Ian Jared Miller

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

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.