Fireflies and Woodcraft

In the "Only in Japan?" category.

I was hanging out with some Japanese friends, average age about 30, the other day and they were talking about how all the fireflies are disappearing. I don't live in Tokyo, I live in the Japanese equivalent of South Carolina, but even here many bodies of water have been paved over, drained, diverted, and so on.

I mentioned how when I was a kid I used to run around on my front lawn catching fireflies. This was in New Jersey, maybe 20km from Manhattan, and densely populated.

My friends were shocked. One said, "You have fireflies in America? I thought only in Japan." And everyone else did the Emphatic Nod.

A couple of days later I was showing some tour booklets to students. I often order tourism pamphlets and use them in class because most people only know LA, Manhattan and Las Vegas so they think the area between Canada and Mexico is thousands of square miles of flashing neon lights filled with skyscrapers and latino gangs. (Much in the same way that Americans think that all of Japan looks like a Tokyo subway station at rush hour.)

Anyway, as we were flipping though a brochure on Louisiana, with the usual pictures of alligators and steamboats, one guy said "Wait, go back a page. What's that?"

So I flipped back a page. It was the back of the brochure mostly with ads for swamp fishing cottages. But there was one for a showroom of handmade wood furniture and antiques. "That one!" said the guy.

After I confirmed his suspicions by explaining the ad he said "Wow! You have handmade furniture in America? I thought only in Japan." He's a pretty smart guy in his early 60's who's been to the states several times.

So there you have it:

fireflies
handmade furniture
only in Japan.