Ah, autumn...

Autumn is here, heralded not by the vibrant reds and oranges of the Japanese maple, but by swarms of dragonflies. Although you see them during other times of the year, autumn is when dragonflies come stage front and steal the show. It’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting on my tatami enjoying a coffee and the gentle breeze passing through the open windows of my apartment. The only disturbance is from the occasional intrepid dragonfly that flits in through the window, bumps curiously into lampshade, wall and paper screen before departing out of another window.
Had they been discovered after the advent of the helicopter, I’m sure they would have been called helicopter flies. They have four wings (albeit not at 90 degrees to each other as on a helicopter), their bodies resemble the tail of a helicopter (albeit without a rotor on the end), the head and eyes look like a cockpit (albeit without little men inside steering) and they can hover (actually, just like helicopters). Hm, maybe I’ve drunk too much coffee and maybe I’ve been staring at dragonflies out the window for too long…
The Japanese for dragonfly is tombo and the kanji is made up of two characters, both of which contain the character for insect. One kanji has the character for blue in it, but I can’t break down the other kanji (flying thing, maybe, at a guess). The Japanese find it fascinating that we call them “dragonflies” – it seems quite a dramatic name for an essentially harmless creature, certainly more dramatic than “blue flying insect.”
At elementary school this week one of the students (most probably a boy) discovered an interesting visitor, which looked as though it belonged in Alien 3 rather than an elementary school. The principal brought it over to me and said: “Excuse me, what is this in English?” I’d never seen anything like it. It seemed equally surprised to see me. They told me the Japanese name and I had a look in my dictionary. It turned out to be a mole cricket. After initial confusion regarding cricket the insect and cricket the sport, I got down to explaining what a mole was. I have a little Nintendo DS that allows me to draw in kanji or English, which the software will then translate into the desired language. I wrote in “mole” and showed my colleagues the kanji. It has two characters, the first I recognised as the kanji for earth (as in soil, not the planet). I then checked what the second kanji meant. Turns out that the Japanese call the humble, blind, bumbling mole, the “earth dragon.” I’m guessing there must have been a period several hundred years ago, during the construction of all the famous Kyoto Zen gardens, when the mole population reached infestation proportions, reeking havoc among the temples and bonsai. Gardens torn apart from below, the torment faced by shogun and gardener alike, surely a punishment from the gods. Yes, earth dragon makes perfect sense when viewed in this historical context.
One day I will sit down and learn the names of all the animals that I share my apartment with. The newest member of the gang goes by the name Argiope amoena or, would you believe it, the “St. Andrew’s Cross spider” given it’s English name. I first saw this spider on Sado Island and convinced myself that it must surely be confined to the island, in a Galapagos-type way, and that there was no conceivable way it could have made it across the sea onto the mainland. I clearly overlooked the thrice-daily ferry that runs from Joetsu to Sado… I found my fat, striped friend on the door handle of the apartment. As much of an animal lover as I am, my apartment is simply too small to share with a spider as scary looking as that. I rolled up a newspaper and swung baseball-style, hoping to send spider-chan for a home run into the nearest rice paddy. Sadly, he simply rearranged his footing slightly and settled back down into his web. On the fourth attempt I managed to get him onto the floor. I won’t describe what happened next, safe to say that he won’t be bothering us any more. I have since discovered that this species, though large and brightly coloured, is harmless, feeding on insects rather than humans. A website reassuring states that “their venom is not regarded as a serious medical problem for humans.” Phew!