Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the relationship between wildlife and sovereignty conservation by examining a series of wildlife conservation campaigns that the Ryukyu University zoologist Takara Tetsuo carried out in the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Isles during the U.S. military occupation of Okinawa (1945-1972).

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the relationship between wildlife conservation and sovereignty production by examining a series of wildlife conservation campaigns carried out during the U.S. military occupation of the Ryukyu Islands (1945-1972). During this period of indefinite, involuntary separation from mainland Japan, groups of government-affiliated Japanese scholars worked to classify the archipelago's cultural and natural heritage in ways that would parallel heritage legislation in Japan proper.

One Ryukyu University-based zoologist, Takara Tetsuo, was an especially avid taxonomist of Okinawan natural heritage. Takara paid particular attention to the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Isles, once the site of a Japanese bird-culling abattoir and tuna cannery, but uninhabited since 1940. Between 1950 and 1968 Takara led five expeditions to the Senkaku group, hoping to prove the survival on the islands of the Short-tailed Albatross, declared extinct by U.S. Occupation authorities but later rediscovered on the Izu Islands and and designated a special natural monument of the Japanese nation.

Although Takara never sighted albatrosses in the Senkaku Isles, he was instrumental in fomenting Japanese media coverage of "poaching" by Taiwanese fisherman allegedly trespassing on the islands. In the process he helped to reposition the Senkaku Isles as a part of Okinawan (and by extension Japanese) natural heritage - whilst leading expeditions that also surveyed the islands for offshore oil and gas deposits, inflaming diplomatic tensions over the territory still further. With the rediscovery of an albatross population nesting on the Senkaku Islands, Takara Tetsuo's legacy continues to play out today.