[Book] collecting is an obsession, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.
—JEANETTE WINTERSON
OBSESSION IS A STRANGE THING. It’s a lust that burrows inside, grabs hold, and doesn’t let go. A fever gets into your blood that drives you crazy. The desire—whether it’s for antique cars, Tiffany lamps, or Barbie dolls—is unquenchable. For the person in its grip there is no escape.
There’s always another item to be obtained, whatever the cost. The price can be losing your job, your house, or even your spouse. The compulsion is so great it’s like an adrenaline rush. Nothing else matters but the next treasure to be added to your collection and the feeling that it will somehow make your life perfect.
That’s the way it is with butterflies. The sight of a silver-bordered fritillary can send a collector into quivers of delight. A rare birdwing is a wondrous thing to behold. To obtain an endangered butterfly becomes one’s Holy Grail. For a collector, butterflies can be as dangerous and addictive as any drug.
Ego, drive, and fanatical obsession are the traits needed for the single-minded pursuit of this goal. Butterfly collectors are comparable to hunters lusting after a trophy to nail on the wall. Except in this case the trophy is to be pinned and mounted in a box.
“The passion and excitement of the chase are almost as important as the bug itself,” offers butterfly dealer Greg Lewallen. “It’s like big-game hunting, only our trophies are under six inches instead of a nine-foot-tall Kodiak bear or a two-thousand-pound bull elephant. Believe me, the weirdest bunch of people you’ll ever meet are bug collectors.”
Their lives can be reminiscent of a Greek tragedy, with many turning to alcohol and drugs to try to subdue their demon. Collectors have been known to go bankrupt in order to underwrite their butterfly trips. To possess what’s rare and forbidden becomes their main mission in life.
“We’re driven toward something that doesn’t put food on the table and that we can’t take with us,” concurs one lepidopterist. “It’s not all happiness and joy. There’s a dark side here.”
A composite of an obsessive collector was provided by another lepidopterist, who also preferred to remain anonymous. “He’s lost his eighth job in three years due to calling in sick and taking off on collecting trips, and he’s depressed because no one else will hire him. As a result, his wife has finally left him. Even so, he still can’t control his obsession. Instead, he’s become hooked on speed, taken out mortgages, and run through his family’s savings while still chasing after butterflies.”
“We’re a dysfunctional lot,” admits University of California at Riverside entomologist Dr. Gordon Pratt. “There hasn’t been a day in my life that I haven’t had a complete fascination with butterflies. It’s truthfully an addiction.”
Get personally involved with an avid butterfly collector, and you’ll always come in second. Mainly because many of those obsessed with the insects tend to have trouble connecting with people and forming relationships. Butterflies become their refuge. For others, such as writers and artists, butterflies become their muse.
Lewis Carroll, best known for having spent time with Alice, was a butterfly enthusiast. Another famous lepidopterist was Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov. Not only did he discover and name dozens of species of butterflies, he kept a collection of male butterfly genitalia coated in glycerin, and methodically labeled, in his office. Little Karner blue butterflies were his major passion. Just an inch in size, the gossamer-winged males are iridescent violet-blue with black rims and delicate white fringe, while the females boast orange crescents along their borders. Nabokov once described the butterflies as covering their habitat in “a sea of blue.” They are now an endangered species.
Nowhere is the passion for insects greater than in Asia, and Japan is the mecca. This is the heart of the beetle and butterfly craze. According to an article in The Economist, one of every ten Japanese men is considered to be an obsessive butterfly collector. Even the former justice minister belonged to a butterfly club.
Insects are viewed as an integral part of Japanese culture. To the Japanese, beauty and harmony are to be found in natural things. Butterflies and bugs are ingrained in their proverbs and sayings, their legend and lore. Some beetles even symbolize samurai warriors. The Japanese see insects as creatures of beauty rather than creepy-crawly bugs. People keep crickets in their homes because they love to hear their chirping at night. Beetles have become more popular in Japan than even cats and dogs.
Vending machines offer live beetles for sale as pets in the summer. You can buy them just as you would a soda or candy bar. Insect cages and butterfly nets are also available in most stores. Have a sudden hankering to get a bug while you’re out shopping? No problem. Southeast Asian rhinoceros beetles can be purchased at Japan’s version of Home Depot. It’s “beetlemania” to be sure.
Little boys begin their pastime by catching beetles in the forest. The bugs are a source of enjoyment and play. Kids pit them one against the other in daily contests. The bugs battle it out to prove which of them is stronger. This childhood passion for insects only seems to grow. So does the amount of money that’s spent on finding rare butterflies and bugs.
A reporter with Japan Broadcasting Corporation travels with a friend each summer on collecting trips to Myanmar. They hire an army of thirty locals to accompany them into the forest, to serve as guides and help carry supplies but also to protect the two men from guerrillas. The friends search for butterflies in territory in which most people are afraid to go. They quickly gather whatever butterflies they can and bring them back to Japan to rear.
Some Japanese collectors take trips not nearly as legal and end up paying the price. A few collectors have spent more time than originally planned on excursions in India and China—getting thrown into prison for illegally collecting butterflies and trying to sneak their contraband out of the country. Those who make it home have more than great adventures to tell. They sell their booty on the Internet for high prices. Some hybrid butterflies go for sixty thousand dollars or more. “That kind of money doesn’t even raise an eyebrow,” states dealer Greg Lewallen.
Then there are those who prefer to stay home and have others do the footwork for them. Their only requirement is that specimens be flawless. One private collector paid a group of able young catchers to parachute onto a South Pacific island and stealthily gather endangered butterflies for him.
Butterfly collectors with the financial means will do whatever is necessary to obtain the specimens they want. For some, it’s the equivalent of collecting a Renoir or Van Gogh. Butterflies and bugs are considered high-end art. For others, it’s more like stamp collecting. Dealers know this and will go to extreme lengths to satisfy their customers’ appetite. Rumor has it that Kojima found the largest rhinoceros beetle of its kind and sold it to a Japanese collector. The man not only paid one hundred thousand dollars for the bug, he flew to Ecuador and met with Kojima to take possession of it.
In Japan, bugs are more than just a cultural phenomenon. They’ve become true status symbols. Stores in Tokyo are dedicated solely to selling live bugs along with all of their accoutrements. Finding a dealer can prove to be a bit trickier. They tend to be elusive due to the pricey treasure trove that they keep in stock.
A butterfly dealer in Tokyo is one such man. Though well known, he still manages to keep a low profile. His office consists of twin three-room apartments lined floor to ceiling with a filing system of slim maroon boxes. Each is filled to the brim with butterflies and moths, many of which are Appendix II species. Twenty thousand additional insects are added to his stash every month, having been gathered from hard-to-get-to places such as Papua New Guinea and Myanmar. All this comprises only a third of what he actually has in stock. The rest are kept under lock and key in a nearby warehouse.
He recently planned to travel to Tibet in search of a butterfly as elusive as Shangri-la, mainly because it’s believed to be nearly extinct. The dealer will train and pay locals to continue the quest once he leaves. The butterfly will be worth a fortune if it’s ever found. The man has already been jailed once in India.
Still other dealers have been run out of villages in Colombia and bushwhacked by natives in Irian Jaya. They take their lives in their hands on their butterfly-collecting trips. Everything they come up against has either a fang or a thorn in it. If not that, then they have bows and arrows.
The voracious demand has given rise to everything from hair-raising helicopter rides in Russia to ensnare mountaintop butterflies to poaching gangs that roam Central Asia. In each case, the butterfly’s location remains a tightly guarded commercial secret. At times warlords and drug smugglers are involved in the mix. There’s even a woman who controls all the street vendors selling bugs and butterflies in Thailand.
“She’s the mama-san, and you do not mess with her,” reveals collector and dealer Ken Denton, professionally known as “the Butterfly Man.” “If you go into the wrong areas over there and try to open a butterfly stand, they trash your product and run you out of business.” You know you’ve reached her abode when you arrive at a gated palace with satellite dishes and a battalion of Mercedeses parked in front along with a troop of armed guards.
“There are people who can get bugs out of any region of the world, out of any national park, out of any forbidden valley,” confirms Brent Karner, associate manager of Entomological Exhibits at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. “If you have the money, and want it, you can get it tomorrow. ‘The Insect mafia’ is certainly a good term for them.”
Kojima also collected bugs as a child. But unlike the other little boys, he didn’t keep them as pets. Instead, he immediately killed them. That way they remained perfect specimens.
Young Yoshi was free to indulge in whatever hobbies he liked, since he came from a family of means. The Kojimas prepared kintoki beans in the back of their home each day and sold them to restaurants and for bento boxes. The business flourished, and it’s the same large house in which Kojima lives today.
His father was also a well-known butterfly collector and taught Yoshi everything he knew. The boy proved to be an apt pupil, and his reputation quickly grew. He was invited to attend a prominent Kyoto high school famous for its entomology club. He became the star pupil, only to clash with other students after a year and promptly drop out. From the beginning, he never played well with others. He then moved on to his next passion. He transferred to northern Japan and took skiing lessons.
Kojima participated in high-speed slalom races while attending Osaka University. He proved nearly good enough to make the 1971 Japanese Olympic ski team as an alternate. But he had to pay part of his way. He did that by working part-time at his uncle’s antiques shop during high school and college.
Kojima bragged of having met his future father-in-law there, a rich American with a passion for Japanese antiques. His family had founded a big oil company that also happened to own a few banks. Charles Hanson soon began to make frequent trips to Kyoto to furnish his homes but mainly to spend time with Kojima, who quickly learned to enjoy the high life.
Kojima graduated from university with an entomology degree and, true to form, decided he no longer wanted to ski. He dropped the sport the day he left college. But then, it would have been difficult to find ski slopes in his new Hawaiian home.
Kojima had befriended a Mormon elder serving in Kyoto and, for a while, even became a Mormon himself. The man was then assigned to Hawaii for gospel work and invited Kojima to fly over for a visit. The plan was that Kojima would attend a summer course at the University of Hawaii to learn English. He packed his belongings, waved sayonara, and took off for Oahu, though he never bothered to attend the university. Instead, he quickly landed a job through a Japanese friend at a convenience store in Waikiki. The pay was lousy but Kojima soon found a way to remedy that.
A few representatives of the yakuza came into the shop one day and approached Kojima for assistance. They’d recently expanded their business and had begun making movies in Oahu. The problem was the subject matter. The films they made were more Yuki Does Tokyo than Bambi. That was fine and dandy in the United States, but fully visible hard-core action pornography is taboo in Japan. What was a group of enterprising new filmmakers to do? They knew their eight-millimeter movies would be a big hit on the Japanese black market. The trick was how to sneak their films into the country. Could Kojima possibly help them? They’d gladly pay for his time and trouble.
Being a natural entrepreneur, Kojima pondered it for a while and came up with an ingenious plan.
The shop sold large boxes of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts. It didn’t take Kojima long to realize how else they could be used. He carefully opened one end of the cellophane wrapper, removed the box, and ate all of its contents. Then he cleverly replaced the candy with two of the movies and slid the box back into its transparent shroud. The weight of the film proved to be almost exactly the same as that of the nuts. Kojima seamlessly ironed the cellophane closed, and voilà! The problem for organized crime had been solved.
The yakuza couldn’t have been happier with his scheme as they proceeded to rack up air miles between Hawaii and Japan. They always transported filled boxes of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts inside their shopping bags, and every trip proved to be lucrative. The films sold on the Japanese black market for a thousand dollars a pop. The plan worked for three years, until Customs finally caught on that not all the yakuza in Japan could have that much of a sweet tooth. By then, Kojima had not only learned the joys of smuggling, he’d bought a seventy-thousand-dollar condo in Oahu with his share of the proceeds. He claimed to have sold it a few years later for one million dollars. Kojima was Donald Trump and Wile E. Coyote rolled into one.
He was flying high enough to visit his family in Kyoto on a regular basis. One trip found him seated next to the vice president of Pepsi Japan. The VP must have recognized Kojima’s unique talent and initiative. By the time the plane landed, Kojima had been offered a job. He was invited to manage Pepsi Japan’s new discount travel agency for its employees.
Kojima moved back to Japan, where he learned the business from the ground up. The agency soon outgrew its one-room office and in almost no time occupied an entire floor. But Kojima was never satisfied with doing just one thing for very long. In addition, he began selling antiques to foreign dignitaries out of his apartment in the Roppongi district of Tokyo.
Roppongi is an area infamous for its risqué shops, strip joints, dance halls, and sex clubs. It’s the place to go to enjoy the kinkiest in adult toys, porn magazines and videos, and S&M gear. Kojima spent his evenings dabbling in all that Roppongi had to offer, as well as entertaining beautiful European models both male and female. But he always reserved vacations to be spent with his future father-in-law.
The two men took excursions together and experienced the pleasures of Italy, Spain, Germany, and France. Kojima was even flown to his father-in-law’s house and invited to live with him there. He stayed for two months, hated the place, packed his bags, and returned to Japan. The next proposal was that the men reside together in Los Angeles. Kojima agreed but only if he could start his own discount travel agency specifically targeted at Japanese travelers. His father-in-law helped make the arrangements, and Jet Sky Travel was born. Kojima would later claim that his business had a branch office in Tokyo with twenty employees and another in Hong Kong with seventy associates, as well as the main office in Los Angeles, where six hired hands worked for him.
Kojima was on a roll and life couldn’t have been better.