Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
Kokasasu Beetle!
Oh... I want it!
Beetle King, Beetle King...
I want to buy a rainbow beetle.
Female.
I wanna buy it. How much is it?
- 57 dollars.
- Let's see if I have that much...
Five... Six... Seven...
Thirteen!
Maybe that is not enough.
This is not enough...
But I wanna buy this no matter what!
If you have some money,
maybe we can combine and buy it.
This one's a little cheaper.
Thirteen?
It's going to be 47 dollars.
Lafcadio Hearn wrote:
"The people that could find delight,
century after century,
in watchlng the ways of insects,
and in making verses about them,
must have comprehended,
better than we,
the simple pleasure of existence".
What then, is embedded in
the Japanese landscape
that encourages such an enthusiasm for insects?
In the 18th century
the Kokugakushu,
sought to define the essence
of being Japanese.
The Kokugakushu endeavored
to purify the culture,
leaving behind foreign influences
and distilling fundamental Japanese thought
into distinguishable concepts
that could be applied across art
and everyday routine.
The pre-eminent scholar of the
Kokugakushu,
Motoori Norinaga,
formulated the essential concept of
Mono No Aware,
which characterizes beauty
as the transience of all things.
According to Mono No Aware,
true beauty is found in that which does not last
and includes the gentle sadness
felt as it fades.
Mono No Aware
expresses the capacity of the Japanese
to experience the objective world
both internally and directly,
without having to resort to language
or other intermediaries.
This connection is granted
by the understanding
that all life and nature is cohesive.
All of its imperfections,
all of its fleeting beauty
is part of a whole.
By letting themselves be moved or affected
by any part of this "whole of life,"
they can experience it absolutely;
without obscurity,
in all of its immediacy.
This is the season when
they begin to emerge.
weeks to come out.
This is the right stage.
This thin line goes to their reproductive
organs - to the testes.
I'm going to sell these as a pair.
Here's the mark, can you see it?
Here's a female.
She doesn't have it.
In summer nights and autumn dusk,
the rush and hum of a thousand tiny voices
fills the air of certain lonesome places,
the cries of suzumushl,
the 'bell insect'.
One poet wrote,
When even the moonlight
sleeps on the garden-grasses,
the song of the suzumushi,
like the crying of a broken heart,
is all that moves in the night.
I love the sound of crickets.
That is why I keep them in my home.
I enjoy the song of the cricket the way
a music lover enjoys his music.
Their sounds are like music to me.
Japanese people have kept
crying insects as pets for all time.
There are some species of crickets that
cannot cry because they have weak wings.
There are more than 118 species
of crickets in our country.
I was 5 or 6 when I first fell in love
Now I am 68 years old, so all that
time I have been obsessed with them.
These are from Shizuoka, by the river.
While the Kokugakushu were striving
to refine the essence of Japanese art,
one humble food-vendor
by the name of Chuzo
was refining the art of entrepreneurship.
On a whim, Chuzo had collected
a few crickets
and kept them confined in his home.
He fed them routinely and they
rewarded him with their nightly chanting.
Charmed by their song,
Chuzo's neighbors asked
if he would supply them with their own.
Chuzo obliged and soon
a new phenomenon of
captive crickets
spread throughout Japan.
Inspired by Chuzo's success,
others followed his example
and the market for a variety
of insects expanded.
A craze took hold of the entire country.
Special:
Insect Catching and Rearing Supplies
Help! All of my insects have escaped.
Can you help me find them?
Even at the hour of the noon-day meal,
the children catching dragonflies.
The poetry that often praises insects
is a type of poetry that rejoices
in the minuscule
as a defining feature
of a particular time and space.
This form of poetry, the haiku,
became popular in the 17th century,
its minimal form a model illustration
of Japanese aesthetics and values.
Haiku is the expression
personal and universal in equal parts.
It is the distillation of time,
a representation of a
single spontaneous moment -
an eternity captured
in a mundane instant of reality.
Haiku is an interpretation
of the brevity of life
and the never-ending cycle of nature -
the unyielding passing of the seasons.
Similar to the concept of
Mono No Aware,
haiku is about the transience of all things
and the perception of intimate nature
without intermediaries.
Haiku is man as part of nature,
or more exactly
man as nature.
Meeting In Flight
How gracefully do the dragonflies
Glance away from each other.
that all creatures exist on an equal
plane of capacity and possibility,
traditionally human,
emotional characteristics to insects.
Because of the shrewdness
with which it caught its prey,
the dragonfly was a favorite emblem
among the warrior class.
It was called the "Victory Insect,"
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