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."