by Hugh Raffles
2.
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.
3.
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.
It was in the 1980s that Mushi-sha began selling live animals. Back then, Iijima told us, it was ookuwagata, the large Japanese stag beetles that Kuwachan breeds, that were in demand. They had become difficult to find in urban areas but were still easily available in the countryside, and it was commonplace there for children to keep them as pets. Some stag beetles lived in the mountains, mostly in Osaka, Saga, and Yamanashi Prefectures. But most made their homes close to villages, in satoyama, the patches of forest that people managed for mushrooms, edible plants, timber, compost, and charcoal, among other useful goods.5 Over time, the burned and coppiced charcoal trees came to look like dark knobs, Iijima said, and it was in the holes in those trees that the kuwagata lived. Kuwagata were at home in satoyama, he told us, because they like being close to humans.
Iijima explained that the kuwagata and kabutomushi boom of the 1980s was stimulated by an increased supply of insects to the cities at a time of high disposable income, before the collapse of the bubble economy. Recognizing the signs of urban demand and developing more effective trapping techniques, villagers brought beetles to Tokyo from the countryside, selling them to department stores and pet shops. Some urban enthusiasts went the other way, deepening their hobby by traveling to the country to catch beetles themselves (and plant the seeds of the informal network of rural inns that now advertise their services as beetle-hunting bases). Others became interested in breeding beetles. Both larvae and adult beetles were available to buy and hobbyists started investing their time in developing techniques for raising bigger animals. This shift to breeding was a significant innovation, said Iijima. Even though back then no one managed to raise beetles as large as the ones found in satoyama or the mountains, many people took up the challenge. Not surprisingly, it was in these years of growth—both in the economy and in the passion for beetles—that most of the country’s insectaria opened.
The real estate boom that swept Japan in those years transformed the countryside. As demand for charcoal fell and brick replaced timber in home construction, the maintenance of managed forest declined; as housing developments expanded, satoyama retreated. By the early 1990s, it was challenging even for local people to find large stag beetles in the wild. For most visitors from the city, it was far harder. Prices of wild insects soared. Yet by this point there was a thriving subculture of beetle breeders throughout the country—amateur experts like Kuwachan who succeeded in mapping the life cycles and habits of the popular species and in developing and circulating sophisticated yet easily replicated techniques for raising large animals from eggs.6
It was a complex story, but Iijima Kazuhiko was a patient narrator. Like everyone we met in Mushi-sha, he was young, friendly, knowledgeable about all aspects of the business, and serious about insects. We were standing at the back of the store, in front of a large, indexed cabinet full of high-quality specimens from around the world and beside tall stacks of Gekkan-mushi, Be-kuwa!, Kuwagata Magazine, and other glossy and expensive specialist publications. On all sides were shelves of Perspex containers holding male and female kuwagata and kabutomushi of varying sizes and prices. From behind the counter Iijima pulled out a large foam-lined case. Inside—huge, soft bodied, and defenseless, motionless on its back—was a metamorphosed beetle pupa. It was a male Dynastes hercules, the largest of the rhinoceros beetles, recorded as growing to just over seven inches, and worth well over U.S. $1,000. A small group of admiring customers gathered to look.
In the 1990s, continued Iijima after returning the case, there were t
hree types of enthusiasts. There were those who went to the mountains to hunt beetles; they were working in the tradition of the old-time collectors, but it was, of course, much harder now for them to find insects. Then there were those, usually schoolboys, who purchased inexpensive live beetles and kept them as pets. Finally, there were those who bought larvae or adult pairs and bred them as a hobby or for sale, often trying to set the record for the largest individual of the particular species. Indeed, he said, by that point it was much easier to breed kuwagata and kabutomushi than to catch them.
Despite (and because of) the decline in wild beetles and the destruction of their habitat, beetle keeping and raising was thriving. Mushi-sha was at the center of a lively entrepreneurial culture serving both a new generation of insect fans and an aging but rejuvenated cadre of experts. When CJ and I met Okumoto Daizaburo a few days later, he readily took on the task of explaining why it was that all this insect love existed here in Japan. Professor Okumoto used arguments we had heard from other insect people, arguments that described a uniquely caring Japanese relationship with nature and drew on nihonjinron, the persistent ideology of Japanese exceptionalism, which, like many nationalisms, is based on a belief in a unified national population possessing a unique transhistorical essence.7
The beetle boom, Okumoto said, was just one piece of a special national affinity for nature. He talked about the high species endemism of the country’s island ecosytem and how this unusual variety of animals and plants, and of insects in particular, produced an exceptional sensitivity among the human population. He talked about earthquakes and typhoons and how these too-familiar events created a visceral awareness of the surrounding environment. He talked about the role of animism, Shintoism, and Buddhism in creating an intimate environmental ethic that still pervades Japanese daily life despite the decline in overt religious practice. He talked about the audiologist Tsunoda Tadanobu’s controversial research in the 1970s, which suggested that Japanese brains are singularly attuned to natural sounds, including cricket song.8 He talked about the extraordinary expressions of high cultural attachment to insects in literature and painting. And borrowing my notebook, he drew a diagram—a schematic representation of an ideal Japanese life, which CJ later annotated for me.