Japanese Invaders Hit the Delaware Valley

The Japanese Beetle and kudzu farm

Were the Japanese practicing their evil 1941 attack on America much earlier right here in Philadelphia and south Jersey? It certainly seemed that way.In 1876, the Japanese introduced a decorative plant called kudzu at the huge Centennial Exhibition that drew 10 million to Fairmount Park.

Then, in 1916 a shiny new insect was discovered at a Riverton, N.J., plant nursery. The bug arrived with imported plants from Japan. It was the Japanese beetle, capable of destroying farm crops, orchard, pasture even a golf course.

Herculean efforts by federal and state agencies to contain the Japanese beetle to a small area of southern, N.J., failed. Since 1916, the beetles have spread to every state east of the Mississippi.

Let’s first take a look at the “kudzu monster.” At the 1876 Centennial and at the 1883 New Orleans Exposition, the Japanese sold kudzu. It had nice flowers, grew quickly and was good to frame a front porch. It was also good feed for livestock.

It was in the 1930s that the government handed out free kudzu plants as ground cover to farmers to fight soil erosion. Many farmers went bust and abandoned their properties but the kudzu kept growing.

Though the kudzu was bad, the beetles were worse.  In late July 1923, the they swarmed across the Delaware River in huge numbers recorded in a long, detailed front-page story in the Inquirer.

Large Inquirer photos showed three men sitting around a bushel basket of corn in the Dock Street market picking out beetles. Another photo showed beetles all over a man’s clothes.

The nation was deadly serious about halting the beetles. One government entomologist had just returned from three years in Japan becoming an expert on the insect. And a Department of Agriculture lab was established in Riverton to test out way to exterminate the pest.

For a while New Jersey and the Philadelphia area was put under a “quarantine.” In order to ship out produce, fruit, cut flowers, sand or soil, every box and container was searched for beetles by more than 200 federal inspectors.

The government put out a list of plants the beetles liked to eat, including everything from asparagus to pussy willow. They munched on the leaves of most trees. The Philadelphia entomologist worried that Fairmount Park might provide a smorgasbord for the bugs.

The term “yellow peril” was used to describe the beetle invasion. One newspaper columnist said a “new sport among shoeshine boys on the Delaware River ferry boats was to pick off the Japanese beetles from Jersey commuters.”

The quarantine didn’t last long. Eventually a Japanese beetle trap was developed.

In 1931 a news story claimed that “530 million Japanese beetles were trapped and killed” in New Jersey. We wonder who was counting.