Greetings 11

A matter of life and death

The wife and I. She’s gesturing that everything’s A-OK. Never mind, it’s a Japanese thing.

Dear readers, as I wrote in my last post, I’m a townie. I love big cities, and urban exploration, and until 2019 BC (i.e. Before Covid) I didn’t much care for the local flora and fauna. I lived in Yokohama’s deep suburbia but spent most of my time in central Tokyo.

After living nearly 20 years in the same place, I still knew very little about it.

Then Corona came, I found myself confined at home and began to appreciate all the little big discoveries I could make just by walking near my house, like Gerald Durrell in My Family and Other Animals.

My Japanese friends, who seem to learn a lot of those things at school, used to tease me because I knew nothing about bugs. Even more embarrassing, I knew the names of the flowers, but with the exception of roses and daisies, I didn’t know what they looked like.

Alas, I still don’t know most of them, so I had to ask my wife and friends to label the flora you are going to see below.

Please forgive the not perfect quality of the images. My cameras are not good enough for this kind of photography. For truly beautiful pictures, check out Shimizu Akira’s newsletter.

Do you have a favorite flower or plant, by the way?

A beautiful marigold (I think). In my ignorance, I’ve always associated blooming flowers with spring. Marigolds, however, have blooms that last throughout the summer and well into the fall.

Cosmos! Boy, do the Japanese love these flowers. I call them “migrant flowers” because while they are native to Mexico, Guatemala and Costa Rica, they have invaded and naturalized in scattered locations across North and South America, the West Indies, Italy, Australia, and Asia.

Can you see the tiny bugs?

This alien-looking flower is commonly known as the plumed cockscomb (keito in Japanese) because it resembles a rooster's comb.

In Japan, during the Azuchi-Momoyama period (1568-1600), it was a favorite subject of the Kano School painter Kano Eitoku.

It is resistant to extreme heat and once in bloom, it lasts a long time, blooming from May to October.

I often find it on my walks to the park I mentioned last time. It first attracted my attention because it is always “decorated” with lots of tiny insects (see photo).

I’m endlessly fascinated by the constant cycle of life, decay and death on display out there.

Here, a couple of months ago, a cicada molted on one of my plants. It reminds me of a scene from the original Alien (if you are an Alien fan like me, you know what I’m talking about).

To me, since moving to Japan, summer is not summer unless I’m deafened by a chorus of cicadas.

Crickets are almost gone now, but they always serenade me to sleep during the summer.

From Alien to Predator, this beautiful white heron stalks one of the local rivers, hunting for tiny fish.

Around the path-turned-jungle I walked yesterday, I saw scores of little bugs having lunch.

Oops, sorry! Please go ahead, don't pay attention to me

Bees sometimes try to build their home under my neighbor’s balcony. And every time, they end up like this.

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Next time: more tales of bugs.