Description: Brings the cultural ubiquity of animals into sharp focus over questions of economy, nation, empire, and modernity
Review Quotes: "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