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This might as well go here.... after all, cicadas (kumazemi) are part of japanese culture and a standard technique in anime for saying "Hey, its August". The black cicadas are over 6 cm long.
Recent article in the scientific magazine Nature about the summertime arrival of cicada being the noisiest of the four year cycle. Sound measurements at some Osaka parks have hit 94 decibels... that's loud enough to damage hearing with prolonged exposure.
The little buggers are also causing Internet outages. They mistake the overhead fiber-optic cables for tree branches and puncture them with their ovipositors to lay eggs. In the last two years, Nippon telco has recorded over a thousand cases of cable-severing or water damage resulting from their egg laying. NTT West has designed new cables without grooves and with an extra protective sheath to combat them.
They sound rather like the cicadas I grew up with in Texas though we rarely had more than a handful in a given acre there.
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