Night Time Stroll

Impressive for a hotel garden!

As Summer comes about, so too do all the bugs - most of them a nuisance. Cicadas and cockroaches, mosquitoes and centipedes, Japan's got all of that. But also fireflies!
 I decided to take a night time stroll to the Chizanso Hotel, which opened its garden to the general public for firefly viewing. Unfortunately, my camera does poorly when it comes to darkness, so pictures are a little sparse. The hotel, a massive, luxurious place in a little-known district of the city, sports quite a handsome garden, complete with a 3-story pagoda that was brought from the mountains of Hiroshima, which is quite a while away.

 When it came to the fireflies, I was actually quite surprised to find out that they're quite different from the ones I grew up with in the forested suburbs of Montreal. Quite a bit smaller, and a lot more timid. And boy, do Japanese love their fireflies. People crowded around the outskirts of the park's ponds, trying hard to spot them. They'd have quite a field day if they ever saw the big bastards in Canada.
 As the old local myth goes, fireflies are the embodiment of the souls of the recently departed. Whatever the case, it was a nice stroll, but you can't go in expecting to see the forest lit up by a thousand tiny lights, as they would have you believe with the posters.