And here I thought frivolous suits were the preserve of Michael Jackson and the American legal system. They’ve arrived in Japan, too, but at least a judge had the sense to swat one before it got too big, even though it’s easy to be sympathetic with the people behind the suit.

The Japanese government has planned and conducted a big land reclamation project in Isahaya Bay in Nagasaki Prefecture over the past 50 years. It always been controversial because everyone knew it was public works pork to begin with, and it would be harmful to the environment as well as the fishing industry. Four local residents got the idea to file suit against the project and listed mudskippers, fiddler crabs, and the environment itself as the plaintiff. In the United States, this particular suit would have generated a hot air and pixel avalanche on the media and the Internet, but the Japanese media largely ignored it (despite plenty of coverage to other legal moves to halt the work). In fact, the court told the residents to remove the three “plaintiffs” from the list when they filed the suit in 1996, but the residents didn’t listen.

They should have. Judge Joji Ito threw out the suit, saying there were no laws designating natural creatures as parties to a lawsuit. I’m still not sure why the litigants persisted, as the Saga District Court in the neighboring prefecture ordered the national government to stop the project last August.

I don’t provide a link because it’s from Kyodo, and their links die after about 24 hours. But in reading this account, weren’t you struck by how cavalierly the news agency threw out the term mudskipper? As if everyone around the world reading this in English is as familiar with mudskippers as they are with monkeys.

If you’ve never seen a mudskipper, take a look at those two darlings in the accompanying photo. They’d both fit in the palm of your hand. They’re called mudskippers because they skip over mudflats when they look for food, and probably when they look for mates, too. In fact, they can leave the water for longer periods of time than the average fish because they belong to a category of sea creature called lungfish. Those are fish that have both lungs and gills. I never knew that lungfish existed until I came to Japan, but that’s just one of many examples of the things you learn when you live in a foreign country—starting with the English language.

Talking about mudflats in Japan leads naturally to the Ariake Sea in Kyushu, of which Isahaya Bay is a part. The Ariake Sea has one of the three greatest tide level differentials of any body of water in the world. (I’ve been told the other two are in France and South Korea.) Low tide is six meters lower than high tide. I live near the Ariake Sea and have seen the difference. You can stand at land’s edge at high tide and watch the water lapping at your feet, and then return at low tide and not see water at all—just mudflats stretching to the horizon. The photo here shows kids playing there during a school field trip. The odor from the mud will not wash out, so their mothers threw away their clothes as soon as they got home.

That’s where the mudskippers hang. They dig holes in the mudflats and come out to frolic when the tide is out. Not only are they edible, some people think they’re a delicacy, so fishermen, such as the man shown in the photo, go out and catch them. It’s not an easy way to make a living. They slide out with one bent knee on the board, skating all over the flats to catch as many as they can before the tide rolls in. They snatch the mudskippers with a tool that looks like a fishing pole and a line, but with a special hook at the end used to snare the creatures and flick them back toward the box. It is astonishing what people can learn how to do when their livelihoods depend on it.

The small town of Kashima on the Ariake Sea has created an event that has to be one of the best examples anywhere of people turning lemons into lemonade. The event, which has been held for about 20 years now, is called the Gatalympics. As with Bakademy, which we found out about the other day, it is a bilingual portmanteau word created by combining the Japanese word gata, or tidal mudflats, with Olympics.

And Olympics they are. The town invites hundreds of university students studying in Japan to participate in Olympic-style events held on the mud instead of a track or field. Before the competition starts, they march onto the assembly grounds at the seashore in groups divided by nationality, accompanied by recordings of their respective national anthems. The events include swimming, cycling races and mud dancing. They also lay out a course of plywood on the surface of the mudflats and the participants compete to see how far they can ride a bicycle before falling over into the slop.

The above photo on the left shows what they call The Women’s Battle Royale. We’d have called it King (or Queen) of the Hill where I grew up in the U.S., except there’s an anchored platform instead of a hill. The whole idea is to get filthy and laugh yourself silly. There’s nothing like competing in a pseudo athletic event and getting slathered from head to toe in stinking mud to create an international camaraderie. The people of Kashima benefit because the national media cover the event every year, and they get a piece of tourism revenue that ordinarily would go somewhere else.

Over in Isahaya Bay, the Japanese government wanted to “reclaim” these mudflats and turn them into farmland. At least that was their first excuse. Later they came up with the idea of controlling flood water during typhoons. For as much as I dislike frivolous suits, I’d have been tempted to file a suit with the mudskippers as plaintiffs myself.