Next year what will it be? Return of Under the Planet of Invasion of the Jellyfish?

As our more protoplasmic readers will be aware, we at the ol’ raincoaster blog have long been fascinated by all things gigantic, digusting, potentially fatal, and aquatic. So we were on the Japanese Invasion of the Giant Jellyfish like deep fried on calamari.

As the swallows return to Capistrano once per year, so too the Giant Nomura Jellyfish return to the teeming waters of the Sea of Japan each Autumn, welcomed by divers and attacked by fishing companies, much as the gentle harbour seal is persecuted from one end of the sea to the other. How petty! What are a few nets, a few spoiled, poisoned, and slimed catches, when compared to the awe-inspiring sight of these throbbing, pulsing masses of brainless protoplasm, lurching quietly through the ocean depths? As the great George Bernard Shaw said, great beauty justifies any sacrifice, and a true artist would slay his own grandmother to create it; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Manabu Nakamata, a 38-year-old diver from Nagoya and an admirer of the monster jellyfish, says, “They are surprisingly hard to the touch. They are big, and extremely impressive.” Big indeed — Echizen kurage can grow up to 2 meters (6 ft. 7 in.) in diameter and weigh up to 200 kilograms (440 lb.) each.

But what’s a Japanese giant misunderstood monster story without some doomed-to-fail, high-tech weaponry, the use of which teaches valuable, and humbling, lessons about science’s essential futility? Eh? I ask you that!

In the latest move in the war on jellyfish, Fukui prefecture is developing new and efficient weapons designed to pulverize those that threaten their shores.

Oh, this should end well.

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