Insects have been celebrated in Japanese culture for centuries. ‘The Lady Who Loved Insects’ is a classic story of a caterpillar-collecting lady of the 12th century court; the Tamamushi, or ‘Jewel Beetle’ Shrine, is a seventh century miniature temple, once shingled with 9,000 iridescent beetle forewings.
Insects continue to rear their antennae in modern Japan. Consider ‘Mothra’, the giant caterpillar-moth monster who is second only to Godzilla in film appearances; the many bug-inspired characters of ‘Pokémon’, and any number of manga (including an insect-themed detective series named after Fabre). Travel agencies advertise firefly-watching tours, there are televised beetle-wrestling competitions and beetle petting zoos. Department stores and even vending machines sell live insects.
Nor do the Japanese merely admire insects: they eat them too. In the Chūbu region, in central Japan, villagers rear wasps at home for food, and forage for giant hornets that are eaten at all life stages, while fried grasshoppers or inago are a luxury foodstuff. Entomophagy once had a place in Western culture too: the ancient Greeks ate cicadas, the Romans ate grubs. But while modern Westerners blithely eat aquatic arthropods – lobster, shrimp, crab, crayfish – we’ve lost our taste for the terrestrial kind.
**
Some historians say that Westerners stopped eating insects because they had easier sources of protein: most of the world’s domesticated mammals are native to Eurasia. Unable to pull a plough or provide leather and milk, even the tastiest grub was not worth the effort. Others say that modern Europeans stopped eating bugs to distinguish themselves from ‘primitive’ societies. Whatever the reason, the Western disgust for insects goes well beyond our plates.
**
In traditional haiku, by contrast, insects tend to symbolise the change of season. As the 18th century poet Kobayashi Issa writes:
Autumn cicada –flat on his back,chirps his last song.
‘In old Japanese literature, poems upon insects are to be found by thousands,’ wrote Lafcadio Hearn, a 19th century European-American writer who became a Japanese citizen. ‘What is the signification of the great modern silence in Western countries upon this delightful topic?’
Not all Japanese, perhaps not even the majority, admire insects. But while Western culture amplifies our perhaps innately human suspicion of insects into distaste and fear, Japanese culture encourages affection, even reverence, for the six-legged. Why?
Daisaburo Okumoto is director of the Fabre Insect Museum. An avid insect‑collector and a scholar of French literature, he has translated many of Fabre’s works. He ascribes the popularity of insects in Japan to national character. ‘It seems like Japanese eyes are like macro lenses and Western eyes are wide-angle,’ he says. ‘A garden in Versailles, it’s very wide and symmetrical. But Japanese gardens are continuous from the room and also very small. We feel calm when we look at small things.’
Traditional Japanese pursuits such as origami, bonsai and painting do often exhibit an appreciation for the small and exquisitely detailed. But Japan’s love of insects might simply be an offshoot of a wider veneration for nature as a whole. Nature and the seasons have had an ‘enormous impact across more than 1,000 years of Japanese cultural history, not only in poetry, painting and the traditional arts but also in a wide range of media, from architecture to fashion,’ writes Haruo Shirane, professor of Japanese literature and culture at Columbia University in New York. Despite urbanisation and industrialisation, this devotion to nature and natural symbols persists in modern Japan, in the design of everything from manhole covers to baked goods.
Ask one of Japan’s many insect collectors why the hobby is so popular, and he (it’s almost always a he) will likely bring up this cultural affinity for nature and its historical roots in Japanese spirituality.
‘Japan’s original religion is Shintoism, and Shinto is a kind of animism, a worship of nature,’ says Kenta Takada, a businessman and longhorn beetle collector who writes articles on Japanese insect culture for entomology journals. ‘Our sense of beauty comes from that.’ Shintoism emphasises that everything in nature, including human beings, is the creation of the spiritual dimension and thus worthy of reverence. Takada also cites Mono no aware, a concept with roots in Zen Buddhism. The phrase refers to a poignant awareness of the transience of all things.
‘There are many more people advocating for mammals or birds or fish than there are for beetles or grasshoppers’
The medieval Japanese monk Yoshida Kenkō put it this way: ‘If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.’
You can hardly get more transient than an insect; some adult mayflies live for just half an hour.
**
It’s hard to say whether a greater affection for insects in Japan has led to more robust conservation. Though Japan is smaller than California, entomologists estimate that it has nearly as many insect species as the US as a whole. Many of those species are in decline, however, as in other parts of the world, and only the most well-known are targeted for protection. Still, public appreciation of insects is quite visible. Some of the few dragonfly nature reserves in the world are in Japan, and firefly and butterfly appreciation clubs have spearheaded the protection of habitat all over the country.
Andrea Appleton, https://aeon.co/essays/japanese-culture-conquered-the-human-fear-of-creepy-crawlies
