Book ID: CBB001420333

The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo (2013)

unapi

Miller, Ian Jared (Author)


University of California Press


Publication Date: 2013
Physical Details: xxvii + 322 pp.; ill.; bibl.; index
Language: English

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.

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Reviewed By

Review Barbara Ambros (2017) Review of "The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo". East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (pp. 159-163). unapi

Review Lisa Onaga (2015) Review of "The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo". East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (pp. 225-227). unapi

Review Onaga, Lisa (2015) Review of "The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo". East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (pp. 225-227). unapi

Review Kinder, John M. (2014) Review of "The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo". Environmental History (pp. 573-574). unapi

Review Low, Morris (2014) Review of "The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 656-657). unapi

Review Donahue, Jesse (2014) Review of "The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo". American Historical Review (p. 1243). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001420333/

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Authors & Contributors
Rosenberg, Gary D.
Mathias Harzhauser
Richard K. Olsson
Erika Gorder
A.J. Blandford
Kathleen Davidson
Concepts
Museums
Natural history
Science and society
Popularization
Paleontology
Geology
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
21st century
20th century, early
18th century
Early modern
Places
Great Britain
United States
France
Europe
Australia
Central Asia
Institutions
American Museum of Natural History
California Academy of Sciences
Zoologischer Garten Berlin
Rutgers University
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