As you might remember, my apartment in Sanda had a rice field beside it. My apartment here in Toyohashi has a pond across the road. I took these photos a while ago, I think I was bored one day and just wandering around taking photos of things.
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Archive for the 'Animals' Category
After leaving the strange pseudo suburbia, I found a large sign that thankfully had Flower Town written on it, so I set off in the indicated direction hoping that it wasn’t a cruel joke.
Continue reading ‘Aeon to Flower Town: The Denizens of the Path’
Last Wednesday I made the trek into Osaka to tick a few things off my list of things to do before I leave Sanda. I took loads of photos and did quite a bit, so I’m going to split it into several separate posts, hopefully over the next few days.
The heat here in Japan has been unbearable for the last few weeks. Every day it breaks 30, some days it breaks 35, and with humidity on top, every day feels 5 degrees hotter than it actually is.
Last week when I was heading off to work in the 30 degree heat wearing my dress black pants, a dark maroon long sleeved shirt and a tie, I noticed this little guy doing what I wished I could have been. Similar to one of my cats back home, he realised that lying under plants not only gives you nice shade, the ground is normally nice and cool as well.
 
It seems that the rice field is starting to dry up, and as such the frogs that previously inhabited it have moved on to wetter pastures. Unfortunately, I believe that the retreat of the frog alliance has caused the insect empires to get over confident, and rapidly expand their area of influence.
As if my previous post wasn’t enough, since then I have encountered even more local wildlife. I present, “The Sanda Zoo: Part Two”.
Seriously, I’m beginning to think Japan is just one giant zoo. Every night when I come home I see new animals outside. Just this morning as I went to work, I noticed at least 15 dragonflys all hovering over the rice field.
To make up for the photo of the squished frog, here’s a photo of three cats. This was taken outside my apartment, so you can also see a little piece of the rice field (really getting big now).
As you may have read at Neils Blog, his laptop is currently incapacitated. We took it apart to clean out the dust as it had been overheating, and either during that, or by coincidence it wouldn’t turn on again. I think it’s simply a rather unfortunate coincidence, because we really didn’t touch anything that could cause the problem, and it’s showing some odd behaviour when plugged into a power supply (no battery charging lights) that makes me think it’s the power supply.
Anyway, we couldn’t fix it, so Neil got in contact with an english speaking computer repair shop in Osaka, and found out he had to send his laptop off to them to get it fixed. So on Tuesday we went to the post office, and with the aid of a Japanese phrase book he bought a box, and sent his laptop off to Felix in Osaka.
On the way home, we came across the biggest frog we’ve seen since we got to Japan. Unfortunately, unlike the frogs outside our apartment it was no longer hopping around. I took a photo, because really, it was big. But don’t click it unless you don’t mind run over frogs. You’ve been warned. Click here to see it.
As I have previously mentioned there is a rice field behind our apartment building. When we first got here it had nice neat rows in it, where (presumably) crops had been planted. A few days ago we noticed that someone was actually working in the field and had flooded it. Then he started driving a tractor around in it. Nobody was quite sure why.
The rice field is home to many frogs, at night they can become quite loud. You never see them in the actual field, they stay under the surface and make bubbles, but occasionally one will venture a little further afield (and presumably get lost), such as this little guy who ended up just a little further along from Neil’s apartment.Â
These frogs dont look very tasty to me, but to a bird they must look like delicious snacks. One night when we came home I noticed that there was just such a bird in the middle of the rice field chowing down on frogs. I tried to get some photos, but it was very dark, and I had to edit the photos somewhat so they are quite poor quality. This bird has been back once more since these photos were taken, I’m hoping he will be a regular visitor.
We called him Dr Heron.
