Discussion

Yes, people can eat cicadas. The one above was roasted on a barbeque. Cicada nymphs are featured deep-fried in China's Shandong cuisine. Cicadas come covered in chocolate, too.

Cicadas are insects related to locusts, but locusts and cicadas are not the same. The fossil record shows that cicadas have been around for hundreds of millions of years. Today, there are over 3000 species of them worldwide living in temperate to tropical climates, and many have yet to be described by scientists.

Some species are periodical; i.e. instead of coming out annually, they live underground for some years then all come out at once in massive numbers. The evolutionary strategy is that there are so many of them that predators can eat until they are sated, leaving huge numbers still alive to reproduce.

Late spring this year, a cicada species labeled Brood X (pronounced brood ten) emerged in massive numbers in the eastern U.S. after living underground for 17 years. They made the news when a press plane that was to accompany President Biden on his first international trip was grounded because the engines were so fowled up by them that mechanical problems occurred. The Press Corp had to switch to another plane.

Male cicadas make a loud noise--kind of a high-pitched buzzing sound--by buckling and unbuckling a drum-like region of their thorax (rear part of the body) to attract mates. One cicada doing this is tolerable, but many many thousands of them doing it simultaneously in the nearby vicinity can become unbearable. In Japan, the loud drone goes on and on and on non-stop most of the summer.

Keisai Eisen (1790 - 1848) specialized in ukiyo-e bijinga (pictures of beautiful people). Vincent Van Gogh was particularly enamored with Eisen's people pictures. He liked one of them he saw on the cover of a magazine so much that he painted his own version of it.

Though Eisen's forté was bijinga, he occasionally did other subjects, too, as is shown in the kachōga (bird and flowers prints) below of a cicada on a gourd.

Ohara Koson (1877 - 1945) painted this woodblock print of a cicada on a willow tree in 1910. Koson was a master of kachō-ga, producing over 500 prints as part of the shin hanga (new prints) movement in the early 20th century to return Japanese art to its classical roots which Japanese artists had largely abandoned in favor of the new-to-them Western-style art after Japan opened up to the outside world in 1868.

The ukiyo-e print below by Katsushika Hokusai (1760 - 1849) titled Persimmon & Cicada is a surimono print. Surimono were privately commissioned prints produced in limited quantities on very high quality paper, typically with large color pallets. They were usually for private distribution only, often to celebrate special events. I don't know what inspired this painting or when it was printed, but it does include a poem thought to be by Kawaguchi Chikujin who wrote Matsuo Bashō's (1644 - 1694) biography, published in 1762. Learn more about Bashō in the next unit (6.1.1 Haiku & Haiga).

The ukiyo-e below by Suzuki Harunobu (1725–70) is a calendar print that was published as part of an egoyomi (pictorial calendar) book. It shows a woman and boy capturing cicadas, a popular summer-time activity in Japan. The cicada in this picture is on a branch in the upper left of the picture.

During the Edo Period (1603 - 1868), it was illegal for anyone but government licensed publishers to print calendars. To get around this restriction, private individuals sometimes commissioned special calendar prints that, instead of showing a typical calendar table, merged coded lunar calendar information with the picture. The challenge of decoding the prints made them popular. This print has characters embedded in the net, one of which is the character for small (shō 小) in the lower left corner, signaling that this is for a short month having only 29 days. Because it is for a lunar calendar, the month represented isn't necessarily February (ni gatsu). The presence of a cicada hints that it is for a summer month.