Section 67 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 September 11 Thursday.
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A couple of days ago, I was on the Okinawan island of Ishigaki. Right now, a typhoon is hammering the archipelago of which Ishigaki forms a part - in Japanese parlance, typhoon Number 14. That's one drawback of traveling to Okinawa in September: there's a distinct possibility of encountering a typhoon.

Here in Yokohama, it's been hot. When I was on Ishigaki, the temperature was 32 degrees Centigrade (90 degrees Fahrenheit or thereabouts) and, here in the Tokyo-Yokohama area, it's been just as hot over the last couple of days. Swelteringly tropical.

To add to the tropical feeling, there's been a gecko running around the living room. Geckos are lizard-type things with adhesive feet, which means they can happily run across the ceiling upside down.

When I was a kid, growing up on Ocean Island, geckos were a routine part of the household scene, so I didn't have any problem with the idea of cohabiting with a gecko. However, not everyone is so comfortable with these creatures, and it was suggested to me that "perhaps the gecko might be happier outside."

In response to this suggestion, I made a number of attempts to deport the gecko. However, catching it proved more difficult than anticipated, and in the end it escaped into the depths of the futon cupboard, uncaught. We were doomed, then, to spend the night in the gecko's company. This prompted a question:

"Do geckos go to the toilet?"

"No," I said, positively. "Geckos never go to the toilet."

Actually, to tell the truth, I was not entirely certain that this claim represented a valid statement of biological fact. However, given that bears can hibernate all through the winter without going to the toilet, I thought it was at least hypothetically possible that the gecko might be able to get through the night without needing a comfort stop.

The next question came in English with one word in Japanese, the critical word being "fun," meaning not "pleasure" but "excrement". (The"u" vowel here is the Japanese vowel, which is similar to, though not identical to, the "u" vowel in the English word "put".)

The question was this:-

"What about fun?"

Apparently the fear was that, during the night, the gecko would launch some kind of excremental terror attack from the ceiling, assailing unsuspecting humanity with unanticipated weapons of micro destruction.

"Geckos do not produce fun," I said, positively.

This was an out-and-out lie. Having had time to think about it, I'd figured out that, in all probability, the gecko in your house probably does treat the place like a public toilet. However, when I was a kid, we never had any conspicuous gecko dung problems in our tropical island home, so I didn't see our resident gecko as representing a sanitary problem.

The outcome, let me say, was that nobody got woken in the night by gecko fallout.

It's surprising, now I think of it, that I've lived on this planet for so many decades without ever giving any thought to the question of whether household geckos are toilet trained.

I was also - all through childhood and then into adolescence - totally incurious about how geckos manage to run across the ceiling upside down. How do they hold on?

It turns out (I read this in the newspaper recently) that their feet are microscopically subdivided. Think of a stalk of broccoli: it divides, then divides again, then divides yet again. The feet of the gecko are engineered in an analogous fashion, and apparently anything which is sufficiently subdivided automatically becomes adhesive.

To me, the notion that subididing something makes it adhesive is not exactly intuitive. However, apparently someone cooked up a scientific theory saying that this is so, and the gecko is the proof of it.

To get documentation on this, I just did an Internet search for "gecko broccoli" (I vaguely remembered the newspaper article I read using the broccoli analogy) and found something on the site of:-