The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo by Ian Jared Miller (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo by Ian Jared Miller James R. Bartholomew (bio) The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo. By Ian Jared Miller. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2013. xxviii, 322 pages. $65.00, cloth; $65.00, E-book. While reading Ian Miller’s book, I was reminded of the intellectual trajectory that Emile Durkheim traversed more than a century ago as he engaged the question of whether institutional factors or cognitive factors are primarily responsible for most human action. At the Sorbonne, his defense of the dissertation stimulated lively discussion among those present partly because he so strongly emphasized the causal role of institutions. This dissertation, [End Page 158] The Division of Labor in Society, appeared as his first book and set the tone for all that followed. It is quite striking, therefore, to observe that in his last and greatest contribution to the history of social thought, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, he showed a strong preference for the primacy of cognitive factors.1 While Durkheim’s engagement with this issue spanned a lifetime of reading and publication, in Ian Miller’s case the same tension is apparent within a single work. This observation is not intended as a criticism. Miller deserves commendation for his delineation of the range of factors that account for the founding of the Tokyo Zoo and its particular evolution. Miller’s book rests primarily on two major concepts. One is the notion of the “Anthropocene.” The other is the idea of “ecological modernity.” Anthropocene is an idea proposed by one of the 1995 Nobel laureates in chemistry, Paul Crutzen, famed for his investigation of the earth’s ozone layer. Crutzen has argued that human activity is now so large a factor in the earth’s climate and physical well-being as to warrant its own label, equal in significance to earlier descriptors, the Holocene, Miocene, and Pleistocene. Even if not every expert is inclined to go quite this far, global warming and related phenomena are now widely recognized as a fundamental reality. Whether “ecological modernity” enjoys the same status is not so clear. The idea here is that human beings and other members of the animal kingdom do not, for the most part, interact on a regular basis in the same way that so many did in earlier centuries. One thus recognizes not only a conceptual but, equally important, a behavioral division between the two, despite the prominence of Darwinian evolution as an explanatory paradigm for both. Miller takes up each of these themes in his discussion of the Tokyo Zoo and its history. Founded in 1882, Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo found itself buffeted and shaped by powerful institutional forces that permeated Japanese politics and social affairs—the British Navy, the U.S. Navy, later the Imperial Japanese Army, ending in the catastrophes of war with China, Great Britain, and the United States. Yet in his account of the history of the zoo, Miller shows that cognitive factors were just as important in its formation. One of them predated the Meiji Restoration, namely, the Honzōgaku movement in materia medica and natural history initiated by Udagawa Yōan during the early nineteenth century. Udagawa’s efforts introduced to Japan the taxonomic scheme for living things developed by the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné, who had prepared this schema in the 1730s. Following the Restoration, beginning in the 1870s, evolutionary theory hit Japan with every bit as large an impact [End Page 159] as it did in the United States and Europe. Based on the important work of Clinton Godart at the University of Southern California, we can no longer take seriously the one-time claim that Darwinism was minimally disruptive in Japan because of Christianity’s weakness there.2 While the exhibition of animals is not new, zoological gardens as such are a modern phenomenon. The zoo in Paris seems to have been the first institution of its kind, though founded in 1793 at a tumultuous moment in French history. London’s Regent Park Zoo was next, created in 1828. Berlin’s zoo dates...