Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. A group of young boys, a shipwreck, a deserted island.
In William Golding's nineteen fifty four novel The Lord of the Flies, these are the ingredients for Disaster, A harrowing cautionary tale about what happens to our humanity when we are removed from society's rules. But, as six Tonguan schoolboys discovered, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. On September eleven of nineteen sixty six, Australian fisherman Peter Warner was sailing in the South Pacific when he spotted a tiny island in
the distance. Now this wasn't unusual. This island called Atah was marked on his map. What was unusual was that the uninhabited island had large scorch marks in the green vegetation covering it. As he drew closer, he began to hear shouts coming from the island, and then one of his crew called out someone was swimming toward them. The young boy who arrived at their ship was covered in dirt,
with long hair, stiff with salt. He looked like he'd been living alone in the wilderness for years, so it was surprising when he spoke in polite boarding school English. His name, he said, was Stephen, and he and his five friends had been stranded on Ata for fifteen months. A year earlier, in June of nineteen sixty five, Stephen and his friends had been students at a boarding school in Nukuwa Lofa, the capital on the island nation of Tonga.
The sixteenage boys named Stephen, Luke, Sioni, David, Colo and Mano were all of their tiny island and yearned for adventure, so they came up with a plan. They would steal a fishing boat and sail for Fiji, five hundred miles away to finally see some of the world. Like most teenage plans, this one wasn't very well thought out. The six boys, armed with very few supplies and no compass or map, took the boat one night and set out on their adventure. Just as the lights of their town
faded in the distance, a storm set in. The boys lost their anchor and the winds ripped through their sail, setting them adrift on the ocean. Finally, after eight days, they sighted a smudge on the horizon. They finally had found land, the deserted island of Ata. Mano was the first to set foot on land. He was so weak he could only crawl when he reached it, But as he realized that he'd found safety, he recalled that he felt more alive than he had ever before. One ordeal
was over, but another had just begun. The first weeks on the island were all about survival. The boys, weakened by their journey in the boat, caught birds and found their eggs in a them raw. They also discovered that the island was small, perhaps a four hour walk from end to end, and they relocated to a grove of
coconut palms. They collected rain water in leaves and gathered papaya and coconuts, slowly rebuilding their strength, but still they were unable to rub sticks together hard or fast enough to build a fire. It took them three months before they finally made a spark, but they celebrated with their first hot meal. Since their adventure began weak as they were, they still focused on finding a way home. They quickly
found sailing was not an option. When they set a raft that they had built out into the water, they couldn't get past the reef, so the boys settled in for a long wait for rescue. Life on the island was surprisingly orderly too. The six castaways took turns keeping watch for ships, maintaining the fire, and building and repairing a woven palm frond shelter. The boys even found time
for fun on the island. They built a rudimentary bench press and weights out of sticks and rocks, and one of them even salvage steel rings to make a ukulele. And to deal with disputes, the group implemented a cool down rule. Any people fighting would be separated during the day, then the whole group would talk over the problem together at nights before saying their prayers. And the boys lasted like this for fifteen whole months, making the best of
island life and dreaming of home. And then one day, when a passing cruise ship seemed close enough to see them, they lifted a signal fire on top of the island. The ship sailed on, but the fire burned through the brush, leaving dark, ugly patches in the uniform green veiling the island. And this is what Peter Warner saw A week later when he finally found the boys. From aboard his boat, Peter radioed Nukua Lofa, telling them that he had found
six teenage boys. Moments later, a breathless voice replied their families had given them up for dead. They'd even had funerals for them. If these were the six missing boys, then this was a miracle. Peter Warner sailed back with the six boys to Tonga, where they were finally able to see their families after more than a year away. After the boys had recovered, Peter hired them as crew on one of his fishing boats, and this way Peter made sure that the boys could still see the world
without being left high and dry. His name was Satoshi Tajiri, and in the late nineteen sixties, he was a young kid growing up in the rural outskirts of Tokyo, A quiet misfit who struggled to fit in. He loves spending time alone outdoors, chopping through the woods, rice paddies, and streams that surrounded his home. He fell in love with the local wildlife and soon developed a passion that would change the course of his life and the world forever.
That passion bug collecting. If it sounds like an unusual hobby for a young boy, then you're most likely coming from a Western perspective. Especially in the US, we tend to think of insects as creepy, gross, and sometimes even dangerous, But bugs and insects have long been revered in Japan. This may be due to the influence of Shinto, Japan's traditional religion. In Shintoism, all aspects of nature deserve respect. Even a single river, stone or insect may be inhabited
by spirits called kami. We can see the reverence toward insects everywhere in Japanese culture, from art to literature. Beetle wrestling matches are frequently televised, and there's a massive bug catching supply industry catering to hobbyists. It's a time honored tradition for children to spend their summers searching for the most unique insect so they can take them home and raise them as pets. All of which is to say. It wasn't Shatoshi's hobby that was unusual, it was his
passion for it. Everything about insects fascinated him, from their odd appearance and the funny way they moved, to the fact that there always seemed to be more species to discover. He loved plotting new ways to catch them. For instance, he observed that beatles like sleeping under stones during the day, so he left a stone under a tree overnight. When he came back the next morning, the beatles were waiting for him. Eventually, Satoshi's passion for insects earned him a
bit of a reputation. The other kids started calling him doctor Bug. For a while, he thought that he would grow up to become an entomologist. But this isn't the story of a kid who followed his dreams and discovered a new species of caterpillar. Sadly, Satoshi's bug collecting days were numbered. During the nineteen seventies, Tokyo's urban sprawl continued
to push outward, eventually swallowing Satoshi's neighborhood. As forrests were replaced with skyscrapers and arcades, Insects and other wildlife became more rare, sights, but Satoshi was still just a kid finding his way in the world, and like many Japanese children, he found his interest shifting to a new subject like manga and video games. He was still as passionate and obsessive as ever, though, and when he was just seventeen, he created game Freak, a strategy magazine for gamers that
included cheat codes and other strategy tips. It was a very small operation. The magazine was handwritten and photo copied. The pages were staple together, and Satoshi distributed them by hand. Still, he found a hungry market, and for one issue he sold ten thousand copies. Pretty soon he was cutting classes to run his small business. His parents, though, were less impressed. They thought their son was a delinquent who had lost his mind to video games, but Satoshi stuck with it.
At the time he was twenty five, he learned to code and was toying with turning Game Freak into a video game company. That year, inspiration struck when Satoshi encountered Nintendo's new game Boy. What made this handheld interesting was the fact that you could connect it to another system, allowing players to compete or swap data back and forth.
As he held the game boy, Satoshi suddenly envisioned the data as insects scurrying from one player's game to another, and instantly an idea wormed its way into Satoshi's mind, and when he sat down to work on his new game, he found himself thinking back on those summer days before he set foot in an arcade. He realized that the world he'd grown up in was now gone, but maybe, just maybe he could still recapture the feeling that he
had gotten chopping through the woods searching for insects. Drawing from his childhood hobby, Satoshi put together a pitch for a game called Capsule Monsters, which he managed to sell to Nintendo. It took six years to actually finish the game, and by the time it was released, the name had changed. You've probably heard of it too. Satoshi created the first Pokemon game. Today, the series is worth ninety two billion dollars, making it the highest grossing media franchise of all time.
I didn't misspeak. Satoshi's creation isn't just the best selling video game series. It's the single most lucrative ip of any kind, Bigger than Star Wars or Harry Potter or the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Mickey Mouse, and all because of a boy who loved to catch bugs. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about
the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.