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

The history of animals, while not exactly a mainstream subject, is slowly approaching the status of an accepted field of research. The surest sign of this is that in December 2005 an online discussion list "H-Animal" was added to the H-Net network. In Western-language Japanese studies, animals have so far not received the attention they deserve. Other than the anthropological studies by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (The Monkey as Mirror; Princeton University Press, 1989) and John Knight (Waiting for Wolves in Japan; Oxford University Press, 2003) and the recent Lost Wolves of Japan (University of Washington Press, 2005) by Brett Walker, no major study has dealt with the impact of animals on Japanese history, culture, or society—or vice versa.

The volume under review aims at raising awareness of the importance of taking animals into consideration and at "entering into dialogue with Japan's nonhuman majority," as Brett Walker titles his introduction. Being an explorative undertaking without the comfortable base of previous research, the volume's scope is by necessity broad rather than clearly focused. The diverse subjects of its nine chapters range from the Heian period to the 1980s, from literary studies to economic history, and from insects to whales.

Arranged chronologically, the volume begins with Hoyt Long's "Grateful Animal or Spiritual Being? Buddhist Gratitude Tales and Changing Conceptions of Deer in Early Japan." To explore the relationship between the new faith of Buddhism and its "native" predecessors, Long takes a detailed look at one episode from Konjaku monogatari involving a nine-colored deer. He detects in this story a dual view of nature: On the one hand, "the essential sameness of humans and other animals" is asserted; on the other, "there is a tendency to reinforce the otherness and inferiority of nonhuman animals." This is a specific Buddhist duality, representing "a radical departure from local cultural formations," which had "idealized nonhuman animals as moral exemplars or spiritual mediators" (p. 46). Long highlights the clash between old and new worldview and how this "drastic redefinition . . . must have had a significant impact on the lives of those who still inhabited the confines of an older symbolic order" (p. 51).

Chapter 2 changes the angle from literary studies to folklore. Under the heading "Fabled Liaisons: Serpentine Spouses in Japanese Folktales," Ria Koopmansde Bruijn highlights the didactic function of folktales involving snakes that transform into humans. Following earlier scholarship, she classifies such tales into five types. Most variants involve a snake that, transformed into a human, marries a partner unconscious of the snake's true character. Interestingly, these liaisons are mostly doomed to fail, which implies that the serpent stands for "a human mate who is unsuitable for partnership from the point of view of prevailing social and communal norms" (p. 82).

Alexander Bay looks at animals as a trade commodity in his "The Swift Horses of Nukanobu: Bridging the Frontiers of Medieval Japan." He argues that during the medieval period northeastern Japan, more specifically the northern sections of the provinces of Mutsu and Dewa (Kita Ōu), was part of both Yamato Japan and transmarine Northeast Asia. In fact it constituted a frontier culture situated between these two larger regions and was incorporated into Yamato Japan only through conquest by Hideyoshi, which "severed the region from its historic ties to Northeast Asia, destroyed its unique frontier culture, and changed the very fabric of life in Kita Ōu for those who resided there" (p. 113). Specific economic arrangements had made possible the region's independent existence before Hideyoshi: "the frontier zone of Kita Ōu offered the inhabitants of the northeast both landborne and seaborne forms of economic opportunity" (p. 108). The most important form of landborne economic opportunity was horse trading: ever since the classical period, the region had supplied central Japan with warhorses renowned to be the best in the country.

In the chapter "Exotic-Bird Collecting...