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Rumors of ‘horned cockroaches’ in Japan continue to attract believers, terrify us, and be false

Casey Baseel Jun 18, 2014
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Japan has sort of a love-hate relationship with bugs. On one hand, there’s a trio of insects that are seen as nostalgic symbols of summer. Dragonflies are a popular motif on yukata summer kimono, the whining of cicadas is an immediate audio cue that brings back memories of the lazy days of summer vacation, and catching stag beetles has been a popular pastime during the warmer months for generations of Japanese kids.

On the other hand, cockroaches are universally hated, because, well, they’re cockroaches.

With such strongly contrasting emotions involved, it’s understandable that rumors persist of a cockroach/stag beetle hybrid, something which caught the nation’s attention again recently after someone in Japan claimed to have caught one.

Twitter user Kitano-san (who’s since changed his screen name to Kitanobi) was out and about recently when he found what he initially thought was a stag beetle. He picked it up, carried it home, and showed it to his little sister.

She immediately let out a scream, which is pretty much the reaction you should expect when you start bringing bugs into the house and showing them off to your younger siblings. Kitanobi’s sister wasn’t frightened or disgusted, though. She was excited, because looking at the bug, she concluded it wasn’t a stag beetle at all, but a horned cockroach, a legendary cross-breed of cockroach and stag beetle that collectors have been whispering about in Japan for almost a decade, but which no one’s been able to confirm the existence of.

Convinced his sister was correct, Kitanobi tweeted a photo of the insect he’d found, along with a newspaper article his sister had shown him about the mysterious insect.

The bug does indeed look a little different to most stag beetles you’ll find in Japan. For starters, it’s got four legs instead of the ordinary stag beetle’s six, and its shell is less lustrous than that of normal specimens. Then there’s the newspaper’s image of a horned cockroach, which looks very similar to what Kitanobi brought home with him. Really, that article itself, taken from Tokyo Shimbun, would be all the proof he needs, except for one thing.

It’s an April Fool’s joke from 2005.

While it’s slowly becoming more and more popular, April Fool’s Day still hasn’t quite penetrated Japanese culture in the same way it has in the west. Each year more and more media outlets in Japan get in on the fun, but in the case of seemingly plausible stories like the horned cockroach, the humor is subtle enough that it flies right under the radar of some readers. That’s why even a decade later, occasionally someone in Japan stumbles across the article and swallows its story hook, line, and sinker.

Some Internet commenters even suspect Kitanobi might have been trying to pull a fast one of his own, and that he himself might be behind the bug’s unusual limb count.

“I feel so bad that it got its legs twisted off.”

“Are you the one who pulled them off?”

“Did you pluck the legs off? That’s terrible.”

The lack of shine to its shell can also be explained as there are various subspecies of stag beetle, some of which are less reflective than others.

So no, cockroaches aren’t powering up like disgusting pokémon by mating with stag beetles. That might be the best news we’ve heard all day, since science is just now giving us mess-free ways of subduing regular roaches, and God knows what we’d do if we had to tangle with ones that have horns.

Source: Byokan Sunday