A chemical products company in Japan recently continued its decades-long tradition this week of holding a service in which it prayed for the souls of the bugs it killed in the name of science.
Earth Corporation, which makes a range of products including pesticides, conducted the Bug Memorial Service (虫供養; mushi-kuyou) at the Myodoji Buddhist temple in Ako, Hyogo Prefecture. The temple, erected in 1532 and belonging to the True Pure Land sect of Japanese Buddhism, is close to Earth’s factory in Ako.
Earth has held the ceremony for dead bugs for over 40 years as a way of paying respects to the innocent insect lives lost in the course of its research developing effective pesticides. At the ceremony, the company put pictures of nine insects, including bed bugs and cockroaches, on an altar, where a temple priest prayed for their lost lives.
“We say thank you to the bugs who gave themselves to our research,” Kobori Tomihiro, the company’s head of research, said.
The company’s factory Ako raises millions of bugs every year, which they use to test pesticides. It runs similar tests at facilities in Thailand and China. The company touts the ceremony as part of its overall strategy for ensuring animal welfare in the course of developing new products.
Religiously, Japan is dominated by a syncretic mix of the native Shinto religion and Buddhism. 48.5% of the nation professes a belief in Shinto, with another 46.4% identifying as Buddhist. (Only 1.1% identify as Christian.)
In Buddhism, all life – even insect life – is precious and shouldn’t be taken thoughtlessly, even if for a good cause, such as feeding oneself or stamping out disease. Many traditions hold that humans with particularly negative karma can find themselves reincarnated as insects in their quest to escape the cycle of death and rebirth.
In an interview in 2018 with Nikkei Business, a reporter asked Nagamatsu Takayuki, then assistant head of Research and Development at Earth, what he thought would happen if the company failed to hold the gratitude ceremony every year.
“If we didn’t do this, then every time we have work issues or accidents, or a drop in performance, or other negative situations like something happening to an employee’s family, I’d think we were bound to them by fate because we didn’t hold the memorial service. Once you hold one, if you skip it, you can’t have any peace. I guess that’s just how habits work in the Japanese soul.”
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