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Putting the “Ew!” in Museum
The delicate white streamers suspended in a jar of liquid looked like wispy bits of tissue paper in front of their royal blue backdrop. They could have been brushstrokes from Japanese ink paintings, irregular and organic, beautiful according to the Zen aesthetic of imperfection in nature.
But these brushstrokes were parasites, Sparganum proliferum to be exact. Though these waterborne critters don’t disfigure their usual hosts of cats and dogs, when they infect humans the larvae form itchy, gravelly nodules right under the skin, giving a crunchy-peanut-butter look. And it gets worse: a larva can grow buds which then detach and migrate under the skin to make more. An adjacent photograph illustrated everyone’s nightmare of dermal moonscape with a clawlike branch erupting from one of the bumps. Poor host, I thought with a shiver. Home, sweet home, I imagined the larvae thinking.
At the Meguro Parasitological Museum in Tokyo there are many such examples where beauty and deformity seem to coexist. As the world’s only museum dedicated to parasites, it houses some 300 specimens, each individually displayed in formaldehyde, free from the intestines, lungs or scrota that once fed them. They come from many different hosts – dogs, cattle, fish, humans – for no living organism is immune from becoming home for something else. Though their lifestyle is inherently gross, I have to hand it to them. Without much in the way of gray matter, parasites have figured out how to get the rest of us to do the work so they can hunker down, sink their hooks in and live off the fat of the land.
The museum was founded in 1953 by Satoru Kanegai, a doctor who treated many patients suffering from parasites amid the poor sanitary conditions left after World War II. I’d read that it is something of a date destination for Japanese teens, though no young couples were there during my weekday morning visit. It was hard to imagine romance flourishing in the clinical environment of smooth glass cases and dry-mounted panels. Still, the shelves of slender preservative-filled jars at the center of the room did look somewhat like a demented bar serving infused vodkas, or perhaps mezcals soaking the maguey worm’s loopier cousins. After all, what could be more sociable than critters that simply can’t bear to live alone?
The most eye-popping stuff was upstairs. Take the color photo of the poor Japanese fellow with elephantiasis of the scrotum. His ballsack was so distended that it dwarfed his legs like a satanic overgrown chipotle chile. This is an extreme outcome of a condition called lymphatic filariasis, caused by the worm Wuchereria bancroft, which is transmitted by mosquitoes and lives in its host’s lymphatic vessels. Though humanitarian groups have been working toward eliminating filariasis over the past couple of decades, this disease still mars the lives of 120 million people in less-developed areas, one-third of whom become seriously incapacitated by the buildup of lymphatic fluid in their lower limbs.
Filariasis was enough of a scourge in old Japan to be depicted by the early nineteenth-century artist Katsushika Hokusai, most famous for his iconic “The Great Wave.” Next to the elephantiasis photo is a woodblock print of a similarly afflicted man wearing a traditional kimono. He is carrying his appendage in a sling suspended from a pole.
Easier to look at was a field notebook opened to finely detailed drawings of a variety of worms and their features in carefully observed close-up. These were abstract enough that I could appreciate their aesthetic qualities and forget that they were depicting things that wanted to eat me.
The most breathtaking, for those who prefer the beauty of hard and fast numbers, was the tapeworm – the 8.8-meter tapeworm, to be precise. Scrunched up like a radiator in its vertical case, it was too tall to capture in a single digital camera frame. Add to that monstrous length the ability to produce billions of eggs over a lifetime, and this foul segmented white strip won the prize for most impressive intestinal artifact on display. Just in case anyone was wondering how long 8.8 meters is, a fabric tape was hanging alongside, the sole interactive exhibit accessible to non-Japanese speakers. (For the record, 8.8 meters is a bit longer than a London bus.)
That particular tapeworm came embedded in a piece of raw trout, according to the English-language description in a guidebook at the gift shop. “Hmmm…we haven’t eaten any trout sushi this week, have we?” I asked my husband. We’d been tasting varieties of fish far beyond what’s usually available in stateside sushi restaurants. But actually I wasn’t too worried about stowaways – the fish served in sushi bars has been frozen during transport, which kills most common parasites.
The gift shop offered some slightly more appealing ways to take home parasite souvenirs, in the form of parasite jewelry. Most depicted the museum’s mascot, a fish parasite of the genus Diplozoon, related to the tapeworm. This little worm completes its life cycle when two larvae permanently fuse in the gills of a host fish, then mature into long, whiskerlike adults. The shop had a cartoonish pin featuring the Diplozoon union, each worm drawn with big anime eyes and a smiley mouth. There was also a delicate silvery rhodium-plated charm bracelet and even necklaces, where the fused pair resembled two crossed flames.
Sweet and romantic, as far as bloodsucker jewelry goes. Still, I took a pass. I’m not enough of a zoologist for their beauty to outweigh my disgust.
If you go
In Tokyo, it’s never a good idea to set out for an unknown destination without decent directions, even if you can speak some of the language. So I accept full blame for getting us lost on the way from the train station to the Meguro Parasitological Museum. (You could say my husband was just tagging along for the ride, har har.)
From Meguro station (on the Yamanote train line), walk out the west exit and along the major road Meguro Dori for about 15 minutes. Near a corner on your left you will see an eight-story, brown brick tower topped with a silver sign that says MPM. If you get nervous along the way, you can always stop and ask someone, “Sumimasen ga, mushi no myujiam wa doko desu ka?” The correct response will be some level of pointing along the road.
Meguro Parasitological Museum
4-1-1 Shimo Meguro, Meguro-ku, Tokyo.
Free admission. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily except for Mondays and holidays.
Also note that the upstairs gift shop does sell an English-language guidebook, which more serious visitors should pick up first. They also sell parasite-themed T-shirts and mobile phone cleaners.
