ゴキブリの戦争

As if life wasn't exciting enough, in recent days intelligence has revealed a noticeable step up in my domestic kitchen insurgency. Enemy activity has increased on multiple fronts including the cracks in and around the sink, fridge and burners, with a significant focus on night time raids.

That's right--I got 'roaches and I got 'em bad.

I mean, like almost every household in Japan, I knew I had some cockroaches living with me, but that can't really be helped. You just live with them knowing they're a fact of life. My kitchen, incidentally, is sealed up like Fort Knox. NOTHING gets left out for my scavenging housemates, which means closing and sealing any and all foods, putting it up out of reach, sticking it in the fridge, and cleaning the counters and sink anytime any food is prepared.

That said, I still kill a couple from time to time or see them scuttle around the vicinity of my living room, so last night I went out and bought a pack of roach traps. These ones are like little houses with some bait in the middle and a super sticky floor, so when the roach enters to try and get at the bait, it gets stuck to the floor. So I set up two of them, one on the kitchen floor near the crack between my stove and sink, and one behind the burners of the stove, where I've also discovered roach tracks.

That was last night.

This morning before heading out the door I figured I might as well check to see if I had successfully caught one in a trap. To my unprecedented horror, between the two traps that I set up more than TEN roaches had been caught, ranging in size from tiny to huge. Most of them were still alive and futilely attempting to free themselves. I instantly put the traps back and left the house in disgust.

Sealing up my house any more than it already is--with the intention of preventing entry for cockroaches--is impossible. To my knowledge they enter from and possibly live behind my sink, which is attached to the wall and inaccessible to me, the only other obvious entryway being through my toilet, which is a squat toilet and can't effectively be sealed. So tonight I'm going to set up about a dozen more traps and get some poison. I initially didn't want to use a roach hotel, because if they bring poison back to their nests, they'll die there and I'll have bug corpses in my house that I can't clean up, but given the escalation in troops on their part, picking and choosing my weapons of choice is a luxury I can no longer afford.

By the time this year is over, either me or the roaches will be dead. If it's the roaches, it'll be by traps and roach motels, and if it's me, it'll be from hepatitis or dysentery or something...

The war has begun.



Also, I've enabled anonymous posting, so even if you don't have an account but would like to articulate your disgust, you can comment.