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You don’t have to kill your foes to claim victory.

As if there weren’t enough reasons already to be terrified of cockroaches, recently there’ve been rumors of some of them becoming extra-resilient to pesticides. Thankfully, there are now alternatives to poisons, such as vacuum guns and freezing sprays, that you can use to deal with the pests, but one Japanese Twitter user recently shared a less sci-fi-inspired countermeasure.

While he was out, @sinomoritsukasa received a text message from the woman he lives with. “It was tough, but I took care of a cockroach in the apartment!” she reported. “Come home quick and tell me how awesome I am!”

As in many cultures, when a man and woman live together in Japan, it’s usually the guy’s responsibility to squash, squish, or otherwise defeat any bugs that invade the home. Still, it’s not like Japanese women never kill roaches by themselves, so @sinomoritsukasa was puzzled about why he needed to come home quickly. All was made clear, though, when he walked through the door and headed into the kitchen, where the woman had found the roach crawling along the wall…

…and decided to trap it by taping a paper bowl to the surface, rather than actually killing the invader or expelling it from their home.

In her defense, the woman did secure the containment area with no less than 11 strips of tape, and even wrote 封印, the kanji for fuuin/”sealed” on the bowl’s bottom for good measure, like she was binding the spirit of an angry demon.

Now, you could make the very logical argument that this constitutes “taking care of” a cockroach in only the loosest sense of the term. Still, given how obviously terrified the woman was, we’d say she put up an admirable fight, and there are certainly worse plans of attack than the one she went with, so we still say her clever tactics are, at least, half-awesome.

Source: Jin
Top image: Wikipedia/邰秉宥