It was at night when I was making my bed in the bedroom. A small white moth had begun to fly around a light. I just knocked it down because of the filthiness. I did something terrible to the moth. However, just because it was a moth made me creepy and I attacked it with a newspaper. That reminds me, it was several days ago. I saw a white butterfly fluttering in the neighboring park. How graceful! I was fascinated by the scene for a while.
After fighting with the moth, I thought in the bed that why do people hate moths, on the other hand, they would love butterflies very much? When I was a kid, it was just around the time when fluorescent lamps were on the market. Some facilities called the light trap were installed beside the rice fields. It was an attempt to lure pests by the pale light and to get rid of them at night. People have disliked the moth so much. It is a big difference from a child writing a butterfly observation diary with pictures for his summer vacation homework.
That is why I tried to find out the difference between butterflies and moths. First, the wing of the butterfly is gorgeous, but that of the moth is sober. Next, the powders on the wings of the butterfly are hard to come off, while moths are easy to scatter. The body is slender in the former and thick in the latter. The antennae protruding from its head is like matchsticks in the former and is usually tapered off in the latter.
The behavior patterns of both are completely different. Butterflies are active in the daytime and moths appear on the stage at night. However, it is not that there are some night butterflies called yoru-no-cho which means a bar hostess. They are flashy and active at night. The light trap in Shinjuku Kabuki-cho is intended to lure people. Attracted guests rest their wings on a perch and try to immerse themselves in a temporary dream world. Of course, butterflies and moths rest on trees and grass. At that time, the butterfly stands with both wings closed, on the other hand, the moth gets its both wings down untidily.
So far, I have mainly compared the appearance of adults, and then I noticed the big difference in the stage from larva to adult. Both hatch from eggs to larvae called green caterpillars. They repeat molting several times and become pupas just before they finally become adults. At that time, the butterfly become a chrysalis as it is, but the moth makes a cocoon and becomes a pupa in it.
By the way, Eiichi Shibusawa is in the limelight now, but the protagonist of the shadow that supported his success is a type of disliked moth called the silk moth. The silk moth cocoons were the material for silk thread and led the Meiji Industrial Revolution and contributed to the modernization of Japan as a result. Even through the silk moth is only a type of moth, it is treated politely. How selfish with Japanese people. On the other hand, in Europe, it seems that there is almost no distinction between the butterfly and the moth.
[July 6, ’21 Yoshihiro Fujiwara］
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