2009/6/13
With a stationary front engulfing the nation, the tsuyu rainy
season is here--a welcome season for rice paddies and rain-loving
frogs. The weekly weather forecast on TV does not show too many
rain icons yet, but I imagine I will soon get into the habit of
looking up at the sky in the morning to decide whether it will
rain.
But raindrops are not the only things that are pulled by gravity
to suddenly fall out of the sky. Last week, about 100 tadpoles
reportedly "rained" on Nanao, Ishikawa Prefecture. Nobody knows how
these rice paddy denizens ascended to the sky in the first
place.
According to reports, a man in a parking lot heard a pattering
sound. When he turned around to look, tadpoles were strewn all over
the place. The same phenomenon also occurred in Hakusan, about 80
kilometers away, where about 30 tadpoles were found. And in another
town, about 10 small crucian carp apparently fell out of the sky on
Tuesday.
In 2000, a "downpour" of small fish occurred in eastern Britain,
blanketing the garden of a private home. In this case, a waterspout
had sucked schools of fish out of the sea. Tornadoes and
waterspouts are known to cause "showers" of frogs and small
tortoises, but this does not explain the phenomena in Ishikawa
Prefecture. Could those creatures have been disgorged by birds in
flight?
While some things fall out of the sky indiscriminately, others
do so in a controlled manner. The Japanese moon explorer Kaguya
impacted the lunar surface on Thursday and ended its mission.
Launched 21 months ago, it beamed back high-precision images of the
moon's surface and the rising and setting of the "full Earth" on
the lunar horizon. Thinking of all the hard work Kaguya must have
done for us, I murmured my thanks.
The last job for Kaguya's project team was to control the
explorer's impact and let it happen on the side of the moon that is
visible from Earth. When signals from Kaguya ceased on cue,
applause erupted from the team. Kaguya carried messages from about
410,000 people, publicly invited to make their wishes upon the
moon. I am sure the messages were delivered safely to the Moon
Rabbit--the creature that lives on the moon in East Asian
folklore.
Amayo no tsuki, which literally means "the moon on a rainy
night," is an old Japanese idiom denoting a person or an object one
cannot actually see and can only picture in one's mind. There are
still many unknowns in life that defy our imagination. The moon
used to be a foremost example, but the power of science has brought
it a lot closer to us.
When the moon peeks out of the clouds on a drizzly night, I
think I will try to remember Kaguya, the hard worker that left a
treasure trove of valuable data and disappeared silently.
--The Asahi Shimbun, June 12(IHT/Asahi: June 13,2009)
