Nature of the Beasts

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-0-520-27186-9
Verlag: University Of California Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 27, 352 Seiten, Cloth Over Boards, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 667 g

Reihe: Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes

It is widely known that such Western institutions as the museum, the university, and the penitentiary shaped Japan’s emergence as a modern nation-state. Less commonly recognized is the role played by the distinctly hybrid institution—at once museum, laboratory, and prison—of the zoological garden. In this eye-opening study of Japan’s first modern zoo, Tokyo’s Ueno Imperial Zoological Gardens, opened in 1882, Ian Jared Miller offers a refreshingly unconventional narrative of Japan’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 nation’s capital—an institutional marker of national accomplishment—but also as a site for the propagation of a new “natural” 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 Japan’s unraveling and subsequent Allied occupation. Today it remains one of Japan’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 planet’s resources.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Miller, Ian Jared

Weitere Mitwirkende

Ritvo, Harriet

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Figures

Foreword by Harriet Ritvo

Acknowledgements

Note on Transliteration

INTRODUCTION

Japan’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:

Japan’s Animal Kingdom: The Origins of Ecological Modernity and the Birth of the Zoo

I. Bringing Politics to Life

II. Sorting Animals Out in Meiji Japan

III. Animals in the Exhibitionary Complex

IV. The Ueno Zoo

V. Ishikawa Chiyomatsu and the Evolution of Exhibition

VI. Bigot’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:

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:

The Children’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. “Animal Kindergarten”

V. Occupied Japan’s Elephant Mania

VI. Elephant Ambassadors

CHAPTER SIX:

Pandas in the Anthropocene: Japan’s “Panda Boom” and the Limits of Ecological Modernity

I. The “Panda Boom”

II. The Science of Charisma

III. Panda Diplomacy

IV. “Living Stuffed Animals”

V. The Biotechnology of Cute

EPILOGUE:

The Sorrows of Ecological Modernity

Notes

Bibliography

Indext

Über Autor(innen)

Ian Jared Miller teaches Japanese history at Harvard University.