The nature of the beasts : empire and exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo / / Ian Jared Miller ; foreword by Harriet Ritvo

• Autore: Miller Ian Jared <1970->
• Pubblicazione: Berkeley : , : University of California Press, , 2013; ©2013
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource : illustrations
• Disciplina: 590.52/135
• Soggetto topico: Zoos - Social aspects - Japan - History; Philosophy of nature - Japan - History; Nature and civilization - Japan - History
• Soggetto non controllato: books about the environment; books for history lovers; books for reluctant readers; east asian history; easy to read; engaging; 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; leisure reads; modernization of japan; natural environment; rapid modernization; shaping japan; vacation books; zoology
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Frontmatter -- Contents -- Figures -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Transliteration -- Introduction: Japan's Ecological Modernity -- Part One. The Nature of Civilization -- Part Two. The Culture of Total War -- Part Three. After Empire -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: 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.
• Titolo autorizzato: The nature of the beasts
• ISBN: 9780520952102; 9780520271869; 9780520377523
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Record Nr.: 9910779756603321
• Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II
• Serie: Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes.