Pandas in the Anthropocene
Pandas in the Anthropocene
Japan’s “Panda Boom” and the Limits of Ecological Modernity
This chapter considers the conflicted status of wild animals in postwar Japan, at once objects of intense cultural and scientific attention and subject to relentless ecological marginalization. This dynamic reached its apex in the so-called panda boom of the late twentieth century. The arrival of two giant pandas at the Ueno Zoo in celebration of diplomatic normalization between Japan and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) sparked an explosion of postimperial fascination with all things Chinese. Fueled by a culture industry eager to extract maximum profit from the alluring black-and-white bears, the most endangered ursine species on the planet, attendance hit world-historical highs for more than a decade. This hyper-consumerism coincided with a shift in environmental consciousness in the 1970s. In wider society, the contradictions between consumerism and conservationism often remain hidden, but the histories of Tokyo’s pandas—the most-viewed nonhuman animals on the planet—throw modernity’s vexed relationship with the natural world into sharp relief.
Keywords: panda boom, giant panda, panda, panda diplomacy, neoteny, anthropocene culture, bio-technology, the biotechnology of cute, cute culture, conservationsim
California Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
