Bringing Politics To Life: Dōbutsu and Other Creatures of the Japanese Enlightenment

Abstract

This essay shows how a new understanding of the animal – and thus the human – developed in Japan over the course of the nineteenth century. Inspired by Linnaean nomenclature, the delineation of a new ‘animal kingdom’ (dōbutsukai) in Japan led to a radical rethinking of the human place in the natural world. Given early form by the natural historian Udagawa Yōan (1798–1846) in his 1822 Botany Sutra (Botanika kyō), that vision – in which people became ‘animals who can reason’ – carried ramifications for the emergence of the modern sciences in Japan, most notably biology and zoology (dōbutsugaku). By the close of the century, the once-foreign kingdoms of Animalia and Plantae were fully naturalized, and they were quickly put to political use. Fueled by the emerging debate over social evolution, the new natural history gathered a diverse assemblage of living creatures together into a single classificatory kingdom, elevating nomenclature to the level of a natural order that seemed to transcend concerns of individual people even as it gave structure and meaning to their lives. The imagination of the modern ‘civilized’ human being, then, was impossible without the definition of a new animal world.

Acknowledgements

A portion of this chapter appeared in Miller, The Nature of the Beasts. The author would like to express his special gratitude to Julia Adeney Thomas and Brett L. Walker for their insightful comments and contributions to the work. Nancy Miller and William Miller provided invaluable assistance in the early stages of the work.

Notes

¹ As Barbara Ambros notes, the characters of 動物 were used together centuries earlier in Japan and millennia earlier in China. They appear in the Chinese Rites of Zhou (Zhouli), first identified in the second century CE and in various Heian-period poetic dictionaries in Japan, notably the Kigoshō (Notes on Poetic Words) compiled by Fujiwara no Nakazane (1056–1118) and the Iroha jiruishō (mid-twelfth century). Ambros, Bones of Contention. The point here is that the term was given new significance in 1822. While it is reasonable to think that Yōan knew of these precedents, he made it clear that his intention in the Botanika kyō was to find a Japanese equivalent for the Western notion of ‘animal’. See also Sterckx, The Animal and the Daemon, especially 16–19; and Bartholomew, The Formation of Science in Japan. On Buddhism’s relationship with animals, see Hirabayashi, ‘Bukkyō ga oshieta dōbutsukan’.

² Yōan expanded on the Sutra in his 1835 Principles of Botany (Shokugaku keigen) and in his 1840 Introduction to Chemistry (Semi kaisō), which established many of the terms used in modern chemistry. For the classic overview of these issues, see Nishimura, Bunmei no naka no hakubutsugaku. See also Tsukahara, Affinity and shinwa ryoku. Shokugaku keigen has been reprinted in Ueno and Yabe, Shokugaku keigen/Shokubutsugaku.

³ Nishimura, Bunmei no naka no hakubutsugaku, 483–86. Yōan would eventually add ‘fungi’ (kin) to his taxonomy. Full text of Udagawa’s Sutra is available online: Waseda University Library, last accessed 28 June 2012, http://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko08/bunko08_a0208/bunko08_a0208.html. See also Ueno, Hakubutsugakusha retsuden, 102–09; Ueno, Nihon dōbutsugakushi, 130–34.

⁴ The phrase used, nyoze gamon 如是我聞, is standard in Buddhist sutras. According to tradition, the Buddhist canon was compiled during the first Buddhist council after the Buddha’s death. His disciple and cousin Ānanda, who had served him for 25 years, was said to have perfect recall, and he recited all of the Buddha’s sermons for recording. ‘Thus I have heard that’ was Ānanda’s reference to his act as a faithful conduit of correct teachings. I am grateful to Barbara Ambros for this insight.

⁵ Tsukahara offers a summary of the relevant literature on Udagawa and the Botanika kyō. See especially ‘Shift of Yoan’s interest to chemical studies,’ in Affinity and shinwa ryoku, 117–46.

⁶ Nishimura, Bunmei no naka no hakubutsugaku, 483–86.

⁷ The denaturing of spectacle in the service of social order during the Enlightenment has an ample historiography. As James Delbourgo notes, the valorization of rational order in nature –as opposed to the celebration of emotional wonder and simple surprise – was part of a social program as well as one of scientific inquiry in the eighteenth-century West. Taking the wonder out of nature was one aspect of a broader effort to maintain social order and control in Europe and North America. The power of wonders to move masses of people contained, some feared, the kernels of radical action. It pushed them towards superstition, enthusiasm, and the benighted belief in miracles rather than self-possession and reasoned consideration. As I have argued elsewhere, Japanese elites, like their European counterparts, also sought to rationalize wonder during the tumultuous years of the late nineteenth century. The emotional shock of encounters with spectacular beasts in the Ueno Imperial Zoological Garden, for example, was mobilized as part of a broader effort to reduce true wonder – the sense of inexplicability and genuine otherness – to a form of reason. The taming of surprise was part of an effort to cultivate docile bodies and tranquil minds. Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders, esp. 8–11. See also Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature; and Miller, The Nature of the Beasts.

⁸ Ueno traces the beginnings of this transformation to the writings of Ono Razan (1729–1810) and others working with the Honzō kōmoku, a translation of the Chinese natural historian Li Shizhen’s (1518–1593) influential Bencao gangmu (Systematic materia medica). For this and the introduction of Western systematics by Udagawa’s colleague, Itō Keisuke, see Ueno, Hakubutsugakusha retsuden, 134–37; also Ueno, Seiyō hakubutsugakusha retsuden, and Endō, Honzōgaku to yōgaku. See also Doi, Itō Keisuke no kenkyū.

⁹ As Pamela Asquith and Arne Kalland note, sei can also be translated as ‘nature’, as in the ‘essential quality and character of something’. Kalland and Asquith, ‘Japanese Perceptions of Nature’, 8. Udagawa expanded this discussion in Shokugaku keigen. On the representation of animals in Edo Japan, see Nomura, Edo no shizenshi.

¹⁰ Tessa Morris-Suzuki makes a similar point about neo-Confucianism and nature; see Morris-Suzuki, ‘Concepts of Nature and Technology in Pre-industrial Japan’. See also Pamela Asquith and Arne Kalland, ‘Japanese Perceptions of Nature’; Kalland, ‘Culture in Japanese Nature’. Stefan Tanaka and Julia Adeney Thomas both approach this dynamic through the broader frame of ‘nature’, each offering convincing analysis of intellectual discourse as social theorists and philosophers struggled with these questions. In both works, Katō Hiroyuki is taken as emblematic of the broader projection of time into nature through the work of Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, and Herbert Spencer. See Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity, chapter 4; Tanaka, New Times in Modern Japan, chapter 3.

¹¹ John Berger makes a similar point in relation to Descartes in his classic essay, ‘Why Look at Animals?’

¹² I am drawing here on Giorgio Agamben’s critical response to Michel Foucault. Agamben, The Open. See also, Shukin, Animal Capital, 9.

¹³ Marcon, ‘The Names of Nature’. On the introduction of Western systematics in Japan, see Ueno, Hakubutsugakusha retsuden; see also Doi, Itō Keisuke no kenkyū. For the full text of Taisei honzō meiso, see http://www.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kotenseki/html/ni14/ni14_00793/.

¹⁴ Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind; Ambros, Bones of Contention, 33–40. On the relationship between caricatures of Buddhist thought and ‘Western’ attitudes toward animals and nature, see Kalland, Unveiling the Whale, esp. 166.

¹⁵ On the ideological uses of shizen, see Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity; Terao, ‘Shizen’ gainen no keisei shi, esp. 233–46; Yanabe, Hon’yaku no shisō.

¹⁶ For Latour’s account of the separation between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ or ‘science’ and ‘society,’ see Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. I have also found Thomas’s ‘To Become as One Dead’ useful.

¹⁷ For Ishikawa’s biography, see, Ishikawa, ‘Rōkagakusha no shuki’, esp. 71–160. On Itō, see Sugimoto, Itō Keisuke.

¹⁸ Ueno, Nihon dōbutsugakushi, 362–420.

¹⁹ For the full text, see Ishikawa, Dōbutsu shinka shinron; Morse, Japan Day by Day, 339–340.

²⁰ ‘Dōbutsu shinkaron’, 7–8; Morse, Japan Day by Day, 334–339. On the development of zoology at Tokyo University, see Ueno, Nihon dōbutsugakushi, 495–502.

²¹ Godart, ‘Darwin in Japan’.

²² ‘Dōbutsu shinkaron’, 17.

²³ Ibid., 75.

²⁴ ‘Dōbutsu shinkaron’, 75. Morse’s lecture was just the first in a series focused on the application of social evolution. Ernest Fenollosa followed with a series on social evolution and religion. It is worth noting that Ishikawa was a prolific participant in social evolutionary debate across his career. For an especially trenchant piece, see his Ningen no shinka, reprinted in Ishikawa zenshū, vol. 8 (originally published in 1917). The piece, where Ishikawa outlines a theory of nationalist self-sacrifice in biological terms, is among the most important entries from a professional scientist in the development of fascism in Japan. The fact that it is rarely cited in postwar scholarship – in Japanese or English – helps us to see how neglected scientific discourse has been in historical writing on Japanese intellectual history and political culture.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Morton and Combe, Crania Americana. For the discussion of phrenology, see ‘Dōbutsu shinkaron’, 74.

²⁷ For Lamarck’s entry into these debates, see Lamarck, Système des animaux sans vertèbres. See also Burkhardt, The Spirit of System.

²⁸ ‘Dōbutsu shinkaron’ 75. Unlike Darwin, who argued that advantageous traits were passed down solely through the reproduction of inborn traits, Lamarck argued that characteristics acquired during an organism’s lifetime might be inherited by offspring. On the history of Darwinian thought in Europe, see Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life, and Darwin and the Emergence.

²⁹ On Georges Bigot, see Shimizu, Bigō Nihon sobyōshū, 226, and Zoku Bigō Nihon sobyōshū, 229.

³⁰ Shimizu, Bigō Nihon sobyōshū, 229.

³¹ It is important to note that the Chinese characters 進化 used for the word ‘evolution,’ or shinka, imply a sense of forward progress; see Yokoyama, Nihon shinka shisōshi.

³² Thus, in part, the importance of art, where aesthetics and reason combined in the nineteenth century. I am drawing here on Mitchell, ‘Illusion: Looking at Animals Looking’.

³³ See for example, Kobayashi Kiyochika, ‘Engekikai no hangeki’.

³⁴ Ohnuki-Tierney, The Monkey as Mirror.

³⁵ Cited in Migita, Tennōsei to shinkaron, 27–30.

³⁶ On Oka, see Yokoyama, Nihon shinka shisōshi, 61–129; see also Godart, ‘Darwin in Japan’.

³⁷ Ishikawa, Dōbutsu shinka shinron. On Katō, see Tanaka, New Times in Modern Japan; Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity; Yokoyama, Nihon shinka shisōshi, 130–182.

³⁸ Tanaka, New Times in Modern Japan, 89–92; Ishikawa, ‘Shōrai no ningen, ketsuron’. On progress and ‘enlightenment’, see Ishikawa, ‘Shōrai no ningen, ketsuron’, 354–357.

³⁹ Ishikawa, Seibutsu no rekishi, 244–246.

⁴⁰ I am drawing here on Harriet Ritvo’s work on Victorian Britain, where the class system picked up and amplified notions of natural selection and superiority. See Ritvo, The Animal Estate, 29. Something similar happened in Japan, where former samurai such as Ishikawa, Katō, and Tanaka tended to assume leadership positions in the new Meiji order.

⁴¹ Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity.

⁴² Tanaka and Nakajima, Dōbutsu kinmō.