Cricket Matches Excite the Orient

The movie Tea House of the August Moon (1956 MGM) finds Okinawa, after 800 years of foreign occupation, in 1946 once again being occupied – this time by the Americans. Adapted from the Pulitzer-winning play by John Patrick, Captain Fisby (Glenn Ford) is presented with a gift cricket cage. Cricket brings good luck, explains his wily interpreter Sakini (Marlon Brando). But now he must catch his cricket, somewhat assisted by an organic farm loving army psychiatrist (Eddie Albert) and the geisha Lotus Blossom (Machiko Kyo).

In some parts of the orient, Thailand for example, they nosh down on crickets. Further east, still, they are treasured for their song. The practice dates back centuries. According to legend, Chinese imperial concubines first kept singing crickets at their bedside to stave off loneliness. During the Tang Dynasty, 618 to 907 A.D., that golden period in Chinese history when the Emperor ruled all of the Middle Kingdom from Xi’an (then Chang’an), princes of the royal blood are said to have become obsessed with the hobby. The later ruler Ming Xuan-Zhong (ca. 1427-1464) similarly became known as the Cricket Emperor. Even the Last Emperor Pu Yi kept a cricket as a pet. “The singing cricket chirps throughout the long night, tolling in the cloudy autumn with its rain. Intent on disturbing the gloomy sleepless soul, the cricket moves towards the bed chirp by chirp,” proclaimed Bei Ju-Yi, Tang Dynasty, records Xing-Bao Jin of the Shanghai Institute of Entomology.

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Singing crickets, or katydids, are larger but lighter than the species used for fighting, another oriental sport. In competitions, prizewinners have been recorded as reaching 106.3 decibels or louder than the neighbour’s lawnmower. Since listening to such a volume of music has recently been demonstrated to encourage drug use and unsafe sex in teenagers and young adults, it might be observed that today there is something of a lack of Chinese royalty. Upon taking over, the Communists, a dour lot, observed how much pleasure the gentle hobby gave and so declared it to be decadent, suppressing it. Nevertheless, you can’t keep a good cricket down. Today, cricket-singing competitions are more popular than ever. A specially moulded and carved gourd rather than Capt. Fisby’s cage are the ne plus ultra for today’s top performers. Such a residence may cost more again than the $250 expected for an exceptional specimen. They come equipped with an assured water supply and a nourishing diet of tofu, chopped vegetables and worms. Plebian performers, however, are sold by street peddlers during May and June in simple bamboo cages – usually Gampsocleis gratiosa, G. sadakovii obscura and Uvarovites inflatus. Xing-Bao lists 31 species of singing and fighting crickets in Cultural Entomology Digest. For the latter more fearsome sport, the field cricket Gryllus bimsculatus is favoured. This attracts big bucks, or renminbi, in modern China. According to an article last November in The New York Times, during the previous year than 400 million renminbi, or about $63 million, were spent on cricket sales and upkeep, according to the Ningyang Cricket Research Institute in Shandong Province. Surprisingly, the ever-sporting English have seen things in a different light. In the Goon Show No. 104, Seagoon and Bloodnok are defending the last banana tree of the British Embassy garden in some mercifully unspecified Latin American country. Out of the night comes the sound of a lone cricket chirping. Bloodnok: “Listen – what’s making that noise?” Seagoon: “Cricket.” Bloodnok: “How can they see to bat in this light?”