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53 2 civilizing canines; or, domesticating and destroying dogs In 1873 the artist Utagawa Yoshifuji (1828–87) created a print that invokes how the arrival of Western canine imperialism had radically reshaped human-canine relations in Japan in just over two decades. The print shows three dogs sitting down to a lunch of hikkoshi soba, a noodle dish eaten to celebrate the arrival of a new neighbor. Two of the dogs are native canines, as evidenced by their physical appearance and traditional Japanese clothing. The other dog is a Western canine wearing dark trousers and a navy-blue tunic. All three sport wooden tags hanging around their necks. In the accompanying text, the Western dog greets the native dogs, telling them that he has come from a faraway country to make his home in this land. To this, one of the local dogs replies, “You are welcome. Lately, there are bad dogs who trouble people, so dogs without tags are struck down and killed. For this, I am thankful.”1 The bad dogs, whom the local dog refers to are untagged native dogs, and as an indigenous canine, he is grateful for a tag that spares at least those dogs whose owners have registered them with the state. New regulations, such as the registration requirements, encouraged people to civilize dogs by turning them into pets through Western-style dog-keeping practices and threatened to eliminate them if they did not. The impact of “civilization” on dogs is shown by their tags, a practice that various local authorities began to require for the first time in the 1870s, and more metaphorically by their wearing of human clothing. It would be easy to dismiss the railings against native dogs throughout the imperial world if such thinking and such talk had not led to actual changes that bore deadly consequences for canines, especially native dogs, and which served to discipline people as well. In a way that sharply diverged from other societies that were the object of Western imperialism, many elite and upwardly mobile Japanese quickly acquired an enthusiasm for Western breeds and dog-keeping practices, and used these animals to create and reinforce social-status structures. But as in other parts of the colonized and colonizable world, the Meiji government, influenced by imperial ideologies of civilization and scientific racism, began to implement policies to eliminate or regulate canines, whether street, feral, and wild dogs 54 Empire of Dogs or wolves, often on the pretext of combating rabies and protecting domestic farm and game animals. Such steps were not without some precedent on the archipelago , but the new Meiji regime, as a modernizing nation-state equipped with unprecedented intrusive bureaucratic and policing powers, was able to increasingly extend a system of surveillance and control over its subjects, both human and nonhuman, within the country’s newly defined borders. Until the government was able to successfully persuade the Western imperial powers to revise the unequal treaties and to escape its semicolonial status in the mid-1890s, it held less sway over foreign residents, and this served to privilege both them and their dogs and to disadvantage indigenous canines, who continued to be a target of imperial ire. As a result, seemingly mundane concerns about dogs were rarely unrelated to politics, either domestic or international. As highlighted by the ecology of indigenous canines in Tokugawa Japan and elsewhere, humans often shared cities and towns with many other kinds of creatures—domesticated, feral, and wild. In much of the today’s world, people have largely driven animals out of areas inhabited primarily by humans. This separation is, of course, the result of urbanization and economic change, but as historian Keith Thomas has argued, it is also the product of powerful sensibilities about what it means to be civilized.2 Ideas that demanded a clear-cut distinction between culture and nature emerged during the Enlightenment and spread throughout much of the world during the age of New Imperialism, contributing to a disappearance of many animals from cityscapes. During much of the last two centuries, people in many parts of the world have often either eliminated beasts—killing them or restricting them to so-called natural areas such as highly regulated parks and reserves—or completely domesticated and commodified them, either as sources of food and other products or as pets. For many canines, these processes amounted to either completely becoming domestic companions of people or extermination at human hands. The tendency of dogs to stray between domestication...

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