So when I found out my placement in Japan when I first got this Job I was really excited because I was placed in a city. Sometimes cities and prefectures (prefectures are similar to States) have the same name, but I was positive I was going to live in a city because the name of the city was followed by 市(shi) which translates directly as “city”. There was no mistake. I would be living in Kobe City. Right? ……wrong.
Japan has a very different interpretation on boundary drawing. Officially I live in Kobe-shi, but the truth is I live in the countryside. The CITY part of the city is on the other side of the mountain. (It can be reached in 15 minutes or so by a train that goes through the mountain.) However, the major downfall of living in the countryside is not the inconvenience; the need to take the train to get daily essentials or the long walks……it’s the insect life.
Everything in Japan is tiny. The houses are tiny, the people are tiny, the cars are tiny, but the bugs are #%$&ing HUGE!!!! AND, they come in every shape size and type. I’ve seen beetles with pincers and spiders the size of my palm (minus the fingers).
Apparently there are these five inch long centipedes that roam around the countryside, and if they bite you, your skin rots off that area and you have to go to the hospital. Awesome. Needless to say I do bug checks in my apartment every night before I go to bed, and make sure the tub is plugged so those suckers can’t crawl up the drain pipe.
The cicadas are psychotic. They play dead on path, little legs sticking pathetically and they wait for you to approach. Just as you are about to step over them they spring to life, screeching an ungodly screech and fly full throttle into your face repeatedly until they give up and fly off. They are harmless, but they are huge and really ugly looking. The average cicada is maybe 1 ½ to 2 inches long and maybe ¾ of an inch thick. When they fly they are about the size of a small humming bird, and they make a SUPER loud noise. I’ve never experienced anything like it.
Their sound correlates to how hot it is, so when it clouds over they die down to a reasonable level, but when the clouds pass, if you are outside with your friends and you are near a group of cicadas, you’ll actually have a hard time hearing each other.
The worst part of all is all of these critters like to hang out in hallways and staircases, so the 5 stories of outside staircase standing between me and my apartment is INFESTED with these lovelies. They are on the floors, ceilings, and the spiders (which are the creepiest spiders you with EVER see, black with flecks of yellow, or big bulbous bodies with gray, spindly little legs.) love to play, “how low can you go?”
This is a game in which the spiders build the biggest possible web in the stairwell that they can, so big that even a short 5’ 4” individual like me will run into the webs, face first, if I’m not paying attention. The process of getting to my apartment is god awful. I take the outdoor elevator to the 4th floor (it only goes to floors 1, 4, and 7) so I only have to deal with one flight of stairs. Then I check out the web situation before I get out of the elevator. I duck and make my way up the stairs, head covered until I reach my apartment on the 5th floor. The ceilings are high enough outside the apartments that I usually don’t have to worry, so I fish my keys out of my purse, look around to make sure there is no airborne insect incoming and then quickly burst into my apartment so nothing gets in. Then I check the entrance to my apartment to make sure that nothing followed me. If you all don’t believe me, I hear you can go to this site, JapaneseBugFights.com. I would post pictures, but looking at these bugs in real life is bad enough. I’ll let you do your own research.
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