Palm trees grow wild across Banyuwangi, on the eastern tip of Indonesia's Java island, and few houses there use air conditioning. The air indoors is usually warm and sticky. In one house with an imposing gate, a single room is cold enough to raise goosebumps.
The room smells of fermented fruit. Plastic cases small enough to sit in a palm are stacked past head height, thousands of them, and a constant rustling and squeaking comes from the pile. Inside, dark, glossy shapes move about.
The insects are beetles, collected in Indonesia for the Japanese market, the Asahi Shimbun reported. Buyers in Japan pay for exotic pets, and the trade that supplies them runs through rooms like this one, chilled to keep the animals alive before they travel.
A trade with costs abroad
Japan's appetite for exotic insects is met by collectors working in the forests of Southeast Asia. The animals are caught in the wild, held in conditions built to mimic neither the forest nor the home, and shipped. What the trade takes from those forests is not counted in the price paid in Japan.
The Asahi Shimbun reported that the room in Banyuwangi held several thousand cases. It did not say how many beetles that amounts to, where they were bound, or who runs the operation.