“I am not, by practically anyone's definition of the term, an animal lover. I keep no pets, eat meat with gusto, and feel no particular urge to commune with fauna in the wild.” So opens JAPANimals: History and Culture in Japan's Animal Life, as coeditor Gregory Pflugfelder throws down the ethico-methodological gauntlet in his preface, “Confessions of a Flesh Eater: Looking below the Human Horizon” (pp. ix–xvii). That gauntlet will likely be taken up by historians, East Asian scholars, and the hybrid (or mongrel) academics who are fashioning the field of critical animal studies.
In the spirit of similar confession, I am not, by anyone's definition, a historian, Japanese or otherwise. However, as a scholar of British Victorian literature, I, too, am in a discipline that questions the master narratives that another island culture once used to dominate other humans and now asks why and how humans claim privileges...
