Semi-deaf

PEOPLE USED TO ASK ME when I first came to Japan whether I suffered from culture shock. Whether it was because I had read extensively about the country before coming, my experience living in different regions of the US, or having two grandparents who weren’t native English speakers, I could honestly answer no.

One day, however, I did feel as if I were living on a different planet!

There was a serious heat wave during my first summer, and summers are intensely hot in Japan to begin with. The temperatures were above 40 degrees Celsius (100+ Farenheit) several days in a row.

One morning I woke up and stepped outside the front door. It was obvious already that the heat wave was going to continue. The heat was one thing, but the sound I was hearing was quite another. In those days I lived next door to a temple with a large, old tree, and by then it was filled with semi, or cicadas.

The combination of the brightness, the heat, and the otherworldly sound of the cicadas made me realize I wasn’t in Kansas anymore!

It’s difficult to describe that sound to people who have never heard it, but fortunately, reader Mac sent me an e-mail with a story about cicadas that is too good to keep to myself.

So here is Mac’s story. At least I hope it’s Mac’s story–if it’s not I’ll have to apologize and take it down!

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It’s my first summer in Japan. I disappeared just at the start of the manageable and comfortable rainy season and arrived back at Kansai in full blown summer.

Heat … humid … pools of sweat I can just about cope with … but the noise? Nothing had prepared me for that. Walking along tree-lined avenues in the morning, I thought it was some high-tech emergency services vehicle alarm going off.

What was it? Cicadas.

Lifting some stats from a related article, their noise can exceed 90 decibels and peak at 120 db. That is about as loud as a bulldozer or comparable to lawn mower peaks on hot days. By comparison, motorcycles are factory-limited between 82 to 86 decibels and 100 plus is on a par with a Harley-Davidson at speed.

Industrial noise expert Billy Martin, a hearing scientist at Oregon Health & Science University, said that “Exposure to 91 decibels of sound for two hours, or 94 decibels for one hour, could begin to cause some permanent hearing damage” and noise-induced hearing loss. “Such noise also could cause psychological strain … anxiety, aggravation and high-blood pressure. Loud sound is very stressful.”

Meanwhile in Nature magazine (last year), David Cyranoski reported that Cicadas are cutting off Osaka’s citizens from their Internet connections. “A cicada known as the kumazemi is descending on Japan en masse, deafening the citizens and wreaking havoc on the country’s fibre-optic system. The 6- to 7-centimetre-long black cicada (Cryptotympana facialis) inhabits western Japan.

Shiyake Shigehiko, curator of the Osaka Museum of Natural History, and Numata Eiji, a biologist at Osaka University, show that the cicada population increases every year for four years, after which it returns to base level and the cycle restarts. From the past three years’ data, the scientists calculate that this year will be the four-year peak, with nearly 2.5 times as many cicadas as in 2006. The noise level is also set to climb. Measured at 90.4 decibels at another Osaka park last year, this year the same spot is expected to hit 94 decibels — decibels follow a logarithmic scale, so that’s more than double the volume. Prolonged exposure to this level of noise causes deafness.

The kumazemi are also cutting households off from their Internet. Apparently mistaking fibre-optic cables for withered branches, they have been punching their one-millimetre-diameter egg-laying tubes into the cables and laying eggs allowing water to seep in and causing failures.

You know what this means? Given the role internet services provide in setting up dates and meeting new partners … the little blighters are attempting to interrupt human reproductive cycles!

It’s them, or us.