An typical early summer seasonal display for insecticide and cockroach traps at a Japanese supermarket. Photo by Nevin Thompson. I'm proud of my ability to eliminate cockroaches. It's one of the most valuable skills I've learned since coming to Japan more than two decades ago, and I'm passing on the knowledge to my sons as part of a family legacy. I had never seen a cockroach before coming to Japan in my early 20s. In the cool, dry corner of Canada where I grew up, there are very few insect pests. I had no idea what I was in for when I moved to Japan. The first summer I lived there, I shared a house with a fellow teacher. It was full of odds and ends, a mountain of junk left by our predecessors. We weren't too bothered by that—neither of us was particularly clean and tidy. We left our dishes in the sink and our garbage in a corner of the kitchen. Such habits would have been fine back home, but in Japan, it was the beginning of our problems. One sultry, sticky morning, I woke up to find a long column, about 20 feet long, of tiny black ants trooping through a crack under the front door, up through the entry hall, and into the kitchen. The line of ants climbed up onto the counter, where they were painstakingly carting bread crumbs and grains of soggy cooked rice and white sugar back outside. I got a dustpan, swept up the ants and dumped them outside. Then I went to work. When I got home the ants were gone, but some other critter had strewn garbage all over the kitchen, with a discarded mackerel carcass as the centrepiece. I heard a noise upstairs. I went to investigate. There was something in my room. A cat. I had left my bedroom window open, allowing a stray to get into our garbage. It was cowering in the corner of my messy room. I ran downstairs and grabbed a butterfly net a previous tenant had left behind. I gently scooped up the cat, took it outside and released in a vacant lot up the street. I then got to work cleaning up the stinking mess in the kitchen. And then the cockroaches came. If you've never seen a cockroach, imagine a creature right out of a David Cronenberg body horror movie. Glistening black or turd-brown body. Waving antennae and spiked legs. And a deeply unsettling way of zig-zagging around a room in search of a bookcase to escape behind or a pile of papers or dirty clothes to hide under. But what is most distressing is the sheer size of a full-grown cockroach. The ones that terrorize the Japanese are big—several centimetres long, and, unlike a house fly, a moth or a jumping spider, cannot be ignored. They must be dealt with if you ever want to sleep soundly again. I encountered my first cockroach the day after the cat ate the garbage. It was dog-vomit brown, and it scurried along the wall under the kitchen table. I grabbed a coffee cup and managed to capture it, its antennae sticking out from under the edge of the cup, waving frantically. Now what? I slid a piece of paper under the cup, grabbed the wriggling cockroach and dumped it in the toilet. It flailed about and wiggled its legs as I flushed it out of sight. I looked at the coffee cup. A bit of antenna was still stuck to it. I threw that away too. But it was the beginning of an onslaught. Over the summer, cockroach after cockroach appeared in every corner of the house, under futon mattresses on the floor, in cupboards, on the TV console. Some were big and black, and, as a defense measure, would fly right at my face when I tried to corner them. I ran out of coffee cups and water glasses. I didn't want to swat the cockroaches with a rolled-up newspaper—I had read that if you did that you might spray their eggs all over the house. Fall arrived, and I forgot about the roaches. I eventually got married and moved in for a time with my wife's parents. My father-in-law schooled me on some of the basics of roach-proofing, notably: I didn't take his advice, so during that summer we lived with them it was a constant battle with bugs in our section of the house. I was still scared of egg-spraying, and continued to catch them with a cup or a bowl, kept handy in a cupboard in case of a cockroach emergency. On a trip back home to Canada during a Japanese summer, I was luxuriating in the cool, crisp air when I was struck with a panic attack: did I unwittingly bring back cockroaches to Canada in my suitcase? Could there, at this very moment, be a cockroach creeping around, ready to set up shop in my hometown? In recent years I have become even more determined to confront the cockroach menace head on, mostly because my kids are deathly afraid of the big, shiny black bugs. Besides researching online forums about how to roach-proof my house in Japan, I've consulted the literature, such as the excellent Understanding and Controlling the German Cockroach.