These small creatures play a big part in Japanese culture, from ancient times to contemporary culture.

Like many children born in the 1990s, I grew up playing Pokémon on Nintendo’s handheld consoles. To this day, the series of open-world video games, in which you capture “pocket monsters” and use them to battle fellow Pokémon trainers, is arguably the most significant piece of Japanese intellectual property to infiltrate Western culture. Everyone in my school – in every school it seemed – was playing them, from the boys once only interested in sports to the girls who wanted a more interactive version of their Tamagotchi pets.

Pokémon trading cards were soon released to capitalize on the hype. Rendered in vibrant colors and depicting the soon-to-be iconic creatures, the card decks were a phenomenon, igniting a buying-and-trading frenzy dubbed “Pokémania.” I hunted for those things like they had bounties on their heads, amassing a huge collection simply for the purpose of owning a collection. You could battle with the cards, but I never did, nor did I know anyone else who had any interest. The only competition was convincing another kid that a Blastoise was worth trading for a Snorlax, or that there was no point in owning a Rapidash when you could have a shiny new Ninetails.

In the original games, Pokémon Red and Blue, you’d encounter rival trainers known as bug catchers. Little pixelated boys wearing sun hats and carrying large nets over their shoulders, they traveled with various insectoid Pokémon: chrysalises called Metapod and Kakuna, hornet-like Beedrills, and butterfly monsters known as Butterfrees. I remembered the bug catchers well, though I’d had little reason to think of them since the halcyon days of Pokémon trading. Then, one hot summer afternoon, I was walking somewhere near the Imperial Palace in Tokyo when a couple of elementary school kids bounded past me with their mother in tow. They were making a racket, emitting high-pitched shrills that cut through the cacophony of the city streets. The noise was so shrill, in fact, I started to think it must have been coming from somewhere else. And that’s when I saw the plastic bottle in one of the boys’ hands, empty save for a vibrating cicada inside. He might have traded the net for a PET bottle, but there was no mistaking it: I had found my very own bug catcher.

I was perhaps two decades too late, but I realized then that Pokémon was essentially a creative insect collecting fantasy. Granted, Pokémon are inspired by every class and order in the animal kingdom. Pikachu is a thunder mouse; Charmander, Charmeleon, and Charizard are fire lizards; Pidgeot is a bird; Tentacool is an octopus; Victreebel is carnivorous plant; Squirtle is unsurprisingly a turtle; and Slowpoke, Rhydon, and Drowzee are mammals. But the influence of insects is inseparable from the Pokémon franchise.

It’s no surprise that Satoshi Tajiri and Junichi Masuda, the founders of Game Freak (the studio that created Pokémon), were avid bug catchers in their youth. Tajiri would fetch insects from fields in the Tokyo outskirts, indexing them in a notebook, which no doubt served as inspiration for the Pokédex, the in-game bestiary. Though Masuda was from Osaka, it was also outdoors, in the long grass hunting for little creatures, where he spent most of his downtime. As I saw with that kid running around with a cicada in a bottle, Tajiri and Masuda are not outliers. Their fascination with insects is emblematic of the bug life that has long found its way into the heart of Japanese culture.

Small Things, Tiny Poems

The dragonfly

can't quite land

on that blade of grass.

Insects have represented attention to detail, an appreciation of the ephemeral and the small, in Japanese art for centuries. It’s telling that the grandfather of the haiku form, Matsuo Basho, penned a poem about a dragonfly trying – and failing – to land on a single blade of grass. In three unencumbered lines, Basho captures the briefest, most minute of moments, yet somehow the entire depth of human struggle. Beautiful? Yes. Quietly haunting? Absolutely. But also evidence that even the greatest, most curious of Japanese artists considered insects worthy of study and portrayal.

Kitagawa Utamaro, an 18th century ukiyo-e artist, would concur. He was primarily known for his illustrations of the “floating world,” of geisha entertaining guests in teahouses and behind-the-paper-screen acts of erotica. But in the late 1700s, Utamaro turned his attention to bugs, producing Ehon Mushi Erabi (The Book of Insects), including prints of crickets, earwigs, fireflies, and dragonflies, often with accompanying poetry. Katsushika Hokusai, arguably the most famous of all the ukiyo-e masters, was also a great naturalist. When he wasn’t depicting Mt Fuji from 36 different angles, Hokusai zoned in on the small, producing kacho-e (pictures of flora and fauna) with philosophical or atmospheric overtones. In Peonies and Butterflies (c. 1843), for example, he evokes the sentiment of the Taoist philosopher Zhuganzi, who once dreamt he was a butterfly. The dream became famous when Zhuganzi supposedly gathered his disciples and posited that he had it all in reverse – perhaps he was in fact a butterfly, dreaming he was a man.

Pokémon is the highest-profile example of insects’ influence on contemporary Japanese pop culture, but it’s in good company. Mushi-shi, a popular manga and anime series, whose name translates to “Master of Insects,” is a surrealist fantasy where creatures called mushi exist on the borders of reality. The mushi look like insects but resemble kami (spirits) from Shinto lore, imbuing the series with a meditative, dreamlike tone that puts it into the iyashikei, or “healing fiction,” category. In Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the debut film of Studio Ghibli auteur Hayao Miyazaki, the titular character Nausicaä communicates with large insectoid creatures, the Ohmu, which represent the soul and last bastion of defense of the decaying planet. Inspired by the 12th-century short story, The Lady Who Loved Insects, it’s a fantastical allegory of real-world environmental destruction and an ode to Mother Nature; both features that would define Miyazaki’s work for decades.

Western culture often depicts insects as a pestilence on the world, the bringers of plagues and disease. They’re decried as “creepy crawlies” and are known for their stings and bites and propensity for spoiling the fruit on your kitchen table. This “yuck factor” is the main reason the increasingly sustainability-conscious West struggles to embrace insectivore diets, despite evidence that harvesting insects for food is neither carbon intensive nor agriculturally demanding. Bugs are eaten without question in parts of South America, Africa, and Asia. Even Japan has a history of entomophagy, going back to at least the Edo Period and resurfacing again during periods of food scarcity during the Second World War. Some Japanese even believed eating bugs could make you smarter or longer lived or more spiritually rounded. No wonder when insects appear in Japanese popular culture, they’re portrayed in a light that is closer to the divine.

Bugged by Beauty

This is not to say that every Japanese person has a deep affiliation for insects. I’ve seen people swat flies, crush mosquitoes, spray bug spray, and run squealing at the sight of cockroaches. But according to an Asahi Shimbun poll from 2023, more than 40 percent of respondents said they liked insects, with their colors, sounds, forms, and behaviors cited as reasons. Perhaps most interestingly, many said they liked insects because they offered a sense of comforting familiarity.

Throughout the year insects serve as a backdrop to daily life in Japan, like the dragonflies of early autumn, chopping through the air in parks and gardens with helicopter-esque whirrs, or the cicadae orchestra of every sultry summer forest. There are 35 semi (cicada) species in Japan – Basho wrote about them plenty, too – but the higurashi, a cicada species that sings as the sun is going down, is many people’s favorite. Its whistling call reminds them that the day is cooling off, the nightworld is coming to life, and that the breezy days of autumn are cresting into view.

Some farmers still consult Shinto priests and perform mushi okuri (sending off insects) rituals before cleansing their land of crop-eating bugs, while both city dwellers and countryfolk keep bugs as pets. The fad for owning suzumushi (bell crickets), known for their pleasant, singsong calls, may be in the halls of antiquity, but a book on rearing them was published as recently as 1983.

Beetles are still in the affections of many schoolchildren, especially rhinoceros and stag beetles, which young boys rear from grubs in their homes, sometimes pitting them against each other in “beetle wrestling” bouts. You can buy such beetles in specialty pet shops and estimates reckon there are hundreds of thousands of people across Japan breeding them as a hobby. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Japanese market for insects and entomological accessories is reportedly worth tens of millions of dollars.

It would make sense that a culture with Shinto-animistic roots would value all living things, even those deemed insignificant or pestilent by other cultures. It’s hard to determine exactly why this love for bugs has persisted beyond reaching for broadstroke explanations, like how insects represent the transient, the spare, the otherwise unseen – concepts at the core of Japanese spirituality. But it’s also quite true, because insects are about as fleeting as multicellular organisms come. And perhaps when we study life reduced to its tiniest and most intricate forms, we learn something more about what it means to be human and the precariousness of life itself.

About the Author: David is a Northern Irish freelance journalist, writer and author based in the UK and Tokyo. Fusing reporting and social commentary with extensive experience traveling throughout the country, he has published stories on travel, arts and culture, business and current affairs, and sports in Japan. His work has appeared in a range of national and international publications online and in print. He's also the author of two travel books, Intrepid Japan and the most recent edition of Frommer's Japan. You can find links to his work at www.davidmcelhinney.com.