Saturday was still a bit on the dull side. Clear in the morning and overcast in the afternoon. Sunday was overcast in the morning and it cleared up in the afternoon. Then "It" went off. That klaxon sound that announces the arrival of summer. The cry of a cicada. The particular individual insect let loose on Sunday afternoon with a high decibel racket that could've raised the dead. He continued for about a minute and went silent. The next day, he had a lot more of his kind accompanying him.
For me, the sound of late spring is the sound of frogs coming from flooded rice paddies. I'm not 100% sure which variety though. I suspect they're Japanese tree frogs. Frogs aren't the only creatures to be found around rice paddies. I've also seen herons standing in flooded rice paddies once the plants have grown a bit. I thought the birds were likely hunting for frogs. But it turns out frogs aren't the only occupants of rice paddies.
Another occupant of rice paddies is a fish known as medaka. It's also known as the Japanese rice fish or Japanese killifish. I was first made aware of this fish by one of my students. It was in her first attempt to use the word "cannibal". She wanted to tell me that she had had two fish but ended up with one because one got eaten by its tank mate. I asked her what kind of fish she had and she replied "Medaka". She didn't know if it had an English name. A quick search on the Internet turned up the names mentioned earlier.
Carrying on with the rice paddy theme, here is a photograph I took of this year's rice paddy art display just on the outskirts of the Onogawa Hot Springs hamlet. This is the eleventh year they've been doing this in these parts. The subjects this year are Sanada Nobushige (more popularly known as Yukimura) and Uesugi Kagekatsu. My understanding is that they were allied, prior to the Battle of Sekigahara, with Ishida Mitsunari. I can only hazard a guess that their images were concealing frogs and fish at the time I took this photo two weeks ago.
