In recent years, research focusing on the relationship between animals and humans, or more precisely, the meaning and appropriation of animals in the human world, has made considerable contributions to the field of Japanese studies. While some of this research deals with animals in ritual, religion, or folk tales, other studies broaden our understanding of the social and cultural history of modern Japan in more general ways. Ian Miller's The Nature of the Beasts is one of these works and a most valuable complement to other monographs that tackle fundamental issues of modern Japan by focusing on the relationship between human and nonhuman animals in society and culture. Ian Miller has already contributed to the pioneering volume JAPANimals,Footnote ³ introducing the Ueno Zoo in early twentieth-century Japan as a space where nation and empire were staged. In the monograph under review here, Miller not only narrates a history of the most famous zoological garden in Japan, which was also the very first modern zoo in East Asia, but also provides a highly interesting supplement to the history of culture, mentalities, and everyday life in modern Japan.

A key term that is necessary to understand Miller's approach is “ecological modernity,” which aims to overcome the conventional dualism, or rather antagonism, between “nature” and “modernity.” Miller wants “to think beyond the simple juxtaposition of nature and society given form by the zoo and other institutions” and “assumes that … modernization meant, not the physical separation of nature from society, but their increasingly rapid interpenetration” (p. 3). Obviously then, Miller's perspective on the modern world is informed by Paul Crutzen's idea of the Anthropocene, defined as an “age when human influence has become so pervasive that it has overtaken geophysical factors as the dominant driver of the earth's climate and ecology” (p. 8). While this phenomenon of human ecological impact has become so overbearing in late modernity that Crutzen's hypothesis seems to be almost self-evident today, it needs to be pointed out that this process in some parts of the world was started centuries ago. Thus, the term “ecological modernity” as applied here also has the potential to broadly reevaluate the emergence of early modern and modern Japan as one example of “Anthropocenic” developments in world history.

The Nature of the Beasts is divided into three parts with two chapters each that narrate the history of Ueno Zoological Garden in a chronological fashion. Simultaneously, each part focuses on a particular issue of intellectual or public discourse characteristic of different phases of Japan's modern history.

Given its fundamental meaning for the intellectual agenda of the early Meiji years, it is not surprising that the first part, entitled “The Nature of Civilization,” traces the origins of animal exhibitions in the nineteenth century to scholars of honzōgaku and their interest in better understanding the natural world. In a fascinating contribution to Meiji intellectual history, Miller underscores the fact that, for these and later scholars of biology, Western culture was a “culture defined … through the work of exhibition” (p. 58) and that Perry's arrival did not signal the beginning of the display of animals in Japan. Moreover, in these chapters the monograph makes a fine contribution to the institution of the zoo from the perspective of global history: As Harriet Ritvo points out in her foreword, the “modern zoo may have been born in London, Paris, and Vienna, but it was an idea – or an institution – whose time had obviously come” (p. xvii). Thus, instead of the conventional hierarchy implied in the notion of Japan “learning from the West,” Miller's narrative emphasizes how the institution of the zoo was formed globally in culturally different spheres. Not surprisingly, then, Japanese scientists and scholars “were often reading the same texts at the same time as their colleagues in Boston, London, and Berlin” (p. 56).

The second part focuses in detail on the Ueno Zoo as an institution that became increasingly entangled in the “Culture of Total War.” While one chapter narrates the history of military animals (in particular horses, but also dogs and doves) and their display at Ueno, the other one analyzes one of the more bizarre events in wartime Japan. In gruesome detail, Miller explores the “Great Zoo Massacre” that took place in the summer of 1943, a term that denotes “the systematic slaughter of the garden's most famous and valuable animals” (p. 120). In this longest and most spectacular chapter of the book, Miller convincingly argues that by annihilating “the zoo's symbolic society,” leaders of wartime Japan set an example that foreshadowed things to come: they “used the spectacular charisma of the garden's animals and the ritual mechanism of animal propitiation to promote a cult of martyrdom on the home front” (p. 121).

The third part, entitled “After Empire,” analyzes two important phases in the postwar history of the zoo. “The Children's Zoo: Elephant Ambassadors and Other Creatures of the Allied Occupation” focuses on the late 1940s and early post-occupation years, a time when the zoo once again became one of the most popular places to go for Japanese families. The next chapter looks at one of the most prominent inhabitants of Ueno Zoo in more recent times. In “Pandas in the Anthropocene: Japan's ‘Panda Boom’ and the Limits of Ecological Modernity,” Miller explores the advent of the pandas in the context of cultural diplomacy in Japan-China relations. Moreover, in his analysis of biopolitics involving the breeding of pandas at Ueno, Miller highlights the “interplay between representation and the natural world within the zoological gardens,” referring to the famous statement by John Berger that animals on display in the zoo “constitute a living monument to their own disappearance” (p. 229).

While not a contribution to animal studies in a strict sense, this meticulously researched book addresses major issues of Japan's modern history in fascinating detail. Focusing on the role and representation of nonhuman animals in one of the most popular institutions of modern Japan lends a fresh, innovative, and very much-needed perspective to our understanding of this history. In more general terms, this book is also a timely contribution to the history of ecological modernity in Japan and East Asia. As such, The Nature of the Beasts should be required reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of modern Japanese and global or comparative history as well as for those interested in the interaction of human and nonhuman animals from a global perspective.