A01=Ian Jared Miller
A23=Harriet Ritvo
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Ian Jared Miller
automatic-update
books about the environment
books for history lovers
books for reluctant readers
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HBJF
Category=HBLL
Category=HBLW
Category=HBTQ
Category=NHF
Category=NHTQ
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
east asian history
easy to read
engaging
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
gifts for friends
global history
historical novels
history and politics
humans and natural environment
imperial zoological gardens
japanese culture
japanese empire
japanese history
japanese politics
japanese zoos
japans emergence into the world
Language_English
leisure reads
modernization of japan
natural environment
PA=Available
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
rapid modernization
shaping japan
softlaunch
vacation books
zoology
Product details
- ISBN 9780520377523
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 05 Jan 2021
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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.
Ian Jared Miller teaches Japanese history at Harvard University.
