The Wall Street Journal
written by Takashi Mochizuki
Monday November 15, 2010
Catching sight of a cockroach usually inspires one of a short list of fairly predictable human reactions: a scream, a churn of the stomach, or a swift stamp of the foot in the critter’s direction. Or all three. Less common: setting it on fire.
Still, a 64-year-old Japanese man in Kagawa prefecture, located on Shikoku Island in western Japan, deployed the technique last week, but managed to burn his mushroom factory to the ground, the local police agency told JRT. Spotting several cockroaches crawling on his machinery, the unidentified factory owner, perhaps out of the Japanese version of Raid or lacking a hardcover atlas, doused a number of the insects with alcohol, then set them on fire.
Known for their strong survival instinct – cockroaches are often posited as likely to be the only species to survive a nuclear Armageddon – the factory’s unwelcome visitors promptly took off at pace around the 500-square-meter building. The enflamed roaches scurried underneath some flammable material: the rest is charred history. The factory was completely burned down.
Fortunately, there were no reported human injuries or deaths. The fate of the cockroaches remains unknown.
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