JAPANimals: History and Culture in Japan’s Animal Life (review)

During the last two or three decades, there has been an outburst of studies about human-animal relations. This growth is part of a much broader interest based on a growing awareness of a worldwide environmental crisis that has given rise to new discourses on the connectedness between worldviews and management of natural resources. In particular, the present dominant worldview—which has alternatively been attributed to Judeo-Christian influences, the development of the market economy and the rise of capitalism, patriarchal societies, and the scientific revolution—is seen as the root of the problem facing us today. A dichotomy between nature and culture is considered fundamental to this worldview, with people separated from, and in command of, nature. Therefore, new paradigms in which human beings are seen as parts of, and in harmony with, nature are called for. Inspiration for formulating new concepts and perceptions of people’s relation to nature comes from a wide variety of sources, not least from Eastern traditions, which often are claimed to be ecocentric (rather than anthropocentric) and monistic (rather than Cartesian dualistic). One of the editors of JAPANimals invites thinking along such lines in his preface, where he argues for the term “nonhuman animals” (and not simply “animals”) and the relative pronouns “who” and “whom” for animals, and where he cites Richard Bulliet to the effect that the “Japanese have preserved the capacity to recover a spiritual aspect of human-animal relations that may someday offer an alternative” (p. xvi).

However, readers who in this book expect to find alternative paradigms to the hegemonic Western one—something along the lines of Christopher K. Chapple’s Non-violence to Animals, Earth and Self in Asian Traditions (Sri Satguru Publications, 1995)—will probably be disappointed. Few contributors explicitly address philosophical questions about what an animal is and by extension what it means to be human. However, this does not mean it is a waste of time to read this book! There is a lot to recommend here, but its strength lies somewhere else.

A few words about the history of this volume would be helpful in order to appreciate its merits. It started in 2000 as a graduate seminar under the guidance of Gregory M. Pflugfelder in order to “encourage original thinking and to stimulate innovative research” (p. x) by participants who had no, or little, experience in the topic. The seminar was then followed by the symposium “Animals/History/Japan” the year after. Such endeavors to force scholars to rethink their research material in terms of new research questions can be a very refreshing and rewarding exercise. And some of the contributors have lived up to one’s highest expectations and brought new theories (and models) to work on their old (or new) material. Where I have some reservations about this collection of essays as a whole, it is because not all the authors do this. Let me illustrate this point with a couple of examples. In the essay “Grateful Animal or Spiritual Being? Buddhist Gratitude Tales and Changing Conceptions of the Deer in Early Japan,” Hoyt Long, who at the time was a Ph.D. candidate in modern Japanese literature, offers a penetrating analysis on how meanings of the deer might have changed with the spread of Buddhism in the seventh and eighth centuries. In order to track the symbolic deer, he draws heavily on theories on human-animal relations developed by anthropologists such as Roy Willis, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Richard Tapper, and Tim Ingold, as well as others such as art historian Steve Baker. In this way, Long locates his essay squarely within the main human-animal discourse. This is very different from, for instance, Martha Chaiklin’s approach. Having done extensive research on Dutch commercial culture and the impact of European material culture on Japan during the Tokugawa period, she focuses on the import of...