In Japan, the Children Are Buying Bugs

While American children are buying Japanese action figures, Japanese children are buying bugs. That’s one lesson to be drawn from Jessica Oreck’s documentary “Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo,” a guided tour of a national predilection that introduces us to insect stores, insect fairs, insect video games, insect vending machines and insect viewing areas.

Ms. Oreck, a filmmaker-botanist double threat, ventures into the woods with a professional beetle hunter (whose career has paid for a Ferrari) and observes children playing with prehistoric-looking bugs as big as their hands. She also visits shrines and festivals featuring traditional dance and music, part of her attempt to tie Japan’s unusual love of insects into its aesthetic affinities for transient beauty and communion with nature. This entails a somewhat stilted narration that introduces us, as if for the first time, to things like haiku and The Tale of Genji.

Punctuated by images of crowded cityscapes, slowly moving trains, neon-lighted streets and green hillsides — backgrounds familiar from Japanese art-house films and serious anime — the diverting “Beetle Queen,” like “Lost in Translation” or Takashi Murakami’s art, says less about Japan than it does about America’s continuing fascination with modern Japanese culture. A scientist looking for a combination of childlike innocence and minimalist sophistication might not see it in Hello Kitty but can recognize it in a horned beetle.

From the New York Times