Suzumebachi OMGRUN (a "thing" I wrote)

I started writing 500 word "things" for writing practice a while back, and figured I may as well dump some of them onto here. Looks like I wrote this one 8-17-09

No more ado:

Suzumebachi OMGRUN

I read once that Americans have a special hatred of insects. You see insects cropping up in American horror/ sci-fi movies an awful lot more than in other countries. The theory in this article was that the great American bug phobia stemmed from the days when insects could easily wipe out a farmers livelihood. For people in remote areas that could easily mean starvation. The same article said that these new world bugs were a whole new level of hardcore for the colonists.

I don’t know exactly what kind of badass insects those puritans were up against, but I’m scared shitless of the Suzumebachi (Giant Asian Hornet). As the English name implies, these beasts are anything but small (see photo http://gaijinlore.blogspot.com/2006/06/suzumebachi.html). The neurotoxin in the suzumebachi’s sting kills a handful of people in Japan every year. So they’re not only physically disturbing, they’re actually dangerous.

Usually nature only gives a creature one trick: camouflage or poison or “being a grizzly bear”. The suzumebachi has three: size, poison and better PR than two of the Beatles. I see some sort of “beware the mighty suzumebachi” reenactment at least once a year on Japanese TV, complete with scary narration and scary music (and terrible acting). Usually some old dude who didn’t even notice he was stung, and then barely made it out with his life.

Despite their television presence, I had never been exactly sure what suzumebachi look like. To wit: a couple of weeks ago I was in an outdoor bath and a couple of these fellas (http://mushi-taiji.cocolog-wbs.com/mushitaiji/2008/08/post_1f26.html) showed up. Giant? Check. Hornet-like? Check. Asian? Check. It turns out my identification was false (they were a species of horsefly), but I really though I had encountered the dread suzumebachi. Add to this threat the facts that they were really aggressive and I was really naked. The perfect storm of shitlessness.

In the end we also barely made it out with our lives.

I actually just had another incident with a misidentified suzumebachi, this time in a dream. In the dream I got stung in the neck by this giant hymenoptera-lookin’ bug. The shock woke me up with a start and left me thinking “was that a suzumebachi?” for the first couple seconds of wakefulness. After I figured out that it had been a dream, I went to check wikipedia anyway. Look at the length of the Japanese page (http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B9%E3%82%BA%E3%83%A1%E3%83%90%E3%83%81)! I’m sure there’s a lot to say about suzumebachi, but this page is longer than the article on WWII (not really).

I was hoping to find some hints as to how to tell the impostors apart from the real suzumebachi and some way to deal with them. Based on what I’ve read the most practical solution is to run away as far and fast as you can anytime you see, hear or or intuit a bug or a leaf that looks a little like a bug. Better safe than sorry.

Postscript: Google tells me that there’s a Naruto character with the last name “Suzumebachi”. That’s dumb.