Insectopedia

by Hugh Raffles

  8. Tsunoda Tadanobu, The Japanese Brain: Uniqueness and Universality, trans. Yoshinori Oiwa (Tokyo: Taishukan, 1985). For a scathing response that locates Tsunoda’s work in the context of nationalist nihonjinron, see Peter Dale, “The Voice of the Cicadas: Linguistic Uniqueness, Tsunoda Tadanobu’s Theory of the Japanese Brain and Some Classical Perspectives,” Electronic Antiquity: Communicating the Classics 1, no. 6 (1993).

  9. Shoko Kameoka and Hisako Kiyono, A Survey of the Rhinoceros Beetle and Stag Beetle Market in Japan (Tokyo: TRAFFIC East Asia—Japan, 2003), 47.

  10. Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO), Marketing Guidebook for Major Imported Products 2004, vol. 3, Sports and Hobbies (Tokyo: JETRO, 2004), 235.

  11. Kouichi Goka, Hiroshi Kojima, and Kimiko Okabe, “Biological Invasion Caused by Commercialization of Stag Beetles in Japan,” Global Environmental Research 8, no. 1 (2004): 67.

  12. A survey of insect stores in Tokyo carried out by TRAFFIC East Asia, the regional network monitoring the wildlife trade, found two imported Dorcus antaeus stag beetles—a species classed as “nondetrimental” but whose collection is banned in its countries of origin—each selling for U.S. $3,344. See Kameoka and Kiyono, Survey.

  13. Goka, Kojima, and Okabe, “Biological Invasion.”

  14. Stag beetles can live up to five years, much longer than rhinoceros beetles, hence their relatively higher price. See T. R. New, “‘Inordinate Fondness’: A Threat to Beetles in South East Asia?,” Journal of Insect Conservation 9 (2005): 147.

  15. Kameoka and Kiyono, Survey, 41.

  16. JETRO, Marketing Guidebook, 3:242.

  17. Kameoka and Kiyono, Survey.

  18. See Goka, Kojima, and Okabe, “Biological Invasion,” for a detailed discussion of these concerns; see also Kameoka and Kiyono, Survey; and New, “‘Inordinate Fondness.’”

  19. Goka, Kojima, and Okabe, “Biological Invasion.”

  20. Yajima Minoru, Mushi ni aete yokatta [I Am Happy That I Met Insects] (Tokyo: Froebel-kan, 2004), 42. I am grateful to Yumiko Iwasaki for all translations from this book and those in note 20 below.

  21. Konishi Masayasu, Mushi no bunkashi [A Cultural History of Insects] (Tokyo: Asahi Sensho, 1992), 29–30. For synoptic histories of Japanese insect culture, see also Konishi’s Mushi no hakubutsushi [A Natural History of Insects] (Tokyo: Asahi Sesho, 1993), and Kasai Masaaki, Mushi to Nihon bunka [Insects and Japanese Culture] (Tokyo: Daikosha, 1997), and for a review of these and other accounts, see Norma Field’s “Jean Henri Fabre and Insect Life in Modern Japan” (unpublished manuscript, n.d.), courtesy of the author.

  22. Like all other narrators of this history (including everyone whom CJ and I spoke to about this), Konishi also emphasizes the collecting work in Japan by three foreign naturalists: Engelbert Kaempfer, Carl Peter Thunberg, and Philipp Franz von Siebold. All three returned to Europe to publish accounts of Japanese fauna, including insects (Kaempfer’s work was published posthumously in 1727; Thunberg’s was published in 1781; and Siebold’s in 1832), contributions that stand as the initial contact of Japanese nature with formal Western science.

  23. The literature on the emergence of European science is, not surprisingly, huge. For a nuanced introductory view of the European scientific revolution, see Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). In The Formation of Science in Japan: Building a Research Tradition (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), James R. Bartholomew argues that institutional and social continuities from the Tokugawa period provided the basis for the rapid development of Japanese science in the Meiji period. For an interesting account of the ways in which scientific knowledge and institutions can travel, see Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999). For a programmatic revision of conventional scientific histories of the leap from pre-modern to modern, see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

  24. Shiga Usuke, Nihonichi no konchu-ya [The Best Insect Shop in Japan] (Tokyo: Bunchonbunko, 2004). Thanks to Hisae Kawamori for translations from this book.

  25. See government of Japan, Ministry of the Environment, “List of Regulated Living Organisms under the Invasive Alien Species Act,” law 78, June 2, 2004, http://www.env.go.jp/nature/intro/1outline/files/siteisyu_list_e.pdf.

  Zen and the Art of Zzz’s

  1. My thanks to Barrett Klein for introducing me to the literature on this topic.

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