The Nature of the Beasts

Abstract

The pursuit of such power in modern Japan took one its most spectacular forms in the institution of Ueno Park Zoological Garden, East Asia's first modern zoo, which opened in 1882. The institution marshaled the animal world in the service of Japanese claims to "civilization" in the age of industry and empire. This book is about the Ueno Zoo and the culture that it helped to bring into being. It was a culture that I have chosen to call "ecological modernity," because it was so persistently concerned with Japan's place in the modern world, as well as the place of flora, fauna, and other natural products within that modernity. The central irony of this culture—which I trace over nearly two centuries—was that, even as it intensified the human exploitation of the natural world through industrialization and the market, it imagined "nature" to be elsewhere.

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