Bugged Read online

  It’s the same exhilaration I see at my next stop: the Jean-Henri Fabre museum. A two-hour train ride from Gunma drops me back off in Tokyo near Nippori’s fabric town. Inside the museum, a four-year-old boy rapidly names off beetle species to an entomologist—counting faster than his bungling fingers can keep up with. Aside from showcasing the scientific benefits and anatomy of bugs, the curators have gone to extreme lengths to re-create a room from Fabre’s home in the southern part of France—from its aged wooden furniture and door to a window overlooking a hi-res photo of the town.

  Outside of this “cabin”—and Japan’s animistic reverence of insects—the relationship with bugs takes a drastic turn toward showmanship. The sport of bug fighting6 is a long-held Asian tradition. I’m talking about real-life Mushi-King beetle-wrestling. One can find multiple venues for summer beetle bouts where elementary school boys pit their pets against each other to play king of the mountain. But China takes the cake for one of the weirdest insect matches.

  During the Golden Autumn Cricket Festival in Qibao, just outside of Shanghai, locals and travelers bring crickets in pots and bamboo cages. The festival includes champions, contenders, and underdogs alike, according to Insectopedia author Hugh Raffles, who gives an incredibly detailed account of the sport. You can find grappling mandibles, quick (six-legged) footwork, and training sessions worthy of a Rocky music montage. The chirpy opponents come from select stock, purchased by men with an eye for talent and tenacity. In nearby casinos, pit bosses watch hundreds of men gamble on these warriors as they battle in 60-second rounds. They huddle in sweaty, cigarette-plumed masses around the tiniest arenas with a cacophony of cheers and anguish, placing bets from $1,600 to over $150,000.

  Over four weeks, 500,000 gamblers visit China, spending over 300 million yuan, writes Raffles. There are scoreboards, weigh-ins, trainers massaging crickets with grass blades, cricket casino bosses due their percentages, assassination attempts, and even ecstasy “doping.” Such matches date back to the seventh century, and the affection for the sport and relationship between man and bug was documented by thirteenth-century chancellor Jia Sidao. Of the five virtues of cricket fighting that Sidao states, my favorite is the third virtue: “Even seriously wounded, [the cricket] will not surrender. This is loyalty.”

  Collecting crickets and, later, beetles was more of an upper-class hobby, says Eiji Ohya. Eiji, a Japanese entomologist I connected with via listserv Entomo-L’s discussion forum, has been kind enough to meet me in Tokyo. More specifically, we’re at Nakano Broadway—an epicenter for manga, collectibles, and all things kitsch and anime fandomonium known as otaku. We’re having lunch together before meeting the manager of Mushi-sha—by far the country’s best-known beetle pet store, dealing in both live and dead specimens. I order unadon. As I pick away at the fine bones in a grilled eel, Eiji tells me how aristocrats during the Heian period would collect insects for their sound. When Japan was governed by samurai in the seventeenth century, and there was peace, the populace began collecting crickets as well.

  Without a doubt, Eiji was a bug boy, a konchu shonen.

  “So were 50 percent of the other boys,” he tells me. He reminisces about one summer assignment that required collecting wild insects to display in a shadowbox. (In fact, we later pass by poster boards in front of the OIOI department store building for one such insect scouting project the company organized for children.) Because he was bad at sports, specifically baseball, Eiji would loll about the outskirts of the outfield. “Insects,” he says, were his “only friends.”

  It was during the nineteenth century’s Meiji period that shops like Mushi-sha hit the scene. “Mushiya, or insect shops,” writes Akito Kawahara, “sold collecting equipment and singing insects in cages.” One of the biggest companies, Shiga Kontyu, has been selling supplies (catching nets, rods, carrying cases) to enthusiasts for over 85 years. Mushi-sha began as a mail-order company back in 1971, selling dead bugs through its catalog—one time reaping 1 million yen for a single stag beetle specimen. Starting in 1998, it opened up shop for live beetles. Today it has customers flying in from South Korea, China, and Thailand.

  Eiji and I leave the restaurant and walk through the busy streets of Tokyo’s Nakano ward, which despite the thousands of people walking around has a quiet to it. And conformity. Even the sidewalks have a dividing line indicating the direction of foot traffic. The nondescript building housing Mushi-sha is near the JR station. The store shares the mildewy hay smell of insectariums. Bags of beetle chow picturing tiny grubs holding forks and knives line the wall near rows and stacks of shiny, barbed beetles sluggishly crawling about their cages. Autographs from local celebrities cover a portion of wall near the ceiling. One is from the pop-rock band Spyair. And waiting in the back for my willing translator Eiji and me is the very reticent store manager Noboyuki Kobayashi.

  I ask him how it feels to be operating one of the most successful insect shops in Tokyo. Kobayashi talks for a while as Eiji nods his head and makes subtle murmurs of agreement. (This is actually a form of conversational etiquette known as aizuchi.) “For the Good Times” by Kris Kristofferson plays on their stereo in the background.

  “He just likes insects,” Eiji laughs. “That’s all.”

  Oy, I think, this is going to be tough.

  After some cajoling, I learn that they are busiest in July and August, as that’s when there are multiple insect festivals and beetle wrestling tournaments throughout Japan. They’ll get 300 people coming in a day, lining up outside during their weeklong sales. Kobayashi will work nonstop for 50 days, losing weight as a result. Unsurprisingly, he was also a konchu shonen. As a kid, his favorite beetle was the same one decorating the Tamamushi Shrine.

  For your average seven-year-old kid, Kobayashi might recommend an Indonesian stag beetle that goes for 4,320 yen. The Beetle Boom with kids was in 2003 or 2004, he says. Finally my ears perk up when Kobayashi utters the name of the gaming company of my childhood nostalgia, “SEGA.” Yes! I know that one!

  “Ah, Mushi-King!” I interrupt enthusiastically.

  The guys listening behind the counter erupt into laughter. I’ve proved I know more than five Japanese words. Back-pats all around.

  “Kids want the real thing,” Eiji translates.

  One Mushi-sha employee was actually an adviser for the video game. But its popularity is declining, according to Kobayashi. The newer version is intended for the grown-ups who enjoyed the original as a kid (and goofy foreigners traveling halfway across the world). One employee tells me how the enthusiasts are practically entomologists. “They know much more about the insects than me,” he says via Eiji. “It’s a very Japanese phenomenon.” Although Mushi-sha’s market may wane, given the oscillating trends of pop culture, it’s always been more about the message for Kobayashi. I turn to Eiji and ask: What does the manager hope to accomplish?

  “By selling insects to kids,” Kobayashi says, “they can learn what life is. The importance of life. That they will protect nature and biodiversity … Without that,” he continues, they wouldn’t know “how precious life is.” Again, this relates back to animism. “We have many other pets, like cats and dogs, but they are all controlled by the human beings. But insects are more wild and free. Between nature and human being. So, yes,” Eiji translates for Kobayashi, “I sell insects. But I want kids to collect bugs by themselves. Go to nature and collect insects and learn. Insects are a sort of mediator between human being and nature.”

  Today, raising insects, in Japan, has grown in popularity. I think it’s for the best. Mushi-sha now works with local farmers. People like Akito Kawahara’s friend who sold enough beetles to buy a Ferrari. A scene from Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, a documentary based on Kawahara’s American Entomologist article, shows his friend driving around in it.

  Due to recent changes in legal policies, Indonesian insect hunters are now paid better wages, hiking up the cost of insect importation. Such cost increase is good news for black market dealers. “Many private ins
ect collectors,” Kawahara writes, “do not have official collecting permits for neighboring countries.” He goes on to refer to beetles as “black diamonds” sometimes stolen from residents and stores. One such pilfered haul was valued at $67,000. And where conservation laws prohibit overcollecting, a strange variety of thug emerges from the shadows.

  * * *

  In 2008, Virginia resident Wenxiao Jiang was expecting a package; it was never delivered. The problem was it made too much noise. Suspicious postal workers decided to take a quick peek. Inside were 25 beetles from Japan, including a Hercules beetle, which Jiang intended to breed and sell. These beetles could potentially be vectors for diseases or invade crops. The Virginian was swiftly charged by police for not having a permit to own exotic animals.

  Ah, the illicit act of smuggling insects into the country. Black market traffickers stick insects in whatever crannies available. Shoving spiders into your undergarments in hopes of sneaking past customs is ill advised—that’s just me—but past endeavors show the benefits outweigh the risks. Take, for example, docile and endangered Mexican redknee tarantulas that can score hundreds of thousands of dollars. Experienced international traffickers make a career dodging USDA fines that reach from $50,000 to $100,000. In 2010, in a government sting called Operation Spider-Man, feds arrested 37-year-old German national Sven Koppler at LAX for smuggling over 300 live Mexican redknees. He had hidden the tarantula spiderlings in drinking straws, possibly making, US agents believe, $300,000 in sales worldwide during his 10-month selling spree.

  Koppler is the type of smuggler you might meet at an exotic pet expo. That’s why I find myself standing at the bottom of a staircase in an expo line spanning four stories in the Tokyo Metropolitan Trade Center.

  For years the exotic pet expo called Blackout was known as the place to buy a large array of insects—like deer-antlered scarabs, Japanese rhinoceros, Hercules beetles—and other creepies. Mysteriously, however, the beetles began to hide from the sales floor. That’s not to say these rows of long tables don’t offer other exotic pets: sugar gliders, chameleons, owls. Jun Okochi, a Japanese-American gem dealer born in Texas, explains why there’s a lack of beetles at Blackout.

  It has to do with the man standing on a shoddy stage a couple of inches off the ground under weak fluorescent lights, currently raffling away prizes as sleazy ’80s music better heard with vibrant spandex pants plays overhead. His depressed lion’s mane hair drapes onto his unbuttoned red silk shirt, which drapes over stylishly frazzled jeans, upon which is a gun holster for his cell phone. This man is Satoru Watanabe—ringmaster of Blackout and formerly Japan’s greatest beetle smuggler. He also spent a period of his life as a rock musician, dressing in theatric anime-like band costumes, a genre known as vijuara kei. (Please look this up.)

  Jun introduces me to Watanabe as he strides through the hall talking to his assistant, but the meeting is a brief handshake and business card exchange. Having not encountered many Japanese people fluent in English, I ask if Jun would like to meet for drinks and tell me more about Watanabe, whom he’s known for a couple years. A man he calls “Beetle Master.”

  Two days before I leave the country, Jun and I commiserate over beers in a Shinjuku bar.

  “So,” I start, “tell me about Satoru.”

  “What d’you wanna hear?”

  “You told me that he was one of the biggest—”

  “Smugglers,” he laughs, taking a sip of beer.

  Jun explains how the Beetle Master frequented Southeast Asia, paying the locals low wages to find insects for him. After placing his orders, he’d wait for another two to three months back in Japan. “Then he flew back to the country—Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, wherever—and bought up the insects they caught. And then he smuggled,” he says, laughing again.

  I tell him about the “Spider-Man” smuggler and the straws he used. “That’s how [the Beetle Master] did it until he was caught,” says Jun. “But for the beetles it is impossible to put them in straw.” Jun’s tip for future insect smugglers? Don’t put them in your carry-on luggage. “At customs, you say, ‘I have nothing to declare,’” he says, his hands innocently raised in the air. “If you’re lucky enough, [the TSA] will just let you go through. I hear Satoru was doing it for over eight years. And at last he got caught.”

  Centipedes, scorpions, hissing cockroaches. From what I could tell, Satoru Watanabe was hauling big time. His operation ran from the mid-2000s to about 2013, but the eventual shakedown happened in an Indonesian airport. Watanabe was smuggling gold beetles. “He was making millions!” Jun continues. Watanabe still keeps mum about how he was busted. Afterward, the beetles at Blackout were slowly phased out.

  Jun and I walk through Shinjuku and make our way to Piss Alley—a series of dank, quirky bars and eateries squashed together, each seating no more than 12 people or so. The alleys themselves are narrower than a supermarket aisle. And it’s true to its name; after we pass a bar filled with Lucille Ball–inspired crossdressers, we see an old drunk furiously urinating with garden-hose gusto onto the concrete. He stares at us and cackles. So, we cautiously tiptoe around Mr. Peepee and duck into a bar called Albatross, where Victorian chandeliers are a head-bump away. After some plum-infused umeshu liqueur we continue down Shinjuku’s busy streets. As if I needed reminding we’re in Japan, we walk past a life-sized, realistic bust of Godzilla’s head over Toho Studios’ office (also producers of Mothra); the head seems to be peeking over the wall.

  This prompts Jun to talk about Japan’s eclectic variety of social and cultural differences. A land isolated by water. “I call it ‘shima complex,’” Jun tells me at Zoetrope, a tiny bar playing silent movies and serving the world’s best whiskeys. Shima means “island.” And true to his definition, it’s only on this island where such an incredible insect world could develop.

  On my flight back home I can’t stop thinking about the charming differences of shima complex—bugs aside. The welcoming ear-pop while riding the Shinkansen bullet train. The instant warmth holding a can of Suntory black coffee from a vending machine on a dewy cold morning. The lace-lined taxicab headrests giving the impression the interior was detailed by your grandma. The power-line hum of bees hidden in the artfully sculpted niwaki plum blossoms. The subtle jerk of a miniature Honda Kei truck shifting gears through mountain roads, past Akima Shrine. The heightened blood flow plumping your skin from soaking in a tiled onsen filled with 111-degree water. The hollow swoosh of the paper shōji door. The child grunting “Monkeyyy!” at Jigokudani’s snow monkey park (selfie sticks prohibited). The slurpy madness over nasal-dripping steam of ramen bowls, sitting cross-legged at a table with construction workers in blue plainclothes. And the mellow, nighttime pulse of red lights dotted across Tokyo’s skyscrapers—a heart monitor blip until dawn.

  * * *

  At US Customs, I declare my goods: tasty plum sauce and novelty almonds coated in white chocolate to look like cocoons. Never mind the real ones in my checked luggage. But for every couple of smugglers who do exist, there are legit enterprises in this realm of big bug biz: cricket rearing and the legal transport of exotic butterflies and beetles.

  Located in a nondescript building near Denver International Airport is an office filled with tiny white boxes marked with three-letter initials, designated for North American cities. Inside, butterfly chrysalises hardened like coarse, booger-y spires from across the world are metamorphosing. “Homeland Security hates me,” says Richard Cowan, owner of LPS, LLC, and the self-proclaimed “kingpin” of insect trade. These animals would make great bioterrorism vectors, he tells me, pushing his slippery glasses back above the bridge of his nose. “You can’t put a powder in an envelope by itself and expect it to work.” He’s been approached by hobbyists without paperwork selling beetles, but only goes through licensed dealers.

  Cowan, who conjures a sturdy Clark Kent in his mid-fifties, has developed a rapport with officials. As a permit-savvy importer, he brings in over 1 million special orders a yea
r. Some of those butterflies—for gardens from Indiana’s Potawatomi Zoo to the Smithsonian—sell for $3 a head.

  LPS has tripled its business in the past five years. His competitors are limited, especially now that he’s expanded to deliver 200 types of foreign beetles. (One goes for $700.) He even bought a satellite business started by London Pupae Supplies. For the sake of recognition, he kept the company’s initials: LPS. Cowan’s competitors realized the cost-saving benefits of shipping through LPS to get through Customs. Inspection fees after 9/11 went from $50 to $200 a box of insects. “Totaled it’s about $500 to get a box … so it became, ‘Why go overseas for $500 a box when you can go through Rich and pay $50 in postage?’” The process also has to be expedited seeing as the live animals are undergoing metamorphosis. And Cowan has streamlined distribution.

  Four hundred thousand butterflies ship through this tiny sealed lab in the middle of strip malls. “Now subtract postage, cost, and everything else, and there’s not as much as you’d hope.” The other 700,000 insects are in bulk shipping: LPS receives 50 to 80 boxes per week at $50 a box. “Fortunately that profit pays for my butterfly habit,” he laughs. Cowan needs it. FedEx delayed a shipment from Malaysia last week, costing him about $10,000 when it got stuck in Fort Worth. “Over half of the box (butterflies, beetles) was dead. [FedEx] didn’t compensate me because they don’t guarantee the delivery of live animals.” That said, be wary around rotten chrysalises. Gases from internal bacteria pressurize the shells. “In this business, we call them ‘hand grenades.’” Enjoy washing the stench off when they pop in your hand. It’s a problem his two in-office chrysalis sorters experience. When a shipment arrives, they separate the healthy chrysalises from the diseased or poorly emerged ones. When healthy “sleeping bags” break open, their wilted wings take time to dry and flatten. I watch the newly emerged cling to a bookshelf and defecate their last leafy meal, which splats the table like melted Skittles.