Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan by Sherzod Muminov (review)

Abstract

in conveying Japan’s shift from an imperialist, militarist, emperor-centered polity to a self-consciously internationalist, peaceful democracy? In other words, what distinguishes avian studies from any number of other scientific or zoological fields that might have supported the above significations? Although Culver does not address these questions directly, her book suggests some possibilities. The sheer variety within Class Aves—ranging from domesticated species widely raised for meat, eggs, and feathers to wild species appreciated as game and for spectacle—has supported an unusually long and deep relationship between birds and humans. It has also allowed for the mobilization of different birds as symbols for disparate concepts; for example, doves for peace and pheasants for democracy. Moreover, the ability to fly untethers birds from land demarcated by human boundaries, transforming them into (inadvertent) agents of transnationalism. A strength of Japan’s Empire of Birds is the breadth of knowledge demonstrated by its author. Culver’s exhaustive preparation for writing about the history of ornithology appears to have involved virtually everything short of earning a PhD in the subject. She describes learning to handle shotguns and skin specimens, participating in bird banding, and viewing skins stored at museums in Japan and the United States. She interviewed surviving members of the transwar cohort featured in the book, as well as younger ornithologists and avian enthusiasts. She also draws on a vast and variegated base of print sources, including personal letters, memoirs, scientific writings, photographs, maps, architectural blueprints, travel narratives, government reports, articles, essays, and obituaries located in archives in the United States, Japan, and England. At times, Japan’s Empire of Birds feels overburdened with direct references to the historiographic literature and with citations of ideas that historians have learned to take more or less for granted—for example, that “memory is notoriously unreliable” (p. 2) and that “photographs are not mirrors of the past but representations of it” (p. 5). For the most part, however, the often-scandalous lives of Hachisuka and others make for entertaining reading, while Japan’s relationship with birds offers an effective lens on the transwar histories of gender, science, animals, and the environment. As Culver points out at the end of her book, Japanese ornithology is “not just for the birds” (p. 222).