Coming from a small town in the
mountains of Colorado, I am no stranger to encountering wildlife on a
regular basis. I am familiar with the faces, behavior, and vehicular
dangers of deer, elk, mountain goats, big horn sheep, and even moose.
I have heard the calls of red-tailed hawks, coyotes, owls, and
cougars. Bald eagles nest in trees by my parents' house, while a fox
family lives in the nearby hill. I've even seen a mother black bear
and her cubs from the comfortable safety of my vehicle parked at a
distance. Despite all this interaction with the wild, the animal life
in Akita was a completely new experience to me. While I didn't wake
up to herd of dear on the front lawn, I felt more surrounded by
wildlife than I had in a long while. (Perhaps I've grown soft in my
years of living in Boulder.) Sometimes this closeness was nice and
refreshing; other times, it left my skin crawling. Sometimes, I
didn't even see the animals, and yet they were a strong presence in
my life nonetheless.
The difference between the nature of
Colorado and that of Akita is based on the humidity. Akita is so much
wetter than Colorado, so the plants and flowers thrive in a way they
never could in Colorado—and so do the bugs.
Oh my gosh, the bugs. Colorado
does not have bugs; not compared to Akita. The sheer number of them
left me speechless and hallucinating crawling sensations on my skin
while I tried to sleep. The spiders were the worst. During the day
they'd go off to hide in some cool hidden nooks, thankfully out of my
sight, but at night they came home like commuters rushing from
cubicle jobs. They hung over every single entry way, dangling
lightly, making most doors impassable. I had to rush under them,
squealing like a child, for fear of them dropping onto my hair. When
I was walking through the streets at night, or through the forest
during the day (I didn't go at night), I would find the webs of the
rumored giant spiders that I, thankfully, never actually encountered.
I am so grateful, because those webs were huge. Giant. Enormous. They
spanned at least three feet wide, often more. I cannot even imagine a
spider big enough to make them.
And it wasn't just the spiders that
were big. There were beetles as long as fingers and twice as thick.
The dragonflies, fed fat on the numerous mosquitoes, sounded like
lawnmowers when they flew by my ears. Justin (my boyfriend) even saw
a caterpillar a foot long and almost two inches thick, scooting along
the sidewalk. Can you imagine the size of the butterfly or moth THAT
thing became?
There was a stairwell near my dorm
that once served me as a convenient quick route back to my room,
instead of going all the way around. That convenience ended around
July, when the bugs deemed that staircase the perfect place to go
when their lives were ending. So many dead beetles found those stairs
as their final resting place. I once stepped on one by mistake on my
way to class. It made a large crunch, and when I looked, I expected
to see the bug in shatters. Instead, its exterior skeleton sprung
back into place, and it looked almost alive. Gross.
It wasn't all disgusting, however. The
dragonflies in Akita are beautiful, brilliant colors. From a safe
distance, even the spiders are kind of cool. Check out the picture
below of a spider I found with a leaf for a house.
During the height
of the summer, the cicadas invaded the lands, filling the air with
their constant buzz. I never could find one in the trees to take a
picture of, in spite of their incomprehensible numbers. At night,
when they stopped humming, the world seemed eerily silent, like an
empty apartment after a night standing next to the speakers at a loud
party. The spiders had the added bonus of providing me with
entertainment while I ate lunch. Looking out the cafeteria windows, I
could see them in the corners of the window panes outside, and so
could the birds. It was fascinating watching the sparrows dart in
and out, expertly taking away an tasty arachnid in their beaks.
Akita also had frogs, whose songs
replaced that of the cicadas at night. Justin and I heard their calls
everywhere when we walked through the forest near campus, and yet we
could never find them. The only one I managed to actually see was one
sitting on a leaf near a Buddhist shrine, silent and motionless like
a monk himself. When I showed the picture I took to my roommate, she
made a disgusted face; I was disappointed. Apparently people in Japan
don't find frogs as cute as people in the States. (He was adorable.)
The most constant animal figure during
my stay was the local bear. Every week there was a new bear warning,
usually saying that the bear had been seen near the convenience store
down the block. There were even signs around that said “Caution
Bears.” This made the native English speakers laugh, (since it
should have said “Caution, Bears”) and we imagined the bear
wearing a bright orange vest while warning passers-by of the various
dangers of AIU. The bear was supposedly an Asian Black-Bear which I
have heard are more aggressive than Grizzlies and frequently attack
humans. Still, there were no attacks that semester, and so the bear
remained merely a scary rumor in our daily lives, and a reason to be
noisy when walking in the forest—so as not to sneak up on it by
mistake.
(Picture from wikipedia. So cute and yet so scary.)
Another friendlier, more welcome
animal presence in Akita were the numerous cats. There are a huge
number of stray cats in Japan, perhaps because of all the seafood.
They tend to gather in large groups wherever there are enough people
to pamper them, and the AIU campus was one such hotspot. Each cat we
encountered was sweet and docile, accepting our coddling with almost
princely satisfaction. I often passed laundry hours by spoiling the
nearby cats, or watching them have small territorial disputes. On
paper, AIU had to periodically get rid of the cats—in the worst
sense of the phrase—but the lady in charge of the distasteful duty
always made as much noise as possible when she was supposed to round
them up. With such ample notice, the cats usually made an easy get
away, going on to live another day fed by bleeding heart students who
left out cans of food bought from the convenience store.
My trip was filled with cameos of
other animals in addition to the usual cast. Koi fish often followed
my feet as I walked, begging for crumbs. I watched seabirds and hawks
dance on the wind at Cape Nyudo on the Oga Peninsula. Every once in a
while I'd spot a rabbit flitting across the grass at AIU. In many
ways the change in animal life made me yearn for the familiar blue
spruce pines of the Colorado woods; and yet many of the creatures I
encountered made my visit to Japan especially satisfying because I
had anticipated seeing them. Almost every anime I have watched
includes a summer scene filled with the buzzing of cicadas. Koi fish
are as iconic of Japan as girls in kimono or cherry blossoms. Even
the stray cats are a famous characteristic of the island nation,
appearing in such beloved pieces as the
movie The Cat Returns,
and the darling show Azumanga Daioh.
Although I can't say I miss the abundance of bug life, the wildlife
reminded me of how lush the nature of Akita is, and how lucky I was
to experience its beauty.
(This cat was not so happy to see us. In fact, it was really pissed that we interrupted its nap.)
(A hunting hawk at Cape Nyudo. This picture doesn't communicate how big and beautiful and close they were, but it's the best picture I managed to capture!)
(A short video to let you hear the hum of the cicadas. Now imagine this from 10am until 6pm, constantly. You might have to turn up your volume, a bit.)
