Category: Urban Essays

Domestic ducks and wild ducks

There used to be an impressive metre-long black carp in one of our local rivers, but someone poured (dumped, actually) concentrated detergent in the river about seven or eight years ago, and for a while we were worried about whether the carp would revive.

We walked along the riverside yesterday, and although we didn’t see any carp, we saw a group of ducks.
Magamo (mallards) and ahiru (domestic ducks) are both ‘ducks’ in English: are they originally like a family? They attracted our interest and we took some photographs of them.

I heard that magamo are also called ahiru if they’re domesticated. It’s written using kanji characters that mean (literally) ‘house duck’.

By the way, we watched the DVD of the movie Ahiru to kamo no koinrokka (The Duck and the Duck’s Coin Locker) but it wasn’t really to our taste. I picked it because the reviews were not so bad, so I rented it without knowing the story. A comment appeared at the beginning that no animals were harmed in making the movie but we couldn’t (physiologically) accept it. And after we watched it I found out it was a mystery story. Hmm… a mystery? Perhaps the original novel is better?

– YS, 28 April 2008

28 April 2008