| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 290 words from this article are provided below; about 614 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Brett L. Walker. The Lost Wolves of Japan. Foreword by William Cronon. (Weyerhauser Environmental Books.) Seattle: University of Washington Press. 2005. Pp. xviii, 331. $35.00.
This book by Brett L. Walker is a fascinating historical exploration of Japanese representations of wolves. The main thrust of the book is to explain how and why the wolf, which originally was seen as a benign animal protecting farmers' fields against forest animals such as wild boar, deer, and hares, turned into a noxious animal. Walker gives three main reasons for this shift. First, people turned against wolves in the eighteenth century when violent, rabid animals killed many people, prompting both peasants and regional authorities to organize large wolf-hunting parties. Second, American expatriates introduced strychnine to exterminate wolves so that horse breeding and other agricultural development schemes could become feasible on Hokkaido. Third, a bounty system based on American models was implemented in most of Japan. The "success" of these schemes was total, leading to what has been regarded as the extinction of wolves around 1905.	1
It is Walker's thesis that modernization—and by implication Westernization—brought about this radical shift in attitudes. The introduction of modern science prepared the ground and made the use of strychnine and bounty culturally acceptable. Chapter one offers a penetrating analysis of how modern science created the Japanese wolf. Where traditional species identification had been vague (allowing interbreeding between wolves and village dogs, among other things), the Linnaean taxonomy introduced new rigidities to Japanese perspectives, replacing local representations with a nationalistic one. It seems that the failure of the modern taxonomy to take the flexibility of local classification systems into account forced a dualistic way of thinking into the Japanese mind.	. . .

There are about 614 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.