Insectopedia (55 page)

CJ and I were here in Japan to find out about the two-decade-old craze for breeding, raising, and keeping stag beetles and rhinoceros beetles. We’d prepared in the usual way: by spending too much time Googling Japanese insect sites (of which there are many) and by talking to friends and reading the books and articles they recommended. By the time we met up in Tokyo, we knew that as well as generating widespread excitement, these big, shiny beetles so reminiscent of the chunky Japanese robot toys that swept the United States in the mid-1980s were also creating considerable anxiety among ecologists and conservationists and in Japan’s venerable insect-collecting community.

But what we hadn’t realized was the extent to which this beetle boom was part of a much larger phenomenon. Those
konchu-shonen
were a symptom. In our three weeks traveling in Tokyo and the Kansai region around Osaka, both of us were openmouthed at the abundance and diversity of human-insect life. Returning to Tokyo after four years in California, CJ—my research friend, translator, and up-for-anything traveling companion—confessed that although he must have lived most of his life in the midst of this insect world, he’d never really seen it before.

Because insects were everywhere! It was
insect culture
, something I’d never imagined. Insects had infiltrated a vast swath of everyday life. CJ and I pored over super-glossy hobby magazines with their beetle glamour spreads, spoof advice columns, and colorful accounts of exotic collecting expeditions. We studied pocket-size exhibitions and read xeroxed newsletters from suburban insect-lovers’ clubs. We visited the geek-tech-culture
otaku
stalls in Akihabara, Tokyo’s Electric City, and found pricey plastic
beetles on sale alongside maid and Lolita fetish figurines. We ducked under low-hanging subway-car posters for
MushiKing
, Sega’s warring-beetle trading-card and videogame phenomenon, and we watched kids battling one another with controlled intensity at the
MushiKing
consoles in city-center department stores. We bought soft drinks in convenience stores hoping for the free Fabre collectibles that came with them. We explored some of the scores of insectaria throughout the country and gaped at the glass-and-steel grandeur of the butterfly houses, monuments of the 1990s’ bubble economy but also testament to a popular passion. We sat in smoke-filled coffee shops and on air-conditioned bullet trains reading the insect-themed serials in the biweekly mass-circulation manga anthologies (
Insectival Crime Investigator Fabre, Professor Osamushi
), a legacy not only of Tezuka’s insect obsession but also of other manga pioneers, including Leiji Matsumoto, famous for his hyper-detailed drawings of future technology (cities, spaceships, robots—insects made metal). We YouTubed
Kuwagata Tsumami
, a cartoon for young kids about the super-cute mixed-species daughter of a
kuwagata
father and a human mother (don’t ask!). We visited the country’s oldest entomological store, Shiga Konchu Fukyu-sha, in Shibuya, Tokyo, which sells professional collecting equipment of its own design—collapsible butterfly nets, handcrafted wooden specimen boxes—of a quality to rival any in the world. We read about (but couldn’t get to) the officially designated
hotaru
(firefly) towns, whose residents strive to capture the charisma of bioluminescence, to build a local tourist trade, and to pull in conservation funding as riverine habitats decline and firefly populations dwindle. (And, if we forgot the allure of the firefly, we were reminded every evening by the strains of “Hotaru no Hikari,” “The Light of Fireflies,” broadcast at closing time in stores and museums, a song about a poor fourth-century Chinese scholar studying by the light of a bag of fireflies, a song that every Japanese person seems to know, set to a tune—“Auld Lang Syne”—that every British person knows too.)

Of course, we took any opportunity we could to talk to people in the neighborhood insect pet stores, which were packed to the rafters with live
kuwagata
and
kabutomushi
in Perspex boxes and with the numerous products marketed for their care (dry food, supplements, mattresses, medicine, and so on), often in cute
kawaii
packaging depicting funny little
bugs with big, emotion-filled eyes acting out in funny little poses. And we also saw the much sadder boxes in department stores crammed with too many too-agitated big beetles and skinny
suzumushi
bell crickets, all on sale at rock-bottom prices. One late night we stumbled upon a display of live beetles in a glass box in the lobby of a suburban train station, an encounter made surreal by the silence of the hour, the insistent sound of the animals’ scratching, and the realization that they, we, and the battering moths were the only living beings on hand. Should we liberate them? We wanted to visit a
mushiokuri
festival to see how the driving out of the insects from the rice paddies—banned by the Meiji government in the early twentieth century as anti-scientific superstition—was being revived as a rural tradition in an ever-urbanizing, ever-reflective nation, but the closest event (at Iwami, overlooking the Sea of Japan in Shimane Prefecture) was just too far, given everything else we were cramming in, and the
mushiokuri
became another of those items we failed to cross off our to-do list.

Knowing our interests, everyone was keen to tell us about Japanese insect love. Look around you! Where else are fireflies, dragonflies, crickets, and beetles so esteemed? Did you know that the ancient name for Japan, Akitsu-shima, means “Dragonfly Island”? Have you heard “Aka Tombo,” the Red Dragonfly song? Did you know that in the Edo period, the time of the Tokugawa shogunate, people would visit certain special places (Ochanomizu, in downtown Tokyo, was one) just to bask in the songs of their crickets or the lights of their fireflies? Did you read the classical literature? The eighth-century
Man’yo-shu
has seven poems about singing insects. The great classics of the Heian period, the
Pillow Book
of Sei Shonagon and Murasaki Shikibu’s
Tale of Genji
contain butterflies, fireflies, mayflies, and crickets. Crickets are a symbol of autumn. Their songs are inseparable from the melancholy of life’s transience. Cicadas are a sound of summer. Do you know haiku? Basho wrote, “The silence; / The voice of the cicadas / penetrates the rocks.”
³
Do you know “The Lady Who Loved Worms”? She was the world’s first entomologist. A twelfth-century entomologist! You know she was the inspiration for Miyazaki’s famous Princess Nausicaä? Do you know Kawabata Yasunari’s beautiful story of the grasshopper and the bell cricket? It’s just a wisp of memory held together by two tiny insects. Have you read Koizumi Yakumo’s writings
on Japanese insects? Maybe you know him as Lafcadio Hearn? He had a British father but worked in America as a journalist. He became a Japanese citizen and died here in 1904. In his famous essay on cicadas, he wrote, “The Wisdom of the East hears all things. And he that obtains it will hear the speech of insects.”
⁴
(And a few days later, over coffee in downtown Tokyo, Okumoto Daizaburo, literature professor, insect collector, and Fabre promoter, paraphrases his own book and rather sourly, though perhaps not unfairly, says of Hearn, the unashamed Japanophile and Orientalist who was also the translator of the definitive version of Flaubert’s
Temptation of Saint Anthony
, “No one can find in others what they lack in themselves.”) Please go to Nara! You must visit the Tamamushi-no-zushi shrine in the ancient Horyuji Temple. It was constructed in the sixth century from 9,000 scarab beetle carapaces!

These last suggestions came from Sugiura Tetsuya, an erudite and energetic docent volunteering at the Kashihara City Insectarium not far from Nara and its many ancient temples. In his younger days, Sugiura told us, he collected butterflies in Nepal and Brazil. Recently, he had donated his specimens to the insectarium in which he worked, where, as he pointed out, he was able to see them whenever he wished. He would, he said, have preferred to send them to a bigger and better-attended facility, like one of the Tokyo zoos—Ueno or, more likely, Tama, with its huge butterfly-shaped insectarium—but neither, disappointingly, had the capacity to accept donations.

It turned out it was Sugiura Tetsuya himself who had suggested the insect museum and butterfly house to the mayor of Kashihara when the plan for an aquarium turned out too expensive. He was kind enough to spend the entire afternoon explaining the museum’s extensive collection to us and later sent a package to me in New York with a selection of Hearn’s insect writings along with articles on many ancient items of interest, including one describing an elaborate insect box and other objects finished with lac—the resinous secretion of scale insects—that had been placed in the Shosoin, the Imperial Repository, near the Todaiji Temple in Nara in
A.D.
756 and immaculately preserved to this day.

In the final room of the museum, after our exhaustive tour, Sugiura-san stopped at a case documenting the insect cuisine of Thailand and told us how Japanese visitors, schoolchildren especially, are disgusted by
this display and how they exclaim over the primitive habits of the Thais. I remember quite clearly, he continued with no change of expression, how I used to go into the mountains with my classmates after the war to collect locusts, which we would bring back to school and boil with shoyu. We also ate boiled silkworm larvae in those days, he said, and stopped only when the silk industry declined in the 1960s and the supply of insects dried up. It was hard-times food, but it was good food. It was part of our cuisine, but you would never know that now. It was the culture of the popular classes, he said, a culture rarely recorded and always forgotten.

Sugiura Tetsuya had his doubts about the fashion for
kuwagata
and
kabutomushi.
He was happy to see so many children and families coming to Kashihara; he knew their enthusiasm was sparked by pet beetles and the runaway success of
MushiKing
, and he didn’t want to discourage them. But like most collectors and insectarium people we met, he was anxious.
Yes, he agreed, the excitement over stag beetles and rhinoceros beetles was an expression of (and a stimulus to) the national enthusiasm for insects. But it brought problems all its own.

Nearby, at the Itami City Insectarium in Hyogo Prefecture, CJ and I stumbled onto an “insect carnival.” Upstairs in the nature-study library, a crowd of high-spirited children and adults was creating some impressively complicated insect origami. We stopped at the “Befriend a Cockroach” table to learn how to handle the large live animals (stroke their backs gently, then pick them up carefully between thumb and forefinger and set them in your palm). All around, the walls were papered with exhibits by local insect-lovers’ clubs: spreads from their newsletters, illustrated reports of environmental challenges met and often overcome, photos from field trips that showed smiling club members (varied in their ages but united in their enthusiasm).

Downstairs, the staff had given pride of place to
kuwagata
and
kabutomushi.
But they had also set free their psychedelic imagination. CJ read off the titles from the cases: “Wonderful Insects of the World,” “Strange Insects of the World,” “Beautiful Insects of the World,” “Ninja Insects of the World.” And across the room, “Surprising Insects of the Kansai Region.” The Beautiful Insects formed an intricate mandala; the Ninja Insects (characterized by skillful camouflage) disguised themselves as a tiki mask; in one display, two tiny leaf bugs were dressed up in paper kimonos; in another, a host of gorgeous blue morpho butterflies floated between glass, spotlit to magnify their irridescence. Hard not to love this place, we agreed. Part science center, part art museum, part amusement park. A place to celebrate our inner insect.

Just before “Hotaru no Hikari” rang out for closing time, we bumped into a museum guide and a curator in the hallway. They talked the same language as Sugiura, found themselves caught in the same contradictions. The emphasis on the spectacular imported insects made them uneasy. But they felt compelled to promote those big foreign species even though they believed that doing so placed Japanese beetles in peril.

Some backstory is in order here. The right person to tell it is Iijima Kazuhiko, who works at Mushi-sha, the largest and best known of Tokyo’s many insect stores. Most of these are pet stores, overflowing with beetles and the paraphernalia needed to keep them. Most cater to elementary
school boys, their indulgent (or perhaps long-suffering) mothers, and a smaller number of middle-aged men who buy the more expensive animals. Most of the stores have appeared since 1999, the year the current beetle boom really took off.

But Mushi-sha, Iijima Kazuhiko explained, doesn’t quite fit this profile. It reaches across two insect worlds, joining the preteen
MushiKing
fans to the scholarly collectors like Sugiura Tetsuya and Yoro Takeshi. Since it opened its doors, in 1971, the store has continually published
Gekkan-mushi
(
Insect Monthly
), a respected entomology journal, and has sold specimens, boxes, and collecting tools. In those early days, its customers were serious amateurs and professional entomologists,
konchu-shonen
old and young who were building collections primarily by catching their own insects.