There is a squid that lives its entire life in total darkness and is almost never seen by anyone. For about six weeks each spring, in one bay in Japan, it comes to the surface, glows electric blue, and dies — and you can book a boat to go and watch.
3:40 a.m., Namerikawa harbor. It is cold enough that your breath shows, the boat's diesel engine is the loudest thing for a kilometre in any direction, and about thirty strangers are standing on a dock in the dark because someone told them this was worth losing a night's sleep over.
The net comes up over the side, and for one second before anyone's torch finds it, the water inside it is lit from within — a seething, pale blue glow, like something spilled out of a different part of the ocean entirely. Then the lights go on, the glow fades to grey, and it is, suddenly, just a net full of small squid.
By full daylight the bay has gone back to looking like any other bay. Further down the coast, though, the tideline is scattered with thousands of small, spent, silvery bodies — and a few retirees are working their way along it with buckets, because breakfast, this time of year, is free.
The animal in that net is Watasenia scintillans, the firefly squid — barely the length of a finger, and for all but a few weeks of its life, a creature of the deep that almost nobody on earth ever sees. It spends its days around 200 metres down in Toyama Bay, rising closer to the surface only at night, and living out a life that has essentially nothing to do with the coastline above it. Then, roughly between April and late May, something changes: mature females move up to the surface in enormous numbers to spawn, right off this particular stretch of shore, and for that one task they make themselves completely visible for the only time in their lives.
Why here, specifically, is the part that made Namerikawa worth building anything around. Toyama Bay's underwater terrain funnels the migrating squid in close enough to the coast that, on the right spring night, they are reachable by net from an ordinary fishing boat rather than from a research vessel — which almost never happens with an animal that otherwise lives its life two hundred metres under the waves. The stretch of sea between the mouth of the Jōganji River and Uozu Port, running right along Namerikawa's own coastline, carries Japan's special natural monument designation — not for the squid as a species, but for the sea surface itself, for this one unrepeatable annual event of light.
The town's response to having this in its front yard was to open, in March 1998, the only museum on the planet built entirely around one small glowing squid. The Hotaruika Museum runs a live tank show timed to the actual spawning season, when real firefly squid are kept and gently prompted to flash for visitors in a darkened room; outside that window, the same show runs on LEDs standing in for the real thing, which tells you plainly how short and precious the live weeks actually are. In season, the museum also runs the predawn boat trips — the ones that put you on the water around 3 or 4 a.m. to watch a working fishing net come up glowing, with a fair chance, if the sky cooperates, of also catching sunrise breaking over the Tateyama mountain range behind the bay.
The glow is not a performance for tourists. It is the last thing most of these squid ever do. Having risen to spawn, the exhausted adults die shortly afterward, and their small, pale bodies wash up along this coast by the thousand for a few weeks each spring — which is a slightly macabre fact right up until you learn that local households have been gathering them off this exact beach for generations and eating them for breakfast, usually boiled and dressed with vinegar-miso, or deep-fried whole. A deep-sea bioluminescent animal most of the world will never lay eyes on is, in Namerikawa, also just a regular, mildly beloved local snack.
There is a second, entirely unrelated light show that turns up on the same bay in the same stretch of spring: a mirage, locally called shinkirō, that forms along the coast near neighboring Uozu when layers of warm and cold air sit over the water and bend the light enough to lift and distort the view of the far shore. It has nothing to do with the squid — one is biology, the other is optics — but both happen to need the same cold, still, early-spring air over the same bay, which is either a coincidence or Toyama Bay simply having a type.
You come to Namerikawa expecting a tidy explanation — a museum sign, a display case, a reason the squid glows. The honest answer is that nobody fully knows. Marine biologists can tell you Watasenia scintillans has some of the most elaborate light-producing organs of any squid on earth, and they can tell you roughly when and where it will surface. What the light is actually for — courtship, confusion, camouflage against the moonlit water above, or something else entirely — is still genuinely argued over in the research. You are not watching a solved mystery performed on schedule. You are watching an unsolved one, on a schedule, which is a much stranger thing to stand on a dark dock for.
- Watasenia scintillans spends most of its life around 200 metres deep in Toyama Bay, and is only reliably visible at the surface during its spring spawning migration, roughly April into May.
- The sea surface off Namerikawa, between the mouth of the Jōganji River and Uozu Port, is designated a special natural monument for the squid's mass spring gathering — a rare case of Japan protecting a stretch of open water rather than a place or a species.
- The Hotaruika Museum in Namerikawa, which opened in March 1998, is the only museum in the world dedicated to a single species of squid.
Getting there
Take the Ainokaze Toyama Railway from Toyama Station to Namerikawa Station (a few stops along the coast), then walk roughly 800 metres — about 8 to 10 minutes — to the Hotaruika Museum at 410 Nakagawara. By car, it's about 10 minutes from the Namerikawa interchange on the Hokuriku Expressway. The predawn observation boats run only in season (roughly April to late May, weather permitting) and must be booked in advance through the museum — check its current schedule and fares before planning a trip around them, since both the season and the sailings shift with the squid and the sea.