The Nature of the Beasts : Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo Paperback / softback

by Ian Jared Miller

Part of the Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes series

Paperback / softback

Out of stock

Description

It is widely known that such Western institutions as the museum, the university, and the penitentiary shaped Japanâ€™s emergence as a modern nation-state. Less commonly recognized is the role played by the distinctly hybrid institutionâ€”at once museum, laboratory, and prisonâ€”of the zoological garden. In this eye-opening study of Japanâ€™s first modern zoo, Tokyoâ€™s Ueno Imperial Zoological Gardens, opened in 1882, Ian Jared Miller offers a refreshingly unconventional narrative of Japanâ€™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 nationâ€™s capitalâ€”an institutional marker of national accomplishmentâ€”but also as a site for the propagation of a new â€œnaturalâ€ 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 Japanâ€™s unraveling and subsequent Allied occupation. Today it remains one of Japanâ€™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 planetâ€™s resources.