The coolest thing about Japan...

…is definitely not the cicadas.

For a city with so little green space, Nagoya sure has a lot of animal life. And by “animal life,” I mean “cicadas.” It seems that every day, when I wake up, I wake up to the cheerful chirp of about a gazillion of these buggers.

Cicadas, for those less entomologically-inclined, are large, green insects that look like someone forgot to tell to follow the dinosaurs into extinction. Sometimes you can find their empty carapaces clinging to tree trunks or park benches or very slow dogs like some troupe of clawed amber alien émigrés who have all decided to give up the ghost together. Sometimes you can see the adult stage buzzing through the air like some discombobulated prehistoric bomber; a two-inch reptilian-looking bumblebee.

An interesting thing to note is – as I learned after much research during my formative years (read, “I was a dork”) – the cicada population peaks every seven years. Apparently it takes cicadas thirteen to seventeen years to mature from egg to adult, at which point they return to the sky in search of some insectoid lovin’, then lay their eggs, and die. And apparently I picked the summer when Japanese cicadas, commemorating an exceptionally “productive” year some thousands of generations back, give the local population an all-out audio barrage.

Now, usually a cicada buzzing harkens me back to my childhood, with images of running through fields and lazy summer afternoons with Kool-Aid and backyard swimming pools. Not these cicadas. These cicadas buzz like a fleet of delivery trucks with cold engines make on a Minneapolis morning in mid-December when the temperature is hovering around “sub-arctic”.

Which is disturbing enough without the fact that I don’t get the feel of Minneapolis-morning-in-mid-December cool air to accompany the squeal. What I do get with the roaring cold-engine squeal is about 75 tons of hot, stale, humid air – the maximum amount that my bedroom can contain without exploding – pressing down on me and making me sweat more sweat than my body can possibly hold. Oh yeah, and it’s now 5:30am, the sun is shining directly into my eyes through the curtains, and temperature is pushing 90. I wake up more tired than I was the night before. And glued to my pillow with drool. Yum.

I know I should stop being so whiny; after all, I’m living in a foreign country, surrounded by new sights, sounds, tastes, smells, adventures. I’m meeting all sorts of new people from all walks of life and most of the English-speaking nations in the world. I’ve grabbed onto an opportunity that few get the chance to take.

But please, please, for the love of all things good, understand: I’ve had six hours of sleep in the past two and a half days, and I just want these things to die. In a good way. Maybe I'll go start a fight club...

I’m done now.
kthanxbye.