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Deadly rat plague riles Tokyo residents
A warm glow starts to sweep through a small pub in the Kabukicho
entertainment district in Tokyo as patrons get drunker and fill their
bellies.
Suddenly, as if from out of nowhere, a whopping rat about 15 centimeters
long drops from the ceiling onto a table covered with delicacies and
drink. The rodent idly raises its head and almost leers at the startled
restaurant-goers before jumping to the floor and scampering off.
Oh rats! The pleasant atmosphere seeping through the eatery just moments
earlier is destroyed.
Vile vermin are infesting the streets of Tokyo -- and, worse than the
gross incident at the Kabukicho pub, they can have deadly results,
according to Shukan Asahi (3/17).
Late last month, a 73-year-old pensioner was found dead in her bath.
She had been killed by an electric shock caused by a rat that had chewed
through the power cables leading to her bathroom.
Rats are responsible for 10 similar incidents a year in the capital
alone, while also causing around 40 electrical problems that do not end
up in fires.
Aiding the vermin has been Japan's record cold winter, which has driven
the rodents to seek warmth indoors or in hollows between buildings, and
has sparked an increase in black rats of plague-like proportions.
"Skyscrapers and insulated wooden houses are the ideal homes for black
rats," Chikara Tanigawa, president of the Ikari Sterilization
Laboratory, tells Shukan Asahi. "Black rats are originally from warm,
southern climes. In the cold spell that we've been going through, all
the rats that had been outside would be doing their darnedest to get
indoors."
A restaurant industry worker is also being riled by the rodents.
"Nibbling away at food in the pantry and droppings under cupboards, I
can handle," the worker tells Shukan Asahi. "It's when the rats pop up
in front of the customers that really causes trouble. It drives people
away."
The rising rat population is compounded by the strict Pharmaceutical
Affairs Law, which bans the use of rat poison, meaning the only way the
potentially deadly creatures can be caught is by using such means as
traps and adhesive sheets, on which the vermin get stuck and die of
starvation.
And recent trends among the pests are doing little to help, either, as
black rats become proportionately more common than their sewer rat
cousins, who once dominated the Tokyo vermin landscape. Black rats,
which can move vertically and horizontally, are also more in your face
than the sewer rats, which travel only along the ground.
"Looking back at the postwar history of rat proliferation in Tokyo,
there is a definite trend where the increase in skyscrapers has caused a
reduction in the number of sewer rats and rise in the number of black
rats," Tanigawa tells Shukan Asahi. "Black rats are scary because they
can cause diseases like Type E pneumonia, and they work together with
household dust mites. The number of household dust mite extermination
cases I dealt with in the 10 years from 1996 to 2005 increased about
ten-fold. If mites bite you, it gets all itchy and you'll end up
scratching for about a week." (By Ryann Connell)
March 9, 2006
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She had been killed by an electric shock caused by a rat that had chewed through the power cables leading to her bathroom.
