STFU you damn bugs!

[Taro Toporific]

‚Sth grade students went camping
in the nearby mountain.
They were found the wildlife.
This is a flog.
We call "Kaeru".
This is a cicada.
We call "nini-zemi".

Everthing ya ever wanted about theJapanese Cicada, sound files, pix, text, etc about these 99db noise monsters.

[Caustic Saint]

I've got a student who keeps bringing these to class. Reactions are always mixed. Out of six boys, only he and one other student can handle them. The other four scream like girls and run away from them. And these are 7th graders - 13 years old?!?

(There will be pics and a blog entry about this phenomenon shortly. )

[mr. sparkle]

They are freakin' noisy, but not as annoying as the Tokyo crows! As soon as the snack bars close, they spring into action. The bastards.



They like to hang near the Pongi hutch which is bordered by a park and snack bars not too far. Rob hung up some old AOL CDs around the outside of the hutch. It worked for a while, but the upstairs neighbor started bitching at him. He had to take them down. Why? T.I.J.

[Big Booger]

why semi are music to my ears I actually used one of those long laundry poles to wack the trees. It scatters them but they come back within an hour or so.

[mikesphat]

i enjoy the song the variety here produces... every evening...

[Thanatos' embalmed botfly]

STFU you damn bugs!

Are you talking to me? Cuzz... uhh... I don't see any other bugs here...

[Marked Trail]

STFU you damn bugs!

Are you talking to me? Cuzz... uhh... I don't see any other bugs here...

[Thanatos' embalmed botfly]

holy shit, that's some slick work, but look at me, I'm still smiling like a macabre motherfucker, I must really love BLACK FLAG, do your worst, go on, blow harder, oh yeah baby, right there on my shiny head, next stop, the cranium.

[kotatsuneko]

letterman just loves semi ^^

there should be like official crow hunters in Sapporo tho.. got some great footage of crows attacking The Birds stylee in Tanuki Koji last year

[sillygirl]

loving the cicadas.....hating the freaking suzumushi (bell-ringing crickets according to my dictionary). Tried spraying them with gokijet once 'cos I couldn't sleep. Didn't work tho........any ideas?

[kotatsuneko]

I saw yukimushi once, it was an almost poetic experience, children playing in the snow, a slight wind, then they appeared to the kids delight. it actually brought a tear to the eye.

[Taro Toporific]

Oh I must be wrong. Gaijin cannot hear insects according to Prof. Tsunoda.:wink:

They Can't Hear the Insects?
The Japanese Language Brain
By Masaomi Ise
"JAPAN CLOSE-UP", August 2002, published by PHP
Our story begins with the visit of Professor Tadanobu Tsunoda of Tokyo Medical & Dental University to Havana, Cuba, in January 1987 to attend the 1st international seminar titled "Central Nervous System Disease Physiology and Compensation." Cuba was still under embargo and Prof. Tsunoda was the only participant from a western nation. There was a reception on the night before the seminar began, with many scientists from eastern bloc nations in attendance...
.... Prof. Tsunoda was distracted by the extremely loud sound of insects that enveloped the meeting hall. Realizing that even in January Cuba was hot, Prof. Tsunoda asked someone around him what kind of insect it might be, but no one could hear the insects but him, while to Prof. Tsunoda it sounded like a loud outburst of cicadas or crickets!
When the reception finally ended at about 2 o'clock in the morning, Prof. Tsunoda made his way back with two young Cubans. On the quiet night streets, he could hear the same insect songs as before, but even louder now. Prof. Tsunoda pointed out many times the places in the bushes where he could hear the insects singing, but though the two would stop and stand still to listen intently, they couldn't hear anything. They just looked at him rather strangely, and said he must be tired so have a good night.
Prof. Tsunoda met with the two Cubans every day for some activity or another, but not until the third day did the man finally notice the insects' noise. He didn't seem much interested, however. The woman never did hear the insects during the whole one week seminar. To the doctor it seemed that the hearing of Japanese people and hearing of foreigners had to be very different.
Left Brain, Right Brain
Based on this difference in the sense of hearing, Prof. Tsunoda set out to research the physiological difference between the brains of Japanese and of the other races. ...more....

[cstaylor]

Man, what a load of garbage. Could it be that the good Doctor's Spanish was piss-poor, so he couldn't communicate what he was trying to say?

[Big Booger]

His experiments revealed that while Westerners process insect sounds together with machinery and noise sounds in the music sphere, Japanese capture insect sounds in their language sphere, meaning that Japanese hear insect sounds as "insect voices."

So japanese is an insect language?

This unique characteristic is only found among Japanese and Polynesian people, while Chinese and Koreans exhibit the same pattern as Westerners. What is even more interesting is the fact that Japanese whose mother tongue is a foreign language follow the Western pattern, while foreigners whose first language is Japanese follow the Japanese pattern. So this phenomenon is not a matter of "hardware," or the physical structure of the brain, but an issue of software, namely what language was learned first as a child.

What about foreigners who learn Japanese? Where the hell do they stand on this Japanese insect language?

The significant part of Prof. Tsunoda's discovery is that the Japanese pattern of hearing nature sounds in the language sphere is not a matter of ancestry, but rather dependent on whether Japanese was the first language learned.

It's dependent on the first language learned eh?

There are still bees in America, but you hardly ever see flies or mosquitoes.

How much weed was the author smoking when writing this article???

[same]

The guy's clutching at straws.
He starts off in a situation where he can hear insects and one other person can sometimes hear them and one other person can't over a few days. Based on him being Japanese he decides this is not because of a communication problem between them, a lack of interest in his insect obsession from the others, or him just being drunk, that Japanese must have special aural abilities.
He then does research and concludes that native Japanese speakers hear animal sounds, bubbling brooks, Japanese musical instruments and what not as language, where as westerners hear them as sounds. Japanese also hear western music as sound.
As further evidence he remembers NOT hearing any insects in California for four years. This is apparently because westerners don't like insects and Japanese do. This can be shown by the fact that Japanese has onomatapoeic words for dogs' voices ("wan wan") but English doesn't ("woof woof").
The special ability of the Japanese to hear nature sounds is linked to their respect for and ability to see divinity in nature. This, I guess, explains westerners' discomfort at the sound of "bubbling brooks", if they can hear them at all.

All this guy has proven is that people hear some sounds in the onomatapoeic words ascribed to them when they were kids. If Japanese adults still do it, maybe they haven't grown up yet.

the only one who exhibited the perfect Japanese pattern of processing natural sounds in the language sphere

Wonderful example of how it's not too late for westerners to become perfect, just like the Japanese. Where can I sign up?