Cue dramatic music: I stayed up until 2AM last night writing this post, but when I published it, all of it was lost. So I spent another hour this morning re-writing this post. But miraculously the post last night randomly appeared! Which is great but I definitely wrote like 200 words less in my re-written post, but also sad because I was so stressed and have yet to do the reading for today.<\/p>\n
Today, we went to the zoo! But not just any zoo–it was Ueno Zoo, the first\u00a0modern zoo in Japan.\u00a0I’m going to be honest and say that I’m not a fan of zoos. I went to a couple zoos \u5b50\u4f9b\u306e\u6642, including the relatively famous San Diego Zoo, and I think I enjoyed them at the time. But now I would much rather go to an art museum than see animals forced out of their habitat just for humans\u00a0to look at them. However, we went for the purpose of intellectualizing a zoo visit, so this was a good experience!<\/p>\n
Zoos bring animals and humans together to\u00a0emphasize that they are separate.\u00a0<\/strong>This was one of the first points in the reading that we had to prepare for today (Introduction, Ch. 1, and Ch. 6 of\u00a0Nature of the Beasts<\/em> by some dude named Miller). When walking to\u00a0the zoo, it was clear that we were going somewhere meant to be an escape or “oasis” from the city. Tall buildings were replaced with leafy\u00a0trees and instead of power-walking on narrow\u00a0streets we strolled through\u00a0spacious walkways. It was beautiful but so purposefully constructed to be so. In front of the zoo entrance was a poster campaigning for panda conservation. I don’t want to quote the sign wrong, but it was translated to basically say that the public should help achieve the “panda’s dream.” EW. That is a pretty problematic statement.\u00a0It seems like it is\u00a0a\u00a0way to justify and feel good about human intervention, like “oh\u00a0what we’re doing is what pandas actually want.” We have no way of knowing what they want. Part of me is conflicted because now there is no way pandas could survive the way they did before humans started intervening. Pandas have very little success in reproducing, especially in captivity, so it is very likely that they would become extinct without human help.\u00a0Do humans have a responsibility to save pandas? Ahhh. I’m not sure. Through poaching and habitat destruction, we were\/are the main threat to panda populations. But there are countless other species that have become\/are becoming extinct because of humans and we haven’t put in\u00a0the same effort to save them. Miller proposed that this is because pandas remind of us of human\u00a0babies, so we have this parental drive to think they’re cute and want to take care of them. There was this quote in the reading: “[pandas] seemed to be designed… to play on human psychology.” EW AGAIN. I know he isn’t using definitive language, but this implies that pandas exist solely for human enjoyment. I do not agree with rationalizing our fascination with animals by saying their purpose in life is to please humans.<\/p>\n Anyway,\u00a0upon entering the zoo, without hesitation, we immediately went to see the panda exhibit. I guess I’m a hypocrite because I was a bit excited to see a panda. But I will say that I was underwhelmed and could have done without seeing the panda (or any of the animals, really) that was on display. The panda just sat there, stuffing its face with bamboo, as workers tried\u00a0to make us leave in order to keep the line moving. I’m not sure if I find the panda cute, but I do find panda merchandise cute! This is similar to what happened in the\u00a0early 1980s to the early 2000s, when there was a panda boom, which the author describes as “when the pandas’ media value outstripped their worth as physical animals.” Our visit\u00a0brought up discussion on copyrighting animal drawings, which involves anthropomorphizing it in some way (giving it a name, drawing blushing squares on its cheeks, etc).<\/p>\n Pandas weren’t the only animals we saw.\u00a0Some of the animals I remember included a\u00a0sad-looking gibbon, a Selinger-seranded elephant, some rascal Japanese monkeys, a hungry tiger, two roasting polar bears, and a few\u00a0cramped candors. I was the most irked from\u00a0the polar bear exhibit. In it, there were two polar bears in the open-air lying in the shade, surrounded by\u00a0rocks shaped and painted\u00a0to look like ice. I dunno what’s worse:\u00a0taking the polar bears out of their natural habitat and putting them on a bunch of hot rocks for display, or putting the polar bears in that situation and trying to mimic their\u00a0natural habitat when it is clearly not.\u00a0We also saw the Japanese\u00a0serow, a goat-antelope mammal that is endemic (unique to certain habitat, found no where else in the world) to Japan. In our discussion about the use of animals as\u00a0diplomatic symbols, we learned that this animal was what Japan gave to China in exchange for pandas in the 1970s. The serow is not the cutest animal, but its name does lend itself for\u00a0great puns.<\/p>\n Another aspect of the zoo that I found interesting\u00a0was the use of the playground in multiple\u00a0exhibits. I am not sure what purpose this served. The playground was a bit different from a public playground, as the color palette was different shades of brown and the materials used were wood and rope. This was obviously meant to make it look more “wild.” Perhaps the playground was meant\u00a0to entertain\u00a0the animals or to make kids (the dominant demographic in the zoo) have more interest and relate to the animals. Either way, this does not fit with the zoo’s goal of\u00a0trying to separate humans from animals.<\/p>\n Once again, I was\u00a0glad to go to the museum with a professor and my classmates.\u00a0<\/strong>We went to the Tokyo National Museum with Selinger \u5148\u751f! Not only did we look at some amazing artifacts and primary sources, but we also got the insightful expert commentary on their historical and cultural contexts. What was interesting to me was the obvious display of wealth and lack of accessibility for the viewer. What I mean by\u00a0accessibility is that visitors were positioned as passive\u00a0observers. The explanations were fairly light, especially in English (meaning that the audience is more for the Japanese), so it would be hard to understand what exactly you’re looking at unless you know the cultural and historical context.\u00a0This was in contrast to the Edo-Tokyo Museum, which displayed the\u00a0“ordinary” and was made to be interactive for visitors.<\/p>\n P.S. I finally\u00a0finished editing my Daigo Fukuryu Maru post<\/a>, so\u00a0if you have time (it’s a long one), please read it \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Cue dramatic music: I stayed up until 2AM last night writing this post, but when I published it, all of it was lost. So I spent another hour this morning re-writing this post. But miraculously the post last night randomly appeared! Which is great but I definitely wrote like 200 words less in my re-written … Continue reading “Where the “Wild” Things Are”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":483,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trip-day-7"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/483"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}