The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo (Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes)

The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo (Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes)

Ian Jared Miller

Language: English

Pages: 352

ISBN: 0520271866

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


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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Day (Aiba no hi), which took place on April 7, was perhaps the most impressive display of ideological horse power during the war. Celebrations took place throughout the empire. The national Buddhist Union (Bukkyo Rengo) mobilized all fifty-six of Japan’s major Buddhist sects to host China Incident War Horse Festivals at thousands of temples, large and small, in Japan proper and overseas. As with the festivals at Ueno Zoo, the centerpiece of the program was the mourning of the nation’s animal war

young women from the capital’s women’s colleges, and a selection of boys and girls from the Tokyo school system.12 Once inside the tent, the group was welcomed by Abbot Omori and asked to sit quietly as the monks began to intone a sutra in memory of zoo animals “sacrificed to the critical war situation” ( jikyoku sutemi dobutsu). As the monks solemnly read the sutra and dozens of news reporters took notes, one person after another moved forward to offer incense and bow before a funerary tablet

Massacre | 145 On August 16, 1943, Koga and Fukuda were called to Park Commissioner Inoshita’s office where they were told that the big game (moju) in the zoo’s collection were to be killed under orders of strict secrecy. The killings began the following night. Koga and Fukuda each later recalled that, though saddened, they were not surprised by the decision to kill certain zoo animals. What surprised them were the urgency of the orders and their own lack of agency in the process. Neither Koga

were dead. The elephants remained The Great Zoo Massacre | 157 alive for well over two weeks after Abbot Omori and his monks sanctified their deaths.72 When firm orders arrived demanding that the pair of female elephants be killed, keepers began to explore ways to put the animals to death. They set about trying to poison the pair. When even the tender skin behind the animals’ ears proved too thick for needle injections of cyanide and strychnine, keepers saturated potatoes with massive doses

pervasive and intentional The Children’s Zoo | 169 absence of empire is easily ignored in institutions less overtly associated with Japan’s imperial project, but it cannot be dismissed at the zoological gardens, where decolonization played out in the concrete work of reconstruction.16 The specific history of the zoological gardens offers us a means of addressing the more general problem of decolonization under occupation and illustrates how Japan’s well-known history of postwar redevelopment

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