＜prologue＞
I started a blog called “The Baby Boomer Generation’s Miscellaneous Blog”（Dankai-sedai no garakutatyou:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳） in July 2018, about a year before I fully retired. More than six years have passed since then, and the number of articles has increased considerably.
So, in order to make them accessible to people who don’t understand Japanese, I decided to translate my past articles into English and publish them.
It may sound a bit exaggerated, but I would like to make this my life’s work.
It should be noted that haiku and waka （Japanese short fixed form poems） are quite difficult to translate into English, so some parts are written in Japanese.
If you are interested in haiku or waka and would like to know more, please read introductory or specialized books on haiku or waka written in English.
I also write many articles about the Japanese language. I would be happy if these inspire more people to want to learn Japanese.
my blog’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳 | 団塊世代が雑学や面白い話を発信しています
my X’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多帳（@historia49）さん / X
It has long been said that the life span of a cicada is one week and that it spends seven years in the ground.
The word “Utsusemi” is a corruption of the word “Utsushi-omi,” meaning “one who is actually alive in this world,” or “the shell of a cicada,” and was originally used to describe a cicada’s life span.
Both of these words have the image of something transient.
１．It is “common knowledge” that “cicadas live only one week.”
When I was a child, I once caught and kept a “Abrazemi”(large brown cicada ,Graptopsaltria nigrofuscata) and a “NiiniiZemi”(Kaempfer cicada ,Platypleura kaempferi) in an insect cage, but they died in less than a week.
I had a longing to catch a “Kumazemi”(Cryptotympana facialis ,species of cicada) , and I tried many times, but they were too quick to catch. It would have been easier to catch them with a birdlime, but the birdlimes would stain their clear wings, so I used only a butterfly net.
By the way, a high school student in Okayama Prefecture questioned the fact that the life span of an adult cicada is said to be one week, and demonstrated that the average life span is about one month by a field survey method in which he captured many adult cicadas, marked their wings with numbers using an oil-based pen, released them, and collected the marked cicadas again. The cicadas were then released into the wild.
This high school student is So Uematsu, a junior in the Science Club at Kasaoka High School, who reported at the Chugoku-Shikoku Region Three Societies Joint Conference held at Hiroshima University in May 2019, winning the top prize in the high school student category (animal field).
He repeated this survey almost daily from mid-July to mid-September 2016 at four locations in Kasamatsu, including residential areas and wooded areas, marking a total of 863 abrazemis, kuma-zemis, and tsukutukuboushi, recapturing 15 and re-capturing four.
The results showed that three species, the abrazemi, the kuma-zemi, and the tsukutukubou, survived for more than 10 days, with the longest confirmed survival records being 32 days for the abrazemi, 15 days for the kuma-zemi, and 26 days for the tsukutukuboushi.
So Uematsu is currently working on establishing a method to analyze the waveform of cicada calls using special software to identify each individual cicada in order to improve the accuracy of the survey.
It has been said for a long time that “they live about one month,” but I think it is very significant that this was demonstrated in a field survey. It was an event that reaffirmed for me that “questioning common sense is the basis of science.
As a side note, Akuapia Akutagawa in Takatsuki City has been conducting a research project called “Akuapia Club Activity Project” for several years, in which they mark “Haguro dragonflies” to investigate their ecology, activity sites, activity ranges, etc. The project is called “Haguro Dragonfly Survey Team.
２．It is “common knowledge” that “cicadas live underground for seven years.”
It used to be said that cicadas spend about seven years as larvae in the ground.
However, now it is said to vary depending on the species, with the tsukutukuboushi spending 1-2 years, the minmin cicada 2-4 years, the abrazemi, higurashi, and ezo cicada 3-5 years, and the kuma-zemi and niini-ii cicada 4-5 years. Overseas, there are also “periodic zemis,” such as the “17-year zemi” and the “13-year zemi,” which live underground for 17 or 13 years and make large outbreaks periodically.
Cicadas are difficult insects to artificially breed, but recent advances in artificial breeding technology have made it possible to determine the exact number of years for each species.
The variation in the number of years for each species may be related to the size of the body, but it is difficult to say for certain, since a small Nininizemi is 4 to 5 years old, as is a large Kuma-zemi.
Cicada larvae live by sucking sap from tree roots. Larvae that attach to tree roots that can suck plenty of nutritious sap become adults quickly, while those that do not attach to tree roots that can suck plenty of nutritious sap take a long time to develop into adults.
The life of a cicada is the sum of its life as a larva in the ground and its life as an adult on the ground.
By the way, it is a delicate question whether the cicada that enjoys its larval life slowly in the ground is happy or the cicada that leaves the ground early and emerges above ground is happy.
If we compare it to “the life of a human being,” it can be seen as the difference between “living a long, thin life” and “living a short, thick life. Alternatively, it can be compared to “those who enjoyed a long and single life” and “those who got married young and struggled with child rearing and mortgages.
Which is better is a matter of each person’s view of life (or cicada-life?)… I mean, it’s a matter of judgment…
３．Cicada hatching time (my personal experience)
My mother told me that when she was a child, she would catch white-winged cicadas from the orange tree early in the morning in summer and put them on the screen door of her house to watch them turn into “transparent-winged katabira cicadas.”
So I once wanted to see “cicadas hatching” and went to the nearby Nomi Shrine early in the morning (I think it was before 6:00 a.m.) to look for them. However, there were only many small holes in the ground and no sign of cicadas hatching. I gave up and left it as it was, thinking that it must have been earlier in the day.
Later, as an adult, on a hot summer night (around 8:00 p.m.), I went out into my yard and casually looked at a wildflowers bush and saw a small brown insect perched on the tip of a leaf. When I got closer, I saw what looked like a cicada shell. However, upon closer inspection, I noticed that it was moving slowly. It was a cicada larva waiting to hatch on the tip of a leaf.
Cicadas have an incomplete metamorphosis, meaning that they do not go through a pupa from the larva to the adult stage. Therefore, the larva is indistinguishable from the often seen “cicada shell” (the only difference is that the back is not split).
My interest was piqued, so a few days later I went to a wooded area south of the civic ground around 8 p.m. and found many kuma-zemi larvae beginning to climb the zelkova trees. When I looked on the ground, I found many wriggling larvae that had probably just crawled out of the ground.
Later, when I went around to Nomi-jinja Shrine, I found a newly hatched white-winged kumazemi hanging still on a branch of a cherry tree. I learned that they do this until dawn, waiting for their wings to dry.
I too had a preconceived notion that “cicadas hatch early in the morning” based on what I had heard from my mother. A similar story was told the other day on TV’s “Sazae-san”. Tara-chan wakes up early many times because he wants to see the cicadas come out, but he just can’t find them. Later, Saburo-kun, an errand boy at Mikawaya, told him that “cicadas hatch around 7:00 to 8:00 p.m.,” which made sense to him.
The “white-winged cicada” my mother found must have hatched the night before and had been waiting for its wings to dry. I was reminded that common sense and preconceptions are often wrong, so it is important to actually see for oneself.
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