The curious case of Ueno Masuzō: recalling the empire as a complex in Imperial Japan’s interwar zoology

日期： 2024/07/26

時間： 14:00~16:00

地點： 檔案館第三會議室

主持人： 雷祥麟（中研院近史所研究員兼所長）

主講人：吉川莉莎Lisa Yoshikawa教授（Hobart and William Smith Colleges）

主辦單位： 近史所「科技與現代東亞的歷史共構」共同研究專題

Abstract:
Ueno Masuzō (1900-1989) was a world-renowned expert on freshwater crustaceans working in zoo- taxonomy, geography, and limnology, all specialties that eventually became bases of conservation science. The height of his scientific career started in the mid-1920 and blossomed in the following decades. Like many of his peers in field sciences, Ueno’s success was bolstered partly by the post-World War I general imperial Japanese efforts to strengthen their science and technology research, the contemporaneous industrial boom that funded these goals, and Japan’s continuing exploitation and expansion of its formal and informal colonies. The last was particularly crucial in these heyday decades of imperial Japanese science as scholars like Ueno traversed the insular empire researching from the northern Kuriles to Micronesia and onto the continent, both in person and through the specimens they analyzed. He also worked with his peers and published in outlets based in the colonies; as an arena for field-based zoology, the empire functioned as an intertwined complex and a whole. Ueno was also a pioneer historian of biology, celebrating the success of imperial Japanese biology in his interwar historical works until the dawn of the U.S. occupation. Soon thereafter, Ueno ceased to advance the chronology of his history of biology, and instead began to reverse course to cover earlier times, rarely discussing post-1890s developments. As a result, he wrote out the details of the role of colonies in the Imperial Japanese history of biology, in the process, erasing his own scientific accomplishments from the narratives. This paper explores this curious historiographical pattern and begins to analyze its causation and consequences.
 
Bio: Lisa Yoshikawa is Professor of History and Asian Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneve, NY, U.S.A., and a visiting scholar at Academia Sinica Institute of Modern History. She is currently working on multiple projects including the history of the Imperial Japanese foundations of conservation science, and the history of coral science in East Asia.
 

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