We Are Not Alone

at left: The Weasel Trap – click for details!
Design by Kazz Ishimaru

Kyushu’s climate makes it an ideal breeding ground for insects of all sorts, and Fukuoka alone supports at least three or four different kinds of bees and wasps. Our neighbours to the south have an attractive ivy that now covers most of the southern wall of their house. It must have hundreds of tiny flowers hidden away somewhere, or has some kind of sweet sap, because in the height of summer it attracts a comprehensive selection of stinging insects. The most fearsome among them are the hornets: a queen hornet seems to be as large as a small bird, and the workers can be up to two or three centimetres long. A helpful sign in one of our local nature parks advises that if you are bothered by a hornet, the best thing to do is to get down close to the ground and quietly hope that it goes away. This was not an option for us, when hornets made a nest under the roof of our laundry area. Readers outside Japan may wonder about this, so I should say that it is quite common for one's washing machine to be outdoors in this part of the world. Our laundry routine is not quite regular as clockwork, so we somehow let a bit of time go by before discovering the nest: by the time we saw it, it was just about to produce its second generation of workers. My first piece of advice to others in the same situation: if your hornet’s nest is any larger than this, call an exterminator. As it was, we enlisted the help of our neighbours across the street, who had recently repelled an incursion by wasps into their doghouse. We followed these three steps: first, spray some kind of evil chemical at them; second, run away; third, cautiously check to see if any of them died.

At this point in our proceedings, the queen came home, and our neighbours discovered that our hornets were twice as big as their wasps. They are kind and sensible people, so they left us with the scary chemicals and a useful hooked stick, and went back home. We went off to the hardware store in search of stronger chemicals, and came home with something called ‘Super Hachi Jet’ – ‘hachi’ being all manner of bees, wasps, and hornets – that offered to knock out stinging insects from a distance of up to six metres. Fortunately, we have a screened window just behind the laundry area, so I was able to hide in safety, insecticide in hand, then quickly push the screen aside, blast away at the nest, and whip the screen shut again. ‘Blast away’ is the only way to put it: this stuff is so powerful it knocked the worker hornets clean out of the air. The first shot seems to be the strongest, though; and even this stuff won’t bring down the queen, although it does encourage her to go someplace else. The hooked stick then came into play to bring down the nest

We had a warm winter this year, and rumour has it that the hornets were able to stay out all season. That may be why they seem more numerous now; so far this year we have taken down two small nests, one from exactly the same spot as last summer’s. I had the ‘Super Hachi Jet’ out at lunchtime today when a bomber-size wasp started exploring the underside of the roof outside the kitchen. I was pleased to see that it didn't kill it, but it seems to have gone away.

Whenever possible we prefer not to kill our uninvited tenants, but to encourage them to move along elsewhere. This seemed inadvisable with the massive centipede we found in the dry goods closet under the stairs. It came equipped with needle-sharp jaws and a nasty disposition, and survived my attempt to crush it under a steamer trunk; in the end I had to brain the poor thing with a stick. Every house in Japan has centipedes, and these big ones tend to come out in wet weather. They do bite, but they are more terrifying than dangerous -- which is small compensation if you happen to find one scampering overhead when you open a closet.

I first heard something even larger than a centipede scampering through that particular wall a few months after we moved in. I am not particularly afraid of rats, but one is never keen to have them anywhere near the kitchen, so I was relieved to convince myself that this noise was a cat. The cats often run across the roof and gables, usually with the sort of thud one would expect from such well-fed animals. The noise from the wall, when it came back early this year, was produced by something much more delicate. When the midnight squealing and scraping began, I gave up hoping we didn’t have rats – prematurely, as it turned out. Following the sound down to the main floor, I flung open a window to surprise whatever might be outside. What I surprised was not a rat, but a weasel. It ran a few paces along the concrete, then turned to get a good look at me, and scampered off when it was satisfied that I posed no immediate threat.

Our local weasels are also known as ‘Japanese mink’ and used to be trapped for their fur. When frightened or captured, they produce what Japanese calls ‘the weasel's last fart’: an evocative phrase with the same meaning as ‘skunk spray’. Their nesting season is in the late winter and early spring; during that time, they seek out warm, dry places – like the inside of our wall. The male weasel then goes out hunting while the female guards the nest. I was pleased to learn that they eat centipedes, but they are very, very noisy animals. They are at their noisiest when people are trying to sleep.

Our neighbours were not the least surprised to hear about our weasels: everyone around us has had at least one or two nighttime encounters with them, although we seem to be pioneers in the ‘living in the wall’ category. It also turns out that they infest supermarkets, crawling in through the air ducts to raid the shelves after everyone goes home. Thus because our brother in law has a shop planning business we learned our first effective weasel control tip: alarm clocks. They don't like loud noises. We heard the story of a supermarket manager who put alarm clocks at opposite ends of his shop, set to go off at staggered intervals, and got the weasels running back and forth so much they gave up and left from the frustration. I discovered that an alarm clock held up to a hollow wall makes an awful noise, and that weasels make rather pathetic noises if you wake them up.

We later learned that weasels never go anywhere without having an escape route, so look for two holes if you want discourage them where they come and go. Like cats, they have sensitive noses – for everything but ‘the weasel's last fart’ – so if you can find something that repels cats, there is a good chance it will work for weasels too. In our case, spraying ‘mokusakueki’ – a kind of distillation of charcoal made from bamboo or wood – helped to send them on their way. It is available at home and garden centres, and also works as a plant fertilizer. Be sure to spray just after dark: they are nocturnal, and it is best to spray after they go off to find their breakfast.

If all else fails, one can always try to trap them. The plan we reproduce at the top of this page is for a simple trap you can make from a length of pipe and a coat hanger. Weasels tend to follow the same routes all the time, and are just as curious as cats. Placing a trap like this across their path should catch a weasel without harming it; you can then – very carefully – take it off to the woods and let it go. I am far too sentimental to want to break up a weasel family this way, but it is a clever technique, suggested by the husband of one of my students. Our wall has been quiet for a few months. Now the rainy season is just about upon us, and there really is nothing at all I can do about the centipedes.

2002/05/25, with minor modifications in August 2003

Date posted: 2003-09-01