Bugged Read online

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  Rows of churchlike pews face a small video projection on the museum floor. We’re in the Tomioka Silk Mill in Japan’s Gunma Prefecture. I’m joined by my Airbnb host Ayomi Anabuki-Browning and her teenage daughter Azusa, the three of us watching an impersonator of nineteenth-century French engineer Paul Brunat. Replete with a Western bow tie and white David Bowie suit, the lean Frenchman looks like a slender, alternate-reality version of Colonel Sanders. Of course I doubt whether Brunat or Sanders spoke Japanese as well as this dubbed version of the mill director.

  Chipper music plays as the camera pans across a CGI re-creation of the factory’s 300 steam-powered mechanical reels, which were fully operational by 1872. The film cuts to a large brass bowl in a factory. Boiling alkaline water softens the silk of the cocoons—a composition of proteins known as fibroin and sericin, generated by the silk glands. Both are products of nitrogen from ingested mulberry leaves—a common tree here in the Gunma Prefecture. Fibroin is the main component of silk, so the binding gum sericin is dissolved in the hot water as the female workforce pull thin filaments out of the bowl and catch the yarn onto a reeling machine. Some cocoons contain nearly 3,000 feet of string. When faced with daunting quotas, Ayomi tells me, women would hide their children beneath the table to eat any excess, leftover threads.

  “They don’t show the dark side,” Ayomi says, disappointed. “Where’s the dark side?”

  Azusa looks bored to tears.

  Lightly Battered Colonel Paul Brunat Sanders walks the outside of the cocoon warehouse talking about—from my audience assessment—nothing particularly interesting as hundreds of stoic-faced women are shown. Then, suddenly, Brunat bids adieu by sparkling into radiant gold light. Yep. Somewhere a clock must’ve struck midnight because he turns into a moose-turd-sized cocoon right near the gate entrance where I just bought my ticket! Unable to personally plop Brunat’s cocoon home into boiling water, Ayomi, Azusa, and I proceed through the facilities.

  The three of us enter the second story of the east warehouse. This 300-foot-long timber construction with a 50-foot-high ceiling is where dried pods were kept. Numbers on the banisters denote the storage sectors. “It’s like the same as Costco,” Ayomi says. A museum guide tells us that the mill closed in 1987. At that time, the sericulture industry was making waves in Japan. Cold chambers slowed the growth of eggs to keep production going through the seasons. Wind caves functioned as large-scale egg banks like Gunma’s Arafune Cold Storage, which maintains near-freezing temperatures during the summer. Lab studies produced transgenic moths for disease resistance and bigger cocoons. One way to yield more silk is to lengthen the last larval instar by playing with caterpillars’ hormones. In their fifth and final instar (larval growth stage) before pupating, “they’ll eat mulberry leaves like crazy,” says Nan-Yao Su. “So the idea there is to expose them to juvenile hormone and delay their [pupation] by one or two days. It forces them to eat more.” This pursuit of perfecting one’s craftsmanship is very Japanese. Su, a Taiwanese man who spent his formative years in Japan, says the phrase for this is shokunin katagi.

  By 1965, automatic reeling machines replaced the workforce. However, the 400-ton iron water tank that fed water to the old steam machines remains. It sits four feet off the ground on concrete blocks. We meet a more talkative man patrolling it. I ask if he can tell us anything that isn’t included on the tour. You know … insider silk mill scuttlebutt. He ponders some. “Hmmm…” And then he raises a white gloved finger and spills the beans.

  “Ah,” interpreter Ayomi starts. “Local people, when they had kids, would come and use this as a playground underneath the tank.” The kind gentleman sees the dismayed expression on my face—I can’t help it. So, he mentions another thing. “So the French guy,” Ayomi continues, “the founder of this factory, he used to drink red wine, right? For Japanese, they’d never seen red wine before. So,” they thought, “‘it’s red drink. What is he drinking?’” She feigns the nervous voice of a silk worker. “They think he’s drinking blood. Human blood. That’s why Japanese girls were scared of him. ‘The Beast drinking the blood!’” They also believed he cooked with human fat. Ayomi giggles. “Their imagination goes too far.”

  Colonel Cannibal Sanders kept a large wine cellar. Actually, he lived here with fellow business managers before moving out by 1875. The houses and dormitories would welcome foreign dignitaries, including the Empress Dowager of China. For symbolizing such a cornerstone in Japan’s economy, the Tomioka Silk Mill was listed as a World Heritage Site in 2014.

  We stop in the village for taiyaki, fish-shaped cakes filled with sweet azuki beans, and then pack into Ayomi’s car. As we drive through the narrow village streets of Annaka, I think back on the yellow cocoon pods I saw in the mill’s gift shop. They were not, as I assumed, dyed. Rather, certain wild silk moths produce yellow pigmentation when consuming carotenoid-rich plants. Green cocoons exist thanks to metabolites known as flavonoids. Japan’s National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences (NIAS) is where such mutant potential is being exploited. Although annual silk production has steadily declined over the past 20 years, sericulture’s shokunin katagi idealists have not faltered in their pursuit for perfection. This is why we now have transgenic silk worms fused with the hardy dragline proteins from spiders, and neon-colored silks engineered for mass production. The red and orange fluorescent silks produced by NIAS are “10 percent weaker,” the researchers said, than commercially bred varieties. But that should be enough to withstand Electric Daisy Carnival partying.

  I look this up at Ayomi’s house, the vast windows of my bedroom opening up to Gunma’s mountains. It’s the same natural light that filled the silk mill. In fact, I learn that silkworms were once reared on the second floor of this converted farmhouse. Ayomi and her British husband Simon have gone to great lengths to modernize this Akima home originally built in 1938. The lush hills of Annaka, like many parts of Gunma, were once heavily populated with mulberry trees; the landscape has now been replaced with plum orchards. After dinner, Simon and I take their golden retriever Hanna for a walk through the orchard. The crisp evening air is rejuvenating, and Simon tells me how patches of mulberry trees remain to mark property borderlines.

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  The potential boon from various insect-related industries relies on our ability to abandon our aversion. Monarch butterfly migrations helped spur the ecotourism movement as guided tours take vacationers along their trail. There was a time when for 10 francs you could watch fleas drag Monopoly-sized tokens around a tiny circus ring. Long before being a superb polishing agent, beeswax was used as a currency in Rome. Iron gall ink, used from the time of the writing of the Dead Sea Scrolls through Bach’s concertos and into the twentieth century, comes from oak tree galls created by a secretion from egg-laying cynipid wasps. And until 2012, a certain type of red bug juice gave your Starbucks frappuccinos happier hues.

  “There is a tiny scale insect,” writes scientist Stuart Fleming, “whose sole love in life is to dwell on the fleshy green joints of a prickly pear cactus … whose bodies owe their distinctive scarlet coloration to the carminic acid in their blood and muscular fibers.” For a time, the top commodities of the New World were gold and silver and this liquid red dye. Before it became commonplace, its rare and regal color was highly sought after, upping its value. A kilogram of this dye, derived from female cochineal (Dactylopius coccus) by squeezing 100,000 of the pruney, sesame seed–sized tropical insects, can sell for $40. Together, Peru and Chile produce 220 tons of extract a year. But it’s at Kentucky’s D.D. Williamson coloring house where chemistry wizards tamper with the by-product’s pH levels to generate a palette of hues, labeling it on food and cosmetic products as E120, carmine, or Natural Red 4. Manufacturers of the carminic acid saw market prices increase eightfold from 2009 to 2010. And the industry remains steadfast despite Change.org’s successful petition against Starbucks’ use.

  The by-product’s popularity began with the Mixtecs of southern Mexic
o. Ancient nobles wore clothes dyed in the “color of the gods” to denote their social status. Traditional farmers would harvest clusters of cochineal from prickly pear cacti using woven, cylindrical nests. The red dye’s introduction to the New World and expansion of our sartorial minds is thanks to colonial Spaniards. The country’s ministry besieged Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in 1523 to diversify and expand the dye’s production. It gave Spain a monopoly for 250 years. But in 1777, a Frenchman snuck these cactus pads back to Europe to begin production elsewhere. The reign of cochineal’s regal red extract as a commodity second to silver began to waver. The Spanish government moved cochineal farming to the Canary Islands, writes Fleming, exporting as much as 6 million pounds by 1875. Less costly, if less radiant, artificial dyes overtook the market toward the end of the nineteenth century.

  The most ubiquitous of all extracts is the one that coats your jelly beans, nails, apples, pharmaceuticals, and coffee tables with a waxy sheen. You know it as shellac. The waxy resin secretions of the Kerria lacca, cultivated in places like India and Thailand, appear as tumorous blisters on tree branches. Its use as a dye goes back to 250 CE. In 1596, European writer J. H. van Linschoeten ventured on a scientific trip to India and described lac’s usage: “They spread the Lac upon the whole peece of woode which presently, with the heat of the turning [melteth the waxe] so that it entreth into the crestes and cleaveth unto it, about the thicknesse of a man’s naile … The woode … shineth like glasse … In this sort they cover all kinde of householde stuffe in India, as Bedsteddes, Chaires, stooles, etc.”

  He continueths for a while about its “beautie and brightness.” Lac harvest can employ millions of people, a fact that has remained largely unchanged over the past century.

  Lac workers called kharadi still pick and melt the red clumps. They then flatten the resin through a wringer before breaking it into flakes. A liaising salesman known as a baipari goes village to village acquiring parcels of lac. Baiparis then take it to shopkeepers, or arhatiyas, who sell it on commission. After refining methods improved, its popularity increased. Varnishes contain about 25 percent or more shellac. Before vinyl came around, some phonographic records were made of insect resin. Shellac author Edward Hicks notes how the resin “stiffened” bowler hats, polished smoking pipes, styled hair, coated playing cards, and layered electrical wires for better insulation. Until the 1950s, its replication dumbfounded lab scientists. By 1998, India produced around 85 percent of the world’s lac, exporting 30,000 tons per year worth $4.8 million.

  Silk, shellac, and red dye. All have helped give rise to global powers, but these products are now in great decline. Before getting hopped up on future insect services, entrepreneurs should first possess an amicable relationship with bugs. Examples of such healthy relationships can be found today on the fringes of culture.

  We once again turn to the East for enlightenment.

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  Gunma Prefecture sits smack dab in the middle of Japan. A landlocked, humid mass of Eden. Nestled within it is a 118-acre bit of habitat dedicated to the pleasure of viewing bugs—1,400 species of them, to be precise. This popular zoo of mini-monsters known as Gunma Insect World, built in 2005, also serves as a centerpiece for the widespread Japanese cultural phenomenon of bug-loving.

  The local Tōbu Kiryū train achingly pulls into the modest Akagi Station. The zoo is a quick cab drive away. Waiting on the opposite platform is a character performer—a brown, bipedal pony that seemingly rolled out from the Hello Kitty wastebasket. This cherubic equine is Gunma-chan—the prefecture’s mascot. Beetle horns sit atop its bloated head like a kabuto samurai helmet. He waves to the three kids starfishing their hands against the train windowpane. Once the door opens, the kids bolt over to hug this plushy character, their tiny backpacks bouncing jovially. I follow next for my hug and tourist photo, naturally.

  In Japan, insect-loving kids are called konchu shonen. Their bug, or mushi, obsession is an itch Animal Planet documentaries can’t scratch. “When I was a child attending elementary school in Tokyo,” writes Akito Kawahara in an American Entomologist article, “my father bought this book.” It was a “butterfly treasure map,” he reflects, one they’d follow every Sunday, and Kawahara was shocked to find groups of butterfly aficionados “with their 30-foot extension poles lined up against a forest just after dawn,” collecting butterflies. In the late 1990s, such mushi enthusiasts’ purchases averaged “tens of millions of dollars” a year. In 2004, import trades to support the habit of konchu shonen were estimated at $100 million. Ushering that support was SEGA’s arcade/trading card game Mushi-King—a role-playing, fighter video game using actual beetle species as models for the playable characters. I gave this a try while visiting the geek paradise known as Akihabara. At the basement level of the six-story arcade tower known as Club SEGA, three teens gather around a new edition of Mushi-King. I sat at the machine next to them and began smashing blue, red, and yellow buttons going fisticuffs with some beetles. At the end of each fight, a new character card with attributes I selected was printed off.

  I love Japan. Where else can you collect 7-Eleven insect toys? The 1970s TV series Kamen Rider featured a motorcycle-cruising grasshopper humanoid. Today, department stores and markets sell live rhinoceros beetles as pets. Fifteen years ago, some vending machines even spat out live beetles. Bugs are the G.I. Joes of Japanese pop culture. Part of this infatuation is owed to the idyllic language of French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre. His 1879 book Souvenirs Entomologiques (Entomologial Memories), explains Kawahara, was translated and published in multiple editions here. This shared obsession for beetles traces back to a temple in Nara Prefecture and its seventh-century Tamamushi Shrine with 9,083 emerald and red-striped hardened wings.4 Ditto other insects. One interpretation of the country’s eleventh-century name, Akitsushima, is taken to mean “Dragonfly Island.” All the manga and anime I’ve read reference or depict insects in various ways. There are the more direct ones like Bug Boy,5 Read or Die with villainous insects threatened to be unleashed, and then Insectival Crime Investigator Fabre—named after the French luminary—as well as Professor Osamushi.

  When I get to the Gunma Insect World ticket kiosk, though, the zoo is nearly empty. This is Disneyland on a rainy day during school finals. That’s because it’s mid-March. The Japanese colloquialism for how the weather’s behaving is “three days cold, four days warm.” The grass in the park is brown and the pathways are sparse with baseball-capped konchu shonen. But clearly I’m not as despairing as the silk tour guide visibly bummed by the off-season lull.

  A middle-aged employee named Sada smokes a cigarette in front of a 140-year-old silkworm farmhouse. He’s supervising about 20 kids running around the thatch-roofed piece of history that reminds me of Ayomi’s home. Children play outside with Hula-Hoops and stilts. The farmhouse, filled with museum-worthy silk-reeling machines and beautiful tatami rooms, is entirely empty. I show patrolling guide Sada a modicum of enthusiasm for the silk artifacts in the house, and he breaks out into a dance.

  “Wait,” Sada says, “one minute.”

  We place our shoes before the stairs that lead to the tatami room. He swings open a large closet, rummages around, his dark green wind jacket swishing, and returns with a card bobbin of twine. “Watch,” Sada implores, his English almost as limited as my Japanese. He squats beside a low table with an authentic, Edo-era manually operated apparatus called a zaguri-seishi, and hurriedly wraps the string over a brass wheel, then feeds it through a stick and finally the reel. Sada starts cranking it. The wooden rod wags like a wind-up metronome as the string clumsily leaves the bobbin. He quickly whips around me, frantic footsteps across the tatami mat, and darts into another closet on the opposite side of the house. Back in a flash, he opens a trash bag with what looks like white and yellow packing peanuts. These are cocoons. Hundreds. Each rattling with a mummified silkworm.

  He pulls thin threads from one and then points to the zaguri-seishi, indicating how silk was originally w
ound. I nod my head. He struggles, trying to explain a factoid, so I bring up my iPhone’s translator app. One cocoon string, it appears, can reach the length of “200 mustaches.” Later I find it in fact averages 2,000 feet. The mustache conversion table escapes me. He scoops about 40 cocoons into a grocery bag and offers it to me.

  “Gift. Gift,” he says enthusiastically.

  “Dōmo arigatō gozaimashita,” I respond, thanking him very much, hopefully not butchering it, and not quite sure how I’ll get these potentially disease-carrying pods past TSA security. When I step outside after poking around some, I see Sada has resumed his babysitting. He’s smoking a cigarette again, this time visibly satisfied.

  Making my way downhill, away from the farmland portion of Gunma Insect World, I see the 3,600-square-foot greenhouse. The giant glass enclosure has an interpretive quarter dome draping over it like the hardened wing of a beetle. Inside is a double deck of semitropical plants from Okinawa. A small bridge passes over the indoor waterfall, and old men with telescopic cameras lean into plants in a full Japanese bow. Going through the sliding door, I arrive at an educational mecca of insect books so high it requires a fireman’s ladder. Boys and girls are nudged shoulder to shoulder to gawk and pet furry brown elephant beetles in sawdust terrariums. Giant stag beetle statues cling to the concrete walls. A paper craft table features origami praying mantises made by kids. Educators clasp their gloved hands behind their backs, answering questions. And several boys reach into the beetle boxes and lift the tiny black-shelled tanks to see their intricate undersides.