Gokiburi.

I don't like bugs.

I have never liked bugs. They are pointless. The sounds and the movements they make are pointless. And yet their pointlessness, their pettiness and their grim determination to keep on involving themselves in my life cause me anxiety. Their bites and stings don't hurt much more than an aggressive nuzzle, yet the anticipation I feel when a biting or stinging insect is nearby falls somewhere on the scale between opening-of-bloodstained-envelope and doctor-approaching-with-comically-oversized-rectal-bulb. Two nights ago I woke up four or five times in the night because I heard a mosquito. That's it. A barely perceptible whine, like a release of air from the world's saddest balloon, was enough to make me jolt awake in a cold sweat. (In fairness, the sweat was probably unrelated to the mosquito. It's 99% humidity here right now. All moments are moments in sweat.) Last week, the presence of three flies in the living room caused me to suffer what might politely be called a "frenzy". There was an incident with a wasp. It's complicated.

The point is, I don't like bugs.

So you can imagine how pleased I was to discover that summer in Nagoya is cockroach season. (Ever the multitasker, Nagoya also hosts typhoon season at the same time. I can only presume that the combination cockroach-whirlwinds come a little later, maybe early September when the roaches have their aerial displays more fully rehearsed). It's hot, it's damp, the roaches, they love it. You can even check the probability of seeing a cockroach on this website, Gokiten, the name of which is a portmanteau of the Japanese words for 'cockroach' and 'weather forecast'. (My suggestion that they start an English-language version called Cockcast must have got lost in the post.) It's a very colorful and shiny site, with lots of simple emoticons - today's emoticon for my prefecture is a grumpy face with a bead of sweat - and the whole thing just projects cheeriness. Back home, cockroaches in the house are the sign that you've failed in life. In Japan, cockroaches in the house are the sign that you live in Japan.

Thus far, I've been lucky. Though I've seen a few outside, crawling around by convenience stores and looking entirely unbothered by the rest of the world, I've only seen one in my flat. And I only screamed at it for a bit, and it was pretty quickly captured and defenestrated - not by me, I might add. I'm a wuss. I got to have a look at it while it scuttled around its Tupperware prison, just before it was thrown to the pavement two floors down (a fall which it probably shook off within seconds before strolling happily into the Italian restaurant we sometimes eat at). It was my first cockroach, and seeing one for myself in a situation where it couldn't crawl on my face made me feel a bit calmer about the whole situation. It's like horror films - once you've seen the monster, it's a lot less scary. I thought I saw a second one a few weeks back, running under the bath, but the thought doesn't even cause me to want to eat my own legs anymore. And we got some traps that are supposed to be very effective. They look a little out of place on the tatami but they seem to be doing the trick, and overall I feel a lot more secure than I did when it was spring and everyone was telling me horror stories.

One thing I will say for Japan is that they're pretty good about making you feel okay about cockroaches. All the pictures of them on websites like Gokiten are cute little cartoons. Although a few people certainly dislike or even loathe them, they don't carry the...stigma, I suppose you'd call it, that they have in the UK. Many people I've met have treated them as not much different than stray cats. Even the name - gokiburi - seems to put across a sense of cuteness, maybe a vaguely cheeky charm. It sounds like something you might gurgle to a baby while tickling their chin. I would much rather see a gokiburi than a cockroach.

And after hearing about Japanese killer hornets, they don't even reach my top spot of most awful tropical bugs that make me want to stow away on the next plane home (in an oblivious businessman's suitcase)!

Hurrah.