"JAPANimals exemplifies the intellectual ferment at the intersection of animal studies, environment research, and human history. The insightful introduction and nine essays, each on a separate species, engage us at every level. Religious and literary parables of nine-colored deer and serpent paramours meet with ecological studies of wild boar and climate change. Standard political and economic narratives are enriched, and sometimes overturned, by horses revealing the colonial nature of Hideyoshi's unification campaign, by exotic birds traded during the Tokugawa era, by dogs accompanying their European masters to Meiji Japan, and by captured wildlife displayed as the spoils of empire. Through its insistent attention to Japan's nonhuman majority from bugs to whales, JAPANimals delights, informs, and challenges our current species-centric approach to history."
—Julia Adeney Thomas, University of Notre Dame
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"In their edited volume on animal-human relationships, Pflugfelder and Walker significantly expand the horizon of Japanese studies. All essays collected here boldly challenge the way in which we have conceived Japanese history, literature, religion, art, and society and demonstrate numerous new possibilities to link these fields to ecology, geopolitics, and earth science. JAPANimals not only opens our eyes to Japan’s animal culture but provides a fresh perspective to better understand Japanese culture as a whole vis-à-vis other Asian cultures and that of the West."
—Ryuichi Abe, Harvard University
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"This bounteous but disquieting book shows us a variety of marvelous beasts getting snared not only by human nets but also within human conceptions. Animals get drawn up into how being ‘civilized' is represented, especially once Japan enters into power tangles with the West. Part of the beauty of beasts, however, lies in how they resist being fitted too easily within the ‘material' culture we humans assume we can totally control. Ironies abound. Via fascinating accounts of human interactions with deer, dogs, boars, birds, whales, and other fauna, this splendid book also subtly explores the ethical problem, expressed earlier in Japan's history but newly resurgent today, of our materializing of the nonhuman animal."
—William R. LaFleur, University of Pennsylvania
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