THE NATURE OF THE BEASTS: EMPIRE AND EXHIBITION AT THE TOKYO IMPERIAL ZOO

0
454

Going to the zoo has become such an ordinary ritual that we might wonder at a person who has never had the chance to marvel at the dexterity of an elephant’s trunk or admire the spotted slope of a giraffe’s neck. Our interactions and familiarity with zoo animals come under great scrutiny in this study, which focuses on how the act of going to the zoomanipulated the politics of looking at animals as it wasmade into a feature of the civilized, self-governing state. Centered on the history of the first public zoological garden to open outside of Europe and North America, The Nature of the Beasts decodes the Ueno Zoological Garden by focusing on its original incarnation, the Tokyo Imperial Zoo, established in 1882. Ian Jared Miller refers to this zoo as an “anthropological machine” (29) that is today deeply embedded within the urban landscape of Tokyo. The analysis of the machine is as much about how various animals were brought together during the course of the Japanese empire as it is about how humans were brought together within a built environment where looking at animals engendered certain kinds of social behavior, especially among children. Zoo politics were tumultuous during the rise and fall of the Japanese empire, aswell as during Japan’s struggle with wartime memory. AlthoughMiller’s analysis is based upon the rich archival trove of the Tokyo Zoological Park Society, this case of maintaining, governing, and exhibiting animal life may well have implications beyond the institution or the nation. The author certainly aimed to generate broader discussion of the existential tensions that arise when humans conceptualize themselves apart from nature in order to advance a project of modernity. Miller walks his readers through the iconic zoological garden in Tokyo using “ecological modernity,” referring to the paradoxical exercises that emerged from a nostalgic longing for unity with nature itself. That longing, of course, had resulted from the partition of reason that demarcated humans from animals. Efforts to deal with that serve as ameans tomake sense of the genealogy of the exhibitionary complex. Everything there—andmany other urban behaviors—grew from the assumption that only human beings possess reason. Miller