I can imagine about a million Samurais spinning around in their graves...

Weird.

Okay, this is probably ethnocentric, racist, and possibly even xenophobic of me - but there is something fundamentally not right about pop culture in Japan. Maybe I was just scarred by an early teen encounter with Demon City Shinjuku . . . .

Is there a link to the picture because for what ever reason I cant see it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqKlt3iCZt4&feature=player_embedded

I don't blame you for not eating crickets. But, since I learned to tell the girl crickets from the boy crickets years ago, and learned they actually (allegedly) eat other bugs, I do not molest them in my house.

When I was 11 or 12 my buddy Steve and I thought it would be hillarious to buy a bag of crickets and let them loose through the mailslot of another friend's house in the middle of the night. They ended up having to tent their whole house a few days later. We never 'fessed up to that one.

I could only watch the first guy attempting to pass it to the second one. I gotta feel sorry for the cricket.

Japan is different. Once you accept that, you can begin to enjoy it. Or not.

It must be remembered that the standard Japanese diet already includes a lot of stuff that we in the West do not generally view as being food. Once you see what they eat on an everyday basis, crickets don't seem that far off.

Ummm Bondagi
http://www.flickr.com/photos/inar/3148313463/

Silkworm, high in Protein!