Of a Scare

I had a close call with death yesterday. I was walking home to my dorm when I decided to take a shortcut. This was nothing new. I always take the shortcut, it's about 10 minutes shorter, and it was really hot outside, so 10 minutes shorter is a pretty big deal.

I stepped onto the little path, which is really just a covered drain in the road, and began to cross over to the other side. To give you a sense of perspective, this drain is only about a foot wide. Everyone uses it here as a foot path, though I've seen the brave bike over it before. The left side is up against a fence and someone's house, where both have a significant green area. The right side drops off a few meters to a communal farm. People can grow vegetables, fruits, and flowers there. It only takes a couple minutes to cross over normally.

I got to the middle, and out of nowhere come three suzumebachi. I abruptly froze, thinking what on earth should I do? If I turned around, they'd chase me. They are predators after all, and secondly, they swarm, like bees. So, running would have caused those three to chase me, as well as possibly calling out the rest of the nest. If I stepped back, I might stumble on the path, and also, the stones move, which would have caused a decent amount of sound. These things are known for attacking bikers and such for being noisy, so that really wasn't an option either. I decided to stay still and make like a tree.

The hornets hovered there for a while, me looking at them, them looking at me. I felt like they needed some sort of your-imminent-death-is-approaching song. I could hear the sound of their wings as they fluttered in the air, and the stingers were obvious. I thought, "What do I do if I get stung?" It only takes twice and you're dead. It was only a few seconds I'm sure, but eventually the three suzumebachi decided I wasn't a threat and flew away. I waited a few more seconds just to make sure, and then I cautiously made my way to the other side. When I got back to the dorm, I realized just how dangerous of a situation I was in. Even now, I have no idea why there were three of them together. One alone is enough to kill almost anything. Either the things have moved on to killing bears, or they were returning to the nest. Either way, I'm glad I made it though, and I'll be on the lookout for more.

Of Mukade

Well, Japan has officially entered its ridiculously hot and humid summer season. This means that all of the super-sized bugs have come out in force. The suzumebachi are flying around, the giant cockroaches and ants are coming out, but without a doubt, the mukade (ムカデ) are crawling out of the woods.

I don't really know how to describe mukade except for the fact that they're centipedes about 5 cm long, and they're just plain terrifying. Getting bit by one is not something to be taken lightly. In fact, you should probably go to the hospital. As long as you're a healthy human being, you'll be fine, but if you're a child or an elderly individual, they're far more dangerous. Mukade tend to come out at night, so you'll normally be bitten while you're sleeping. This is exactly why they're so dangerous. Depending on where the bite is - for example, if it's close to your heart or your neck - the consequences are much more severe. Otherwise, apparently you suffer extreme pain.

The other International House deals with mukade often. In fact, they've developed a Mukade Killing Competition Chart, where they rack up the number that each of them has killed as a kind of morbid game. I believe one guy killed about 15 of them in a couple weeks. Regardless, pamphlets and other announcements of how to deal with the dreaded mukade have started circling around.

My personal favorite is how you're supposed to apply first aid for these things. The English goes something like this, "If bitten, immediately remove the centipede and crush the head. Then, while running cold water over the wound, squeeze out the venom. If the wound is painful, go see a doctor."

However, the best part of this is how you're supposed to eradicate these things. No matter who you talk to, the preferred method is always something short of the absurd. The Mukade Killing Club recommends chopping the centipede into pieces as if you're playing a role in some sort of Poe horror story. The standard method seems to be pouring boiling water on them or wrapping them in newspaper and lighting them on fire. Ridiculous? Absolutely. Yet, even this still doesn't seem to kill the bug from your nightmares.

No joke. Taku, one of the buddies over at the other International House, doused a mukade the other day in a pot of boiling water. It stayed dead for about a couple hours. But then it got back up and continued to wreak havoc around the dorm. This begs the question, if you can't kill it with a pot of boiling water, what on earth are you supposed to do?

I personally think that we should pit the mukade against the suzumebachi. Maybe one of them will wipe the other out. I haven't figured out yet what purpose these things serve in the food chain. Supposedly some sort of hardcore indestructible bird eats them, but surely it might enjoy eating something that doesn't threaten kill it more. Either way, the mukade curse continues.

Of Fire Buckets

There's something about Kyoto which has continually perplexed me. All around the city outside of every store and house is a little red bucket with one of two things written on it: For Fire Fighting Use (消火用) or Fire Prevention (防火用). If there are no houses, you find these buckets on corners, in temples, hanging from rafters, absolutely everywhere. Interestingly enough, the other places that I've visited in Japan haven't had these. Only Kyoto.

In the past, this probably made a lot of sense. After all, the entire city was made of wood, and the houses are built extremely close to each other. That means that if one caught fire, it would likely burn down a couple other houses around it before it was put out. This led to huge sections of the city burning down relatively frequently. Long droughts, hot summers, and just general mishaps contributed to this. Of course, in the past, you couldn't just call up your local fire department and ask them to help put it out, so everyone in your neighborhood would try to put the fire out as they gathered more people to carry buckets, etc. All in all, it was a rather organized system, and this prevented the entire city from burning down.

In the modern day and age though, this really doesn't make a lot of sense. Houses are still built with a significant portion of wood, but they also built with concrete, flexible steel, and other materials in order to prevent the collapse of houses in earthquakes and such. If there is a fire, I'm not going to deny that it's useful to have people with buckets to prevent the spread of the flames, but buckets should not be the primary fire prevention here. People have fire extinguishers (消火器) now, and they're in homes and businesses as well. If you're given a choice between a fire extinguisher and a bucket, doesn't it seem more practical to use the fire extinguisher? You might think when would you ever have this choice? Well, sometimes you do. You can run outside and choose. As this picture or this one show.

I actually asked one of my friends this exact same question, and they explained that they don't want the fire extinguisher fumes and excess in their house. Practical enough. But if the fire's big enough, even they would use the fire extinguisher. And in that respect any different from the rest of the world. But these buckets are still everywhere.

The best part of this is that even Amazon, Yahoo, and Rakuten have gotten in on this. You can buy the things for anywhere from 500-1260 yen. Who spends approximately $13 US on a fire fighting bucket they'll never use, I have no idea.

I've come up with a few explanations. They're the only explanations I can find besides the ones given above.

1. It's tradition. Japan, and Kyoto especially, is really big on this. Things are continued just because it's the way that it's always been. "But, we've used buckets for a thousand years. They've always worked in the past." And for that exact reason, their existence continues.
2. It's some law that I haven't been able to find. I've searched all over, but to no avail. It might be secretly one of those things that the Kyoto government has decided for all of its residents to do.
3. Kyoto has this sadistic motive to become the city with the most mosquitoes in all of Japan. Understand that these buckets don't just sit there empty. No, they are always full of water, and the water is never changed. I know this because sometimes they're growing moss and algae. This means that the water is at the perfect speed - meaning nonexistent, and always still - to breed mosquitoes. So far, they're doing pretty well.

Either way I'll give it to Japan. Fire prevention measures are doing well.

Of Kobe

There was an earthquake the other day in Kyoto prefecture. It was a M3 at its epicenter, but it hit us around an M2. Basically, this means it was just enough to feel, but nothing serious. I was underground in class at the time, and things shook a bit, but it was over within a second. Since Kyoto never really gets these, it was somewhat unusual, but it was fine.

Kan's promised to step down after settling the budget for this upcoming year. He didn't even make it a year without calls for him to step down, which is rather sad.

I went the Kobe yesterday, and had a great time. It was my friend's first time there, so it was a good experience. Slowly, but surely, I'll learn to make my way around Kobe. It's actually rather simple to navigate, much easier than Kyoto. Then again, anything is easier than Kyoto. People who visit here frequently comment on how easy it seems to navigate, in comparison to Tokyo and the like. However, once they manage to get themselves lost once, they learn just how hard it is to get un-lost (yes, I'm making that a word). Kyoto is in some ways convenient. It's set up on a grid pattern, but the problem is navigating where you are on that grid. All of the houses look fairly similar due to the building laws here, and the streets that are fortunate enough to have names frequently end in something-something-temple. Since you can walk anywhere in Kyoto and run into a temple almost as often as you run into a konbini, this makes the city almost impossible to navigate. I actually discovered the other day that there's a song or rhyme that the elderly teach to the youth in order for them to learn the streets. It goes from north to south, and east to west. Learning this song months ago would have been good for me. Needless to say, Kobe is easy to navigate, and I'm really thankful that I was able to go again yesterday.