Cicadas used to be something I had never seen. It was something you heard about in movies, how they created an almost romantic ambience in the evenings.

Then I came to Japan.

Here, cicadas are anything but romantic. They wake you up with their incessant noise as soon as the sun hits the trees where they are sitting. They continue with the morning choir until around 9:30 – 10:00, and then come back and make noise intermittently during the day.

The funny thing is, that the japanese kids love them. They love all bugs, and everything else that is small and creeps around, like lizards and worms. Kids in Sweden or Germany or anywhere else that I’ve been have a kind of squamishness about bugs – they might find them fascinating, but they are not going to pick them up or let them crawl around in their hair… The last weekend I learned about a lot of bugs from some Japanese kids:

• Kamikiri is a nasty little beetle that has really strong jaws which lets it bite off straws of grass, or, as the name implies, hair (Kami = 髪 = hair, and kiri = 切り = cut).
• The walking sticks here are much bigger than the ones I had in a jar back in Sweden when I was seven. Never managed to figure out what they are called though…
• Cicadas are called semi (せみ or　蝉), and, as described above, are very noisy.
• Tombo (蜻蛉) is the Japanese name for dragonflies in general. There’s plenty of them here, and they are big.
• Hotaru (蛍) are the lightningbugs that fly around and shine at night. There’s a place close to our house (actually, it’s a graveyard) that is famous for its hotaru.
• There were of course lots more, but the names are all very similar, so I managed to forget most of them. Praying Mantises, grasshoppers of all kinds, beetles in the hundreds, and of course a few lizards just for fun :-)

In other news, I recently got a new camera – a Sony DSC-H5. Very ver nice, so now I finally have no (material) excuse for taking shitty pictures anymore ;-) Also, I’m moving to Tokyo in just over three weeks. Exciting, but sad to leave Adri behind here in Kobe :-(