Japanese with anime voice: episode67
Hello, I’m Sachi.
4 June is Insect Day. Osamu Tezuka is a very famous Japanese manga artist, and he proposed that 4 June should be a day to celebrate insects, with the aim of creating a town where insects can live.
Insect Day. When I used to work as a dispatcher on a construction site, I had a very good friend. He looked like a mascot and was a bit natural and cute. When I came to work on 4 June, he told me, ‘Sachan, today is Insect Day’. I thought it was just a play on words, so I just answered in a random way that it was, but when he said it was Insect Day, I heard laughter in the distance. I felt like everyone was laughing. Then later, one of the other kids who are close to me told me that this morning he told you that it was insect day, but that’s what she told everyone she heard on the radio before you came. He said they all laughed at him because he was telling me as if it was knowledge he had gained. If he were to say, He heard that today is insect day, it would sound as if it was information he got from someone else. But if he says it’s insect day, it sounds as if it’s knowledge he’s acquired himself. There are people who express themselves that way, aren’t there? Well, he was a natural, so he had the personality to laugh and be forgiven for saying so. Whenever I hear that 4 June is Insect Day, this episode comes to mind. It’s not so much the content of the episode that impresses me so much, but the fact that he speaks as if it’s his own opinion, something he’s received from other people.
But still, it’s about building a city where insects can live. When it comes to all living creatures, insects and reptiles fall into that category, but… But I’m not very good at them. Even ladybirds make me overreact when they fly by. But I also think butterflies are beautiful at first glance, but when I look at them closely I think they’re creepy, and I don’t like the way they fly so erratically. So I told my Argentinean friend that I don’t like all insects, whether they are butterflies or not. Then she said something interesting.
The world praises butterflies as beautiful and says that people who kill them are unbelievable. But when you kill a cockroach, they say you are a hero. People change their response just because they look beautiful or ugly. But you see all insects as the same, without judging them by their appearance. That’s something to admire. I’ve never had someone look at my dislike of insects from that point of view, so I was more interested in her sensitivity. It’s an interesting way of thinking.
Even I would like to be a little more tolerant of insects. I don’t know why I overreact so much. When I was in high school, I had a mysterious insect perched on my hand and it stung me. I was more surprised by the fact that an insect I had never seen before was attached to my body than by the fact that I had been stung, and my face turned pale. But the teacher didn’t know that, did they? She asked me if I was feeling sick or not, even though I was so pale. I was like, no, I was just too surprised by the insects. If I have such a fear of insects, when they get stuck on my clothes, I can’t even brush them off with my hands, so all I can do is make a lot of noise. I can’t get rid of the bugs when I make a fuss. It’s chaos all by itself. It’s really chaos.
One girl I knew said that she was relatively unperturbed by insects. She said it was because she grew up in a house where she couldn’t make a fuss about bugs. In other words, she lived in an old house, or in a house where insects were common. If you say it like that, it’s the same for me. Not only insects, but snakes, frogs and rats would come into the house. I never encountered any, but my mother told me that a stray cat was in the dining room before she knew it, and a civet jumped out from behind the chiller. I grew up in a house full of animal panics. But I didn’t develop any antibodies against them. Why is that?
