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In Aesop’s fables, “The ant and the grasshopper” is so famous that everyone can recite its storyline: an easy-going grasshopper spends all summertime to play fiddle and take no care of days of shortage, while hard-working ants gather and store foods for wintertime. When winter comes, the grasshopper suffers from hunger but ants win their food-safety. Save up for a rainy day.

But in the original Greek story of Aesop’s fable, a different creature is taken for one of protagonists. A cicada shows up as a fiddler instead of a grasshopper. When this tale spread in northern Europeans, they didn’t know what was cicada, that can be found in Mediterrenean area, where Greece lies, but can’t be seen where they live. So north europeans changed a protagonist of it into an insect they were familiar with.

In Japan, like in Greece and unlike in north Europe, cicadas (蝉,せみ) can be found everywhere in summertime. Probably Japan has a culture that shows the most affection to this noisy insect in the world. In Tanka, Haiku, poems and other kinds of literatures cicadas are taken so frequently for a symbol of Japan’s summer. In TV dramas and movies it is a cliche to indicate summertime that a shower of cicadas’ buzzes is heard in the backgound of each of the scenes.

There are kinds of cicadas that can be seen and heard most:

Abura-zemi (あぶらぜみ) – sings with a loud sound, that people compare to a sound of frying something in oil.
Kuma-zemi (くまぜみ) – sings with a high pitch. This species was only seen in warmer areas such as Kyushu island in the past, but nowadays we can see it almost anywhere in mainland Japan, whose reason is said to be due to warming of Japan’s climate.
Minmin-zemi (みんみんぜみ) – sings like “meen, meen…”, so is named “minmin”. This species’ sound is one of the most popular one, though in cities in western Japan it is relatively rare to be seen and heard.
Higurashi (ひぐらし) – sings with a pleasant sound around sunset and dawn. This is the one which has been one of the most favored insects for Japanese people, from ancient to modern days.
Tsukutsuku-boshi (つくつくぼうし) – sings with a charasteristic sound in late summer to early autumn. This species’ sound indicates the end of summertime, so the end of happy summer holidays for children.

(Oda Mitsuo, the president of Asian-curd)

カテゴリー：英語日記English Diary￤

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