Synopses & Reviews
and#147;Brilliantly researched and refreshingly original, this study of the Ueno Zoo shows how the human world has been constituted in large part by its engagements with nature and animalsand#151;and, conversely, how the zoo reflects larger questions of modernity, desire, violence, and history. Nationalism, empire and colonialism, total war, consumerism, and the culture of capitalism, bio-power and necropolitics, raceand#151;readers will be challenged to think about these and other and#147;humanand#8221; concerns through the supposed garden of nature and animals.and#8221; and#151;Takashi Fujitani, Dr. David Chu Professor and Director in Asia Pacific Studies, University of Toronto
and#147;In a tumultuous history of the Tokyo Zoo as it has been intertwined with the history of the Japanese nation, Ian Miller reveals the zoo as a site for disciplining subjects and citizens, naturalizing empire, glorifying sacrifice during war, playing out geopolitical rivalries, and spurring mass consumerism. Theoretically sophisticated but accessible and thoroughly engaging, The Nature of the Beasts is an important contribution to our understandings of Japanand#8217;s modernization, imperialism, and relationship with the animal world."and#151;William M. Tsutsui, author of Japanese Popular Culture and Globalization
"Miller offers a unique vantage point onto Japan's modern experience. The Nature of the Beasts is deftly and poignantly written. The book is a real gem."and#151;Brett L. Walker, Regents Professor, Montana State University, Bozeman
"The Nature of the Beasts is at once critical, compassionate and profound. The Ueno zoo becomes a stage on which animals, people and nations act out the changing ecological drama of modernity. It is a drama in which we all play a part. We are touched with sorrow by the ritualized sacrifice of majestic animals played out in the culture of total war. This book is a deep reflection on the rise, fall, and transformation of an imperial power and its consequences for the lives of humans and nonhumans alike."and#151;Gregg Mitman, author of Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Film
"Ian Miller's compelling book on Japan's foremost zoo makes clear that the cages constructed for nonhuman animals ultimately circumscribe their human captors as well. Japan's modern history, its rise and fall as an imperial power and its postwar place in a world threatened by climate change, are all encapsulated in dramatic events at the Ueno zoological garden."and#151;Julia Adeney Thomas, author of Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology
Review
"A rich political and cultural history of modern Japan."
Review
"Books that invoke big thinkers' names abound, but few engage the ideas as profitably as this.and#160;The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japanand#160;is a magnificent work, erudite and sophisticated. This is the most stimulating work in the early modern field to appear in some time."
Review
andquot;Marcon boldly challenges the hoary notion that the disenchantment of the world through scientific investigation was unique to the West. Like their early modern European counterparts, Japanandrsquo;s honzogaku scholars systematically transformed natural ecosystems into discrete objects of analysis, manipulation, and control. This exciting study places Japanandrsquo;s independent scientific trajectory in the context of its growing commodity culture and professionalization of scholarship.andquot;
Review
"The Nature of Beasts is a critical intervention in global zoo, environmental and Japanese histories. It stands on its own as a fascinating and thoughtful history, but also provides opportunities for future scholarly exploration into patterns of human dominion over nature across the East Asian world."
Review
"This is a path-breaking contribution to the history of science, environmental history, and Japanese history."
Synopsis
Focusing on Tokyo's historic Ueno Zoo, Ian Miller shows how the facility played a critical role in legitimating Japan's project of imperial expansion in the public mind. Founded in 1882, the zoo served as one of the primary arenas of Japan's imperialist spectacle.
Synopsis
It is widely known that such Western institutions as the museum, the university, and the penitentiary shaped Japanand#8217;s emergence as a modern nation-state. Less commonly recognized is the role played by the distinctly hybrid institutionand#151;at once museum, laboratory, and prisonand#151;of the zoological garden. In this eye-opening study of Japanand#8217;s first modern zoo, Tokyoand#8217;s Ueno Imperial Zoological Gardens, opened in 1882, Ian Jared Miller offers a refreshingly unconventional narrative of Japanand#8217;s rapid modernization and changing relationship with the natural world. As the first zoological garden in the world not built under the sway of a Western imperial regime, the Ueno Zoo served not only as a staple attraction in the nationand#8217;s capitaland#151;an institutional marker of national accomplishmentand#151;but also as a site for the propagation of a new and#147;naturaland#8221; order that was scientifically verifiable and evolutionarily foreordained. As the Japanese empire grew, Ueno became one of the primary sites of imperialist spectacle, a microcosm of the empire that could be traveled in the course of a single day. The meaning of the zoo would change over the course of Imperial Japanand#8217;s unraveling and subsequent Allied occupation. Today it remains one of Japanand#8217;s most frequently visited places. But instead of empire in its classic political sense, it now bespeaks the ambivalent dominion of the human species over the natural environment, harkening back to its imperial roots even as it asks us to question our exploitation of the planetand#8217;s resources.
Synopsis
Between the early seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth century, the field of natural history in Japan separated itself from the discipline of medicine, produced knowledge that questioned the traditional religious and philosophical understandings of the world, developed into a system (called
honzogaku) that rivaled Western science in complexityandmdash;and then seemingly disappeared. Or did it? In
The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan, Federico Marcon recounts how Japanese scholars developed a sophisticated discipline of natural history analogous to Europeandrsquo;s but created independently, without direct influence, and argues convincingly that Japanese natural history succumbed to Western science not because of suppression and substitution, as scholars traditionally have contended, but by adaptation and transformation.
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;
The first book-length English-language study devoted to the important field of honzogaku, The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan will be an essential text for historians of Japanese and East Asian science, and a fascinating read for anyone interested in the development of science in the early modern era.
About the Author
Federico Marcon is assistant professor of Japanese history in the Department of History and the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University.
Table of Contents
Figures
Foreword by Harriet Ritvo
Acknowledgements
Note on Transliteration
INTRODUCTION
Japanand#8217;s Ecological Modernity
I. Animals in the Anthropocene
II. Ecological Modernity in Japan
III. The Natural World as Exhibition
PART ONE
The Nature of Civilization
CHAPTER ONE:
Japanand#8217;s Animal Kingdom: The Origins of Ecological Modernity and the Birth of the Zoo
I.and#160; Bringing Politics to Life
II.and#160; Sorting Animals Out in Meiji Japan
III.and#160; Animals in the Exhibitionary Complex
IV.and#160; The Ueno Zoo
V. Ishikawa Chiyomatsu and the Evolution of Exhibition
VI. Bigotand#8217;s Japan
CHAPTER TWO:
The Dreamlife of Imperialism: Commerce, Conquest, and the Naturalization of Ecological Modernity
I. The Dreamlife of Empire
II. The Nature of Empire
III. Nature Behind Glass
IV. Backstage at the Zoo
V. The Illusion of Liberty
VI. Imperial Trophies
VII. Imperial Nature
PART TWO
The Culture of Total War
CHAPTER THREE:
Military Animals: The Zoological Gardens and the Culture of Total War
I. Military Animals
II. Mobilizing the Animal World
III. The Eye of the Tiger
IV. Animal Soldiers
V. Horse Power
CHAPTER FOUR:and#160;
The Great Zoo Massacre
I. Tokyo, 1943
II. A Strange Sort of Ceremony
III. Mass-Mediated Sacrifice
IV. The Taxonomy of a Massacre
V. The Killing Floor
VI. And Then There Were Two
PART THREE
After Empire
CHAPTER FIVE:and#160;
The Childrenand#8217;s Zoo: Elephant Ambassadors and Other Creatures of the Allied Occupation
I. Bambi Goes to Tokyo
II. Empire After Empire
III. Neo-Colonial Potlatch
IV. and#147;Animal Kindergartenand#8221;
V. Occupied Japanand#8217;s Elephant Mania
VI. Elephant Ambassadors
CHAPTER SIX:and#160;
Pandas in the Anthropocene: Japanand#8217;s and#147;Panda Boomand#8221; and the Limits of Ecological Modernity
I. The and#147;Panda Boomand#8221;
II. The Science of Charisma
III. Panda Diplomacy
IV. and#147;Living Stuffed Animalsand#8221;
V. The Biotechnology of Cute
EPILOGUE:and#160;
The Sorrows of Ecological Modernity
Notes
Bibliography
Indext