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Nar3: Japan

Alfred Hitchcock Presents
Posted on Thursday, April 15th, 2004 at 12:48am by Brett.
(Thursday, April 15th, 2004 at 1:48pm Japanese Standard Time)

It's spring. People are coming out of the hibernation in their rooms, the grass and shrubs are coming alive with bugs, and the sky is filling with birds. Chirping, singing, shrilly little birds.

The Japanese crow is one of the most evil creatures ever gifted with the ability to cry. From the picture, you can't tell how large these things really are, and you certainly can't hear the nasty little buggers.

Each room in my dorm has a window--they were nice that way--with a "balcony" outside of it. I'm not exactly sure what the purpose of these are, as they're too small to fit a person on unless you're going to just...stand. Most people have taken to using them as a sort of storage place. But not me...

For about the last two weeks, my balcony has been the home of a couple of these karasu birds. Each morning, around 4:30 or 5, they come, sit on my balcony (which happens to be about 2 feet away from where my head is while I'm in bed), and they scream. They don't chirp, mind you, they SCREAM.

These birds fear nothing...especially the ones around campus. Just last quarter, they would sit on my bike, and I'd have to basically grab them to get them to move. So when I pound on my window, it takes them a good 10 minutes more of shouting to decide that they want to fly to the tree that's 7 meters away from my window to continue screaming.

I've seen old Japanese ladies go up to a tree full of these beasts, clap twice, and they all go flying away immediately. Yeah...doesn't work for me. I'll open my window, look determinedly at the fouls (hahaha...haha...ha...*ahem*) in the tree, and clap. They look back defiantly at me, and cry even louder. It generally takes about 15 minutes of my countering their screams with ones of my own before they fly off, leaving me with a groggy, sleepless next 4 hours.

I'm currently looking into the process required to allow foreigners to purchase firearms in Japan...



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A good catapult by Pete [2004/15/04 11:51 ET]
Brett. Get yourself a bait caster. It's a catapult type thing that fishermen use to throw their bait longer distances. They are usually pretty powerful. Get one of these and keep some stones in a bag, and when the crows start screaming, let them have it! It probably won't kill them, but it should give the little buggers an incentive to move away.