When They Start Playing Footsie, It's Time for a Girl to Quit

Along the Ginza, Tokyo's garish main stem, a bar girl has to be able to handle all types--but even so. there's a limit. It came for one Ginza doll last week when. as she put it. "I felt something playing footsie with me under the table." Said she: "I figured it was the customer; but the game went on after he excused himself. Then I looked down, and there was this huge rat trying to pry some meat out from under my foot. Sure. I knew we had rats, but when they get that familiar, I quit."

Melons & Minks. They have been getting more importunate every day. Some 2,000,000 strong, twice as numerous as the district's daytime human population, the Ginza rat kingdom seems to have been caught up in a revolution of rodent expectations. No longer content with their network of underground rivers and sewers, armies of rats now prowl the Ginza every night after the cabarets have closed and before department stores open. Rats with affluent tastes gorge themselves on such fancy groceries as melons, leather furniture and mink coats. One gormandizing rat pack even held up construction of a new building by chewing through a strong box and gobbling the blueprints; dim Ginza bars have regular, unscheduled blackouts whenever rats gnaw through power lines, a never-failing taste treat. When a U.S. tourist was assured by the manager of a luxurious Ginza hotel that he couldn't possibly have seen a rat "as big as a cat" in his room, the American bought a rat trap, showed up at the reservation desk the next day triumphantly lugging a 3/4-lb. Rattus norvegicus.

Last week Tokyo's sanitation department joined forces with a passel of private exterminators in an all-out campaign to keep the Ginza for people. With military precision, anti-rat guerrillas fanned out through darkened department stores in stockinged feet, coordinating their offensive by means of walkie-talkies. "This is C Team calling B Team." whispered one communications man to the unit on the floor below him. "I hear rats on the eastern side of the floor scurrying down. Close door immediately. Over."

Meatballs & Mikes. For weapons, the rat hunters mostly used a supply of 300,000 poisoned meatballs--about one for every six or eight rats believed to be in the Ginza. Exterminators bugged ratholes with tiny microphones so as to detect enemy strongholds. They also planted extra-strong traps that are normally used to trap mink, since Ginza rats are a special samurai breed that can usually chew through a conventional trap. The hunters had no illusions about their foe. "The Ginza rats are terribly clever," said one old rodent fighter. "You can't just leave a meatball by a rathole and expect them to eat it. That's much too obvious. What you must do is put the meatballs in, say, a cardboard box with a little hole in it. Then the rat will eat it thinking it's something you don't want him to have."

In three days, the exterminators had killed about 6,500 rats outright, and expected another 3,000 to die later as the poison took effect. But each female rat can theoretically produce about 70 offspring every year. Concluded one sanitation official: "What we really need is the Pied Piper of Hamelin."

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