The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo

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 mo...