Miller, Ian J. - The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo

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... 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. Read more...

Ian J. Miller Professor of History   Miller is the author of The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo (University of California Press, 2013) and co-editor with Brett L. Walker and Julia Adeney Thomas of Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power (University of Hawaii Press, 2013). He is currently writing a book about energy and electricity in the making of modern Tokyo, Tokyo Electric: Japan in the Age of Global Energy.   Read More...