Spider in the Foyer

Japan is a small country that produces a lot of trash. Since they've long run out of landfills to dump it in, the Japanese people have gotten better about separating their trash, and there are specific pick-up days, M-F. Monday mornings are newspapers, magazines, cardboard, and milk and juice cartons. Tues. and Fri. are normal trash. Wed. are plastic, and Thurs. are cans, glass and PET bottles. Once or twice a month, there are special pick-ups for small electronics and broken dishware.

So, Sunday night, I was working late. At 1:30 AM, I was getting ready for bed, and I had to take the trash out first. There wasn't much - a couple magazines, a handful of cartons, and some empty shipping boxes. I took the elevator downstairs, and just as the doors opened, I spotted the above spider sitting on the wall opposite, near the floor. It was maybe 2-3" long tip to tip, and just sitting there. Fortunately, one of the boxes was fairly long and flat, so I tossed everything else in the trash bin, keeping the one sheet, and ran back upstairs to get my camera. I came back down, took a few photos for the blog, and then tried to herd the spider out the automatic door, and then outside. And it decided to go everywhere but out the door. At one point, it got between the auto sliding door and the wall and wouldn't come back out. So, I took the cardboard box outside and threw that away. But, when I returned to the elevator, the spider had come back out from behind the sliding door. So I grabbed the box from the trash and tried again. Eventually, I got it to crawl onto the box, and I managed to carry it outside before it leaped off and into the street, where I lost it in the darkness. I spent over 5 minutes on this.

The next day, it rained again. When I had to go out for work, I looked in front of the elevator, outside around the car park, and in the street. I couldn't find it anywhere, and I have to assume that it found a safer, drier place to live.

Later, I tried using reverse image searches to identify the species, but nothing came up. So, I registered with spiderid.com, and  uploaded the photo. A day later, someone identified it as a subspecies of the Huntsman. Most huntsmen aren't fuzzy like mine, but a couple are. Some of them are native to Asia, but apparently mine might have hopped a ship from Laos, or some place similar, because it's apparently not normally found in Japan.