The Nature of the Beasts

It is widely known that such Western institutions as the museum, the university, and the penitentiary shaped Japans emergence as a modern nation-state. Less commonly recognized is the role played by the distinctly hybrid institutionat once museum, laboratory, and prisonof the zoological garden. In this eye-opening study of Japans first modern zoo, Tokyos Ueno Imperial Zoological Gardens, opened in 1882, Ian Jared Miller offers a refreshingly unconventional narrative of Japans 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 nations capitalan institutional marker of national accomplishmentbut 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 Japans unraveling and subsequent Allied occupation. Today it remains one of Japans 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 planets resources.