Environmental History Group Lecture

Speaker:
Lisa Yoshikawa (Professor of History and Asian Studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, USA)

Topic:
Island Lives: Considering biological diversity in Japanese colonial Taiwan

Moderator:
Tsuru Shuntaro (Assistant Research Fellow, Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica)

Date and Time:
Friday, December 1st, 2023. 10:30-12:30 (GMT+8) (Admission starting at 10:00)

Place:
Room 802 at ITH

Language:
English

Registration:
Click Here to Register

Please Note:

1. For physical attendance, participants should register before November 27th (Fri.). Please feel free to contact Mr. Lee if there is any question. E-mail: asithteh@gmail.com.
2. The lecture will be given in English and will not be live-streamed. The meeting room holds 50 participants.
3. Participants can apply for a two-hour “Certificate for Environmental Education.” Collection Method: (1) Physical participants can pick up on the spot. Participants from organizations other than the ITH are not required to sign but must complete the registration process at their own organization. (2) Members of the ITH must provide their signature and the administration office will take of the registration.
4. Lunch is provided. Please choose your meal type (vegetarian, non-vegetarian, or no meal) on the registration form.

Abstract:
From the mid-nineteenth century to its height in 1942, the Japanese empire approximately sextupled both latitudinally and longitudinally. This enormous space contained both terrestrial and aquatic regions and was unique amongst contemporary empires in its relative contiguity and its large insular composition. Its latitudinal span from the subarctic to the tropics was of particular interest for resource potentials due to the variety in plant and animal species it offered. Natural historians and biologists in various fields hence were often pioneers in this extractive imperialism to identify and secure resources for the metropole, particularly with the rapid population growth and industrialization starting at the turn of the century. In the newly acquired territories, zoologists soon began to study more generally the animal population, including their diversity and their distribution, regardless of their direct economic utility to humans. The timing of the empire’s expansion that coincided with the publication of Alfred Russel Wallace’s Island Life and its geographical layout that was conducive to the study of the volume’s topic, zoogeography, led to the blossoming of the field in Imperial Japan. In 1928, Japanese scientists became one of the first in the world to establish a biogeographical society, second only to the French, with its organ starting publication in the following year. This predominantly English language journal that continued until 1944 under Imperial Japan became a stage on which scientists showcased their latest zoogeographical research internationally as part of the contemporary Indo-Pacific science competition. Of the most popular target locations for research in its first decade and half of existence were the Kuriles, metropole, and Taiwan.

Taiwan’s centrality in zoogeographical research resulted from environmental, scientific, and political reasons. Its (sub)tropicality offered animal species diversity and its insularity that often countered this advantage in turn accentuated certain features about the resident population that had made islands a historically favorite zoogeographical research site, for the likes of Darwin, Hooker, and Wallace, and later MacArthur/Wilson. Such significance was not lost on Imperial Japanese scientists to whom island territories on the N-S axis, including Taiwan, was clearly more important than continental colonies on the E-W axis. The empire’s early acquisition of Taiwan, in addition to its legal colonial status and attraction as a resource-rich domain provided incentives to establish infrastructures including research institutions that became important bases for investigations. In fact, of the 29 empire-wide cities from which the Japan Biogeographical Society members hailed in 1932, Taipei had the second largest number of members following Tokyo. Biogeography is a discipline crucial to environmental conservation today. This talk seeks to provide insights into the role of Taiwanese animals and and their scientists in the development of this important field during the first half of the twentieth century.