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

摘要

The zoo has recently become an important site for examining the construction (and destruction) of the so-called natural world. The bulk of critical zoo studies have focused on Western Europe, both the birthplace of the modern zoo and the center of the zoo industry until World War Ⅱ. Theoretically rich and interdisciplinary in design, Ian Jared Miller's The Nature of the Beasts expands the geographic scope of zoo history by charting the rise, fall, and reemergence of the first modern zoo in East Asia, the Ueno Imperial Zoological Gardens, founded in Tokyo in 1882. Beyond narrating the history of the zoo itself, Miller's book aims at a more ambitious goal: to trace the development of Japan's "ecological modernity," the culture of "intellectual separation and social transformation" that came to define the nation's fraught relationship to non-human animals (p. 3).