Things to consider before visiting me in Japan

Exhibit A: Yesterday was a pretty nice day. So, once I got home, I had about 20 minutes to go out biking. I figured I'd head south instead of north, like I usually do. It wasn't until recently that I even noticed there were houses back there. Seriously... an entire neighborhood that I didn't know existed literally around the corner from my apartment.

So I took off biking and enjoying the awesome fall weather and brought my camera along. It was a neat little area... a little more rural than the spots I usually pass on my way to school. I was kinda shocked that I lived so close to some older style houses with their amazing architecture (I'm a nerd, so sue me). But, as I said, it was a bit more inaka (countryside, rural... pretty soon, I'll stop translating this word, so pay attention, kids!) than most of the town I'd seen so far. I came to a crossroad and looked down to the right and saw a row of driveways emptying into it... but the cool thing was, running next to the street and under the driveways was an irrigation canal. Sweet, I'll go that way! I thought.

I stopped for a picture and cringed at the idea of coming home late, tired, and not in the best of driving conditions... and missing the driveway, only to fall into the canal... but still, it was neat, so I snapped the picture. :D

I biked down a little further, whizzing down the sidewalk, enjoying the breeze and loving the sunset. pretty much, I was in my own little world. And that's when it happened.

I looked ahead and saw one of the last driveways before that side of the street became rice fields. Above this, stretched between the light post on the other side of the canal and the guard rail on the driveway, was a pretty massive spiderweb. It seriously looked amazing in the light. So I got a little closer, all excited to take a picture of it. As I got closer, though, I noticed the big hulking mass sitting in the spiderweb. Inside of this pretty massive spiderweb was a pretty massive spider. I slowed down since one hand was busy collecting my jaw before it tangled in the bike chain. "...sugoi..." I thought ("cool/fantastic" ...ok, so I didn't think this... I don't think in Japanese... yet ;) )

I pulled my bike into this driveway and got out my camera. I was maybe about 7 or 8 feet below the web and had a nice clear shot of the spider. I moved around closer to the guard rail to get an angle shot that mght show off the web a bit...

...and then I looked immediately to my right.

You guessed it, folks. This driveway wasn't infested with one massive spider, but two. I jumped back a bit and gasped. Luckily, though, this one was in HIS web just chillin' there... though he was MUCH, MUCH CLOSER. His web was in the corner of the guard rails from the sidewalk to the driveway, so he was right at hip level, only about a foot off the sidewalk. A friend once told me that there are no poisonous spiders in Japan (a fact which I have since found out to be false... grrr) so I wasn't terribly afraid of getting closer to snag a picture. After all, he was just sitting there. So I got as close as I dared... maybe a foot or two away... and hit my zoom. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the monster spider. (Arachnophobes, don't click the thumbnails... seriously. You've been warned.)

First shot:


Second shot:

I have NEVER seen a spider this big without the protection of glass before... in fact, I thought these things only existed in sci-fi movies... Since it's hard to judge scale, the abdomen was about as big as the first 2 knuckles on my first finger, and each of those front legs were about as long as that same finger. He didn't move once while I was there, though, so that's good.

Since it was getting late, and I had to be home by 6, I decided to turn around and bike back the way I came. You know that "realization moment" in a horror movie where something suddenly happens to the protagonist and he begins to see the evil things everywhere? Like, the hero walks deep into a dimly lit house, and suddenly the light clicks on, revealing body parts and stuff that he missed on the way in, and he has to now leave the way he came, through a mountain of gore? Or else the hero finds a pair of sunglasses and realizes the aliens are all around us, and backs out slowly to avoid causing a disturbance (until he runs out of bubblegum)? Such was me with the spiders.

As I was biking back down the sidewalk, I realized I passed about 3 others of those things right next to the sidewalk. The webs were strung up between signs, posts, blades of grass... but those massive spiders were EVERYWHERE. I completely missed them when I first went down the road, but now I found myself seeing every single one, and gasping and unnecessarily swerving everytime. I even saw a different, but still massive spider apparently floating in mid air about 10 feet up. One of those big abdomen spiders with the short legs.... his body seemed to be the size of those rubber bouncy balls you get out vending machines... but he was so far away, and he stood out so starkly from the clear blue sky, that he seemed to be flying along. (The picture is on the photobucket... check it out. :D)

I made it back safely and managed to lose any spiders that may have been chasing me (I swear I was chased 5 or 6 blocks by a praying mantis once...) and immediately uploaded my pictures to my computer to confirm that, yes, they really DID look like that. And yes... it seems they really did.

I should note that this was maybe a good half mile or so away from my house, so it's not like I have these spiders just hanging around my place all the time. It was more of a rural section, and I have yet to see one indoors... hopefully it stays that way... And I've even had people tell me, "Oh, it's just a garden/banana spider. We have those all over where I'm from!" Well, SO WHAT!!! We don't have these in Nebraska! "Garden spider" to me is a little fuzzy thing the size of a quarter that just hangs out like "sup?" in your garden, happily eating flies and tiny insects and not threatening the destruction of an entire small japanese town.

Yeah, I see spiders all the time here. They're seen as guardians of the home, and I guess it's bad luck to kill them... I don't have any in my house (that I know of... *shudder*) but the steps going downstairs outside have a few that hang out there all the time (The fuzzy one is named Nigel). I was a little scared of spiders before getting over here... but you just kinda get used to them.

But still... I don't think anything could have prepared me for walking into this massive arachnid den (though it WAS cool lookin').