Six-legged summer beauties: Museum show fosters an appreciation of seasonal insects

Tom Baker / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Open your window on a hot summer day and you may hear a sound that caught the ear of haiku poet Matsuo Basho in the 17th century: the voices of cicadas, seeping into the rocks. Of course, Japan today is a lot more urbanized than it was in Basho's time, and cicadas are more likely to sing against a background of asphalt and cement. Yet year after year, the buzzing bugs never fail to show up, even in the heart of Tokyo.

Visitors to Insects Festival, an exhibition now running at the Edo-Tokyo Museum in Ryogoku, Tokyo, are reminded of such persistence right away with a display of six-legged critters that live in three different Tokyo zones: mountains, fields and downtown areas.

While city-dwellers often resent sharing space with the likes of cockroaches and ants, the emphasis of this show is on seasonal outdoor insects whose diverse shapes, bright colors and occasional songs actually enhance city life.

Basho was not the only Japanese to value his encounters with insects. "The oldest anthology of Japanese poetry, 'Manyoshu,' contains poems about dragonflies, crickets, fireflies and bees," according to a sign at the show. "Samurai...in the Kamakura and Muromachi periods (13th-15th centuries) believed that human souls dwelled in butterflies."

Some samurai identified themselves with insects whose qualities they admired. The show includes two suits of armor from the Edo period (1603-1867), one of which boasts an oversized model of a praying mantis poised to strike from the front of its helmet. The other has a helmet adorned with a gigantic dragonfly.

Yuichi Tsuchida of the Toei Co., which along with The Yomiuri Shimbun is among the event organizers, explained that the dragonfly symbolized victory because it only moves forward, while the mantis was admired for its strong claws.

Visitors can also see insect motifs on kimono fabric, painted screens and lacquerware items. Modern insect art on display includes a silvery metal sculpture of a grasshopper about the size of a car and a collection of wooden insect robots that flap their wings and wave their claws at the push of a button.

But no manmade artwork can compete with the insects themselves. There are thousands of specimens on display, including hundreds of rainbow-splashed butterflies, horned beetles the size of mice, jungle insects that look like tree-climbing lobsters, bugs that do an astonishing job of camouflaging themselves as dead leaves, and weevils so tiny that a microscope is provided to look at them.

The weevils are from the vast collection of University of Tokyo Prof. Takeshi Yoro, who uses Google Earth in his hunt for specimens, Tsuchida said. His minuscule quarry can't be seen from space, of course, but the professor uses the satellite images to identify likely habitats.

Yoro is one of several entomologists whose work is featured in the show, which seems to be popular among parents and kids. Many children will be encouraged to see that their fascination with bugs can be turned into a real grown-up career.

Mitsuru Yaku has another career many kids dream about: He's a mangaka. Part of the museum exhibition shows how he spent two days traveling around the Yamanote Line, getting off at each stop to find and photograph an insect. He found a different type for each of the 29 train stations, including moths, beetles and aphides.

Also included in the show is a re-creation of the window of Yaku's Setagaya Ward, Tokyo, studio, with insects crawling on its screen. Through that screen, he no doubt hears the voices of cicadas.

"Insects Festival" runs until Sept. 5 at the Edo-Tokyo Museum in Ryogoku, Tokyo. Open 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. (until 7:30 p.m. on Saturdays), with last admission 30 minutes before closing. Admission: 1,300 yen for adults, 1,040 yen for university students, 650 yen for primary through high school students and those aged 65 or over. For more information, visit www.edo-tokyo-museum.or.jp.