The Nature of The Beasts : Empire and Exhibition at The Tokyo Imperial Zoo / Ian Jared Miller ; foreword by Harriet Ritvo.

Print version record.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 285-322) and index.

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 study of Japan's first modern zoo, Tokyo's Ueno Imperial Zoological Gardens, opened in 1882, the author offers a refreshingly unconventional narrative of Japan's rapid modernization and changing relationship with the natural world.

Introduction : Japan's ecological modernity -- Japan's animal kingdom : the origins of ecological modernity and the birth of the zoo -- The dreamlife of imperialism : commerce, conquest, and the naturalization of ecological modernity -- Military animals : the zoological gardens and the culture of total war -- The great zoo massacre -- The children's zoo : elephant ambassadors and other creatures of the Allied occupation -- Pandas in the Anthropocene : Japan's "panda boom" and the limits of ecological modernity -- Epilogue : the sorrows of ecological modernity.

English.

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