Asia: Local Studies/Global Themes, 27. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. xxvii, 322 pp. (Figures.) US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-520-271869.
“The zoological garden thrives in a culture of alienation that it helps to produce,” writes Ian Jared Miller in his impressive The Nature of Beasts (20). Miller deconstructs the history of Tokyo’s Ueno Park Imperial Zoological Garden—once the exhibitionary crown jewel of Japan’s Empire—in order to reveal the distinct human structures, institutions and values that have shaped Japan’s visions of the natural world from the 1880s through the post-World War II period. As Miller demonstrates, the Ueno Zoo and its exhibitions were an attempt by zoo administrators, scientists, colonial authorities, nationalist bureaucrats and Japanese patrons to seek “the wellspring of humanity” (20) in a modern world that was increasingly industrial, urban and disorienting. The zoo itself served as an institutional metaphor for a people and an empire seeking to achieve revitalization, but ultimately struggling to negotiate fantasies of nature with the complex realities of war, colonialism, national sacrifice and potential extinction.
In its struggle to make sense of the natural world as most zoos do, the Ueno Zoo was a product and producer of what Miller calls “ecological modernity”(2)—human beings’ attempts to situate themselves and non-human nature in the modern world. The first two chapters consider the establishment of the Ueno Zoo as a mechanism of evolutionary theory, modernization and imperialism that was designed to separate human beings from the rest of nature. In doing so, zoo administrators and scientists envisioned a broader mission of instructing the Japanese people of their own separateness and special mission in the world. By the early twentieth century, Japanese imperialism across East and Southeast Asia broadened the zoological horizons of the Japanese people by offering new exotic wildlife trophies for display. The Ueno Zoo did the important ideological work of empire by providing a colonial outlet for Japanese immersion in the natural and seemingly authentic. These distinct representations concealed the brutal realities of colonial war and reminded patrons of where Japan was gloriously headed, as was powerfully reflected in the name of a female giraffe born at the zoo in 1942: “South” (85).
The third and fourth chapters deal entirely with the zoo in wartime. In further blurring boundaries, the Ueno Zoo mobilized its animals for the purposes of total war as dogs, pigeons, elephants, camels, yaks and especially war horses were celebrated and memorialized. Animal displays projected patriotic messages of civilian production and soldierly duty. By far, the most powerful episode comes in chapter 4, when the Tokyo municipal government and zoo officials organized the 1943 massacre of dozens of zoo animals (a process occurring across Japan’s dwindling empire). Faced with increasing food shortages and security concerns over escaped animals during impending air raids, Tokyo and Ueno Zoo administrators utilized the excruciating killing of its popular animal residents as a potent ideological demonstration of national martyrdom in the face of imminent destruction. Through the killing and subsequent pageantry memorializing the animals, “the Great Zoo Massacre” offered a coded language to discuss the unthinkable issue of defeat. This traumatic event proved to be a moment of rupture in the zoo’s history as the full excesses of the war’s sacrifices sparked a move away from civilizational collapse and towards the gradual embrace of human redemption in the face of extinction. The final two chapters examine this transition in the context of the postwar zoo and how it became an institutional incarnation of postwar Japan itself. In a rejection of the nation’s recent past, Ueno embraced a children’s zoo to teach Japan’s postwar children lessons in productivity, social order, innocence and human compassion for animals. The Children’s Zoo embodied the broader pains of postwar trauma, normalizing relations with the United States, demilitarizing both humans and animals, and concealing Japan’s colonial past. Miller finishes by examining the more recent history of Ueno’s attempts to breed pandas. This process entailed the “panda diplomacy” of rebuilding ties with China, but it also revealed Japan’s latest phase of ecological modernity: enclosing the natural world for its own protection from human exploitation. As Miller demonstrates, ecological modernity has reached perhaps its most problematic stage. Ueno Zoo’s attempts to artificially reproduce threatened species as a cure for mass extinction have only highlighted the paradoxes of the very same modernity that originally fueled such a crisis.
In exploring the Ueno Zoo and broader Japanese imperial cultural attitudes towards the natural world, Miller offers a necessary non-Western history of such exhibitions alongside the other great histories of zoos, including Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate (Harvard University Press, 1987) and Nigel Rothfels’s Savages and Beasts (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Miller’s contribution, however, offers a fundamentally different framework for understanding zoos during the height of global imperialism. Prevailing narratives in recent Japanese environmental histories, as well as zoo histories more generally, emphasize decline: either the decline of humanity’s intimacy with the natural world or the decline of nature itself. As Miller argues, the Ueno Zoo, through its contributions to ecological modernity, offers a story neither of environmental decline, nor institutional progress, but rather a narrative of negotiations and contradictions through humans’ attempts to situate themselves in nature. In doing so, Miller presents one of the first major histories of zoos to be situated explicitly within the Anthropocene, a geological epoch typified by humanity’s impact on most aspects of life on Earth. By historicizing the Anthropocene through the story of Japan’s empire over nature, Miller successfully deploys cultural history as a mechanism for understanding the complex human behaviours and structures that have produced and impeded our full understanding of humanity’s place in nature, climate change and ongoing mass extinctions. 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.
Noah Cincinnati
Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale, USA