it was impossible to tell the difference in the dark.
The genji female was 18 millimetres long as opposed to the
15 millimetre male while the Heikei female was 10
millimetres long to the 8 millimetre male. Only the boys had
the lights, a ploy to attract willing females. Vince found
all this out in a special information booth. He also
discovered that fireflies metamorphose in an incredible 20
minute long cocoon phase.
Firefly watching was called Hotaru Gari and Vince felt that
he was particularly adept at it. Common sense told him that
the best way to view fire flies was to escape to the darkest
and least noisy and consequently least crowded sections of
the swamp area. He would stand away from the rabble that was
armed with torches and a range of oohs and aahs that was
instant insect repellent to any self-respecting hotaru. Sure
enough some fireflies, tentatively flickering lights at
first, becoming bolder, until someone nearby would notice
and another noisy crowd would congregate. At this point,
Vince would move to another area and the fireflies would
follow him.
He was not always able to do this. The first year, he tried
hotaru gari, the boardwalk paths at Shiki no mori koen
became so crowded that it was impossible to find a special
viewing point for yourself and for all the torch light
illuminating the bushes it was very difficult to see the
path itself. This was also the year when it poured with rain
and the populace, torches in one hand and brochures or
complimentary fans in the other, hadn't brought along the
obligatory umbrellas that singled out the ready for all
occasions salaryperson from the run of the mill rabble. If
the hotaru had not already called off the evening's mating
activities, the stampede along the narrow board paths back
to the car park ensured the fact that few hotaru larvae
would be conceived that night.
Even Connie could understand the attraction of the hotaru.
Their fragile lights wending a jagged path through the
foliage. She had avoided all the information material lest
she discover, as she suspected, that the hotaru bore a
distinct resemblance to all other creepy crawlies in the
light of day. Vince had tried to tease her about this, but
she was adamant. Who had seen a real glow worm? she
demanded. No doubt, they just looked like worms. She
compared hotaru with stars in the sky, which looked nothing
like great belching balls of ignited gas.
While everyone in Japan seemed agreed on the fleeting beauty
of the hotaru, not unlike the sakura when you thought about
it, they had mixed feelings about insects in general. It
seemed that half of Japan loved insects while the other half
hated them. How often had Vince been teaching a class when
everything had been thrown into chaos by a moth flying into
the room. A good two thirds of the girls and some of the
boys were close to hysteria.
Vince could only assume that this monstrous reaction had
something to do with the possibility of the moth laying eggs
on their hair and making holes like they did in clothes. But
no, one day, he witnessed a equal Richter scale reading of
hysteria when an ear wig was discovered on the floor in
front of one girl's seat. Vince, not only concerned with the
state of his class but also with the realisation that a
fellow creature, the ear wig, was suffering great traumas,
took immediate action and stomped on it, hopefully putting
the poor little fellow out of its misery.
This caused even more chaos and an irate student, the
spokesperson for the group, reminded him that he might just
have stood on a long-dead ancestor who had taken on another
life time as an ear wig. Surprised by this sudden appearance
of religiosity so rare during his time in Japan, Vince found
himself wondering how Australian ear wigs had made it to
Tokyo. From then on, the moth problem assumed a new light.
Maybe, the hysteria arose from the thought that these girls'
ancestors might well be checking up on whether they had done
their homework.
On the other hand, Vince went to enough parks on the weekend
and had seen the hundreds of men, women and children
searching through fields for grasshoppers and on the edges
of marshes for dragonflies. The Matsumoto children were
particularly fond of wading thigh deep through muddy creeks
in search of tadpoles, tiny molluscs or swamp insects.
Junichi could name any insect in any of its four stages and
took great pleasure in presenting Vince with a dead cocoon
and showing him what it had looked like as a caterpillar or
would have looked like as an adult.
Vince was not very keen on caterpillars himself, although he
had collected them for a short time as a boy. He had been
put off for life when his prize caterpillar, Spartacus, had
eaten some leaves with fly eggs on them. The maggots had
eaten their way out via Spartacus's head. Years later, when
Vince was watching the alien eat its way out of a man in the
movie, Alien, all he could think of was Spartacus.
Vince was well aware that no hobby as popular as bug
catching could be left alone by the massive commercial
machinery of Japan and so it didn't surprise him in the
least that you could buy insects in department stores during
the summer months of June and July. For just 680 yen, you
could buy one kabuto mushi larva complete complete with
plastic cage and a mulchy, mouldy living and feeding mat.
The kabuto mushi, a succulent looking grub of some
proportion grew into a formidable looking monster with the
two horns. Vince was infinitely grateful that it was only
two inches long. Indeed, he thought that it was a purely
Japanese breed until, on a visit back to homeland Australia,
one of Connie's nephews brought in a slightly smaller but no
less ferocious looking specimen.
If 680 didn't sound like much for such an impressive
looking insect, you could buy him optional extras - special
mushi water for 200, mushi gourmet food for 190 and even
mushi jelly for 250. The kabuto mushi was named after the
kabuto helmet used by samurai warriors and often presented
as part of the boys' day celebrations.
Another celebrated insect in Japan was the cricket. Vince,
whose favourite sport bore the same name, nevertheless
remembered how their back leg scrapings had kept him awake
for half the night at a time when he was a young boy of six
or seven living in Melbourne. He had thought of them as
pests in those days and nothing until his visit to Japan had
given him reason to change his mind, least of all cricket
plagues in the Wimmera.
He had quickly discovered that crickets were a delicacy in
the north of Honshu. Inago was sugared cricket complete with
legs, head, thorax, abdomen and antennae. Vince could
acquire a taste for just about anything and now that he
delighted in sometimes bringing a packet into his classes
and munching on them while half the class screamed and the
other half drooled.
Even more surprising for Vince than edible crickets was the
yearly late-summer rinshunkan or appreciation of the songs
of the insects. If crickets weren't the tastiest of
delicacies to Vince's mind, their song was hardly the most
melodious to his ears. Still, it was a measure of Vince's
time in Japan and his experiences there, that thirty years
after lying in bed and listening to their drone that kept
him awake half the night, Vince and Connie were busying
themselves to go out for an evening of Rinshunkan at
Sankei-en gardens.
To make matters worse, one of his interminable in-laws,
Connie's brother, Ted, was staying with them at the time.
Ted had laughed and laughed out loud when he had heard that
they were going out to listen to insects. He had point
blankedly refused to join them and ripped the tab off
another of Vince's beers with a burp.
"The only crickets I'm going to listen to are Buddy Holly's.
I think I'll just spend the evening trying to get used to
this shit the Japs call beer."
Vince frowned as Connie pulled him towards the door, "You
know, you don't have to drink it if you don't like it."
In fact, I'd sooner you didn't drink it, Vince thought as he
walked down to the train. There might be some left for me.
As it turned out, it was one of the most restful evenings
they'd spent in Yokohama. Sankei-en is a large Japanese
garden with iris, cherry and plum arbours. At the highest
point, you can look over the industrial Yokohama port and
see Mount Fuji on a clear day. There was an inner garden
with the usual range of bridges and creeks in a miniaturised
landscape. Sankei-en was rarely open to the public at night
time. It was open on this particular day for the first full
moon after the autumnal equinox. Hundreds of photographers
were trying to get a view of the moon as it rose behind the
three tiered pagoda that seemed to hang in the air over the
lower part of the garden. The Kanshin bridge on the opposite
side of the pond was brilliantly illuminated with golden
light.
The insects weren't nearly as noisy as the ones that haunted
Vince's childhood and he found the cigarette smoke far more
annoying. There was hardly a patch of fresh air and
considering the pollution, it surprised Vince that anyone
could see the moon at all or that there were any insects
left. Still, he reflected, it would have been the same at
home as Ted inevitably lit up without thinking.
In the inner garden, there was a concert first for the
bamboo flutes playing haunting Japanese refrains that were
meant to compliment the tune of the crickets. Then came a
series of koto players who played an unusual range of tunes
Doh, a deer, a female deer. Reh, a drop of golden sun, Mi, a
name I call myself. And so on, And so on, And so on.
This was followed by "Home on the Range" and "Bringing in
the Sheaves". Vince wondered if these were popular numbers
with the crickets themselves. He knew well enough that they
probably had Japanese lyrics and most people in the country
no doubt thought they were native songs.
When he arrived home, Vince noted that there was no beer
left in the fridge and asked his brother-in-law if he had,
at last, acquired a taste for Japanese beer.
The latter replied, "I don't think so, but after the third
it doesn't seem to matter."