Petting Beetles: The Love of Japanese Kids For Insects

You may be one of the numerous people who have spent long lockdown hours playing the Nintendo video game hit Animal Crossing: New Horizons. If so, the hobby of insect collecting, and the sound of cicadas have become familiar to you. But did you know this is directly inspired by the Japanese’s peculiar relationship with insects? In this article, I’ll introduce the different ways the Japanese appreciate co-existing with the little critters.

Enjoying the Seasonal Sounds of the Insects

Japanese cicada (photo credit: Pakutaso)

Culturally, Japanese people consider insect noises as “soothing” or “comfortable.” According to Tadanobu Tsunoda, a doctor of medicine at Tokyo Medical and Dental University, while Western people recognize the sound that insects make as “noise, in their right brain, Japanese people recognize it as a ‘voice’ in their left brain, where language is processed.”
This difference is apparently derived from language.

If you visit Japan during the summer, you will hear the very loud song of the Japanese cicadas everywhere. For Japanese people, this sound is a pleasing symbol for summer, even though they call it…