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This paper discusses how fossil specimens from the Indian subcontinent became objects of scientific investigation for Japanese palaeontologists and were incorporated into institutional imaginaries and political projects during the Japanese imperial period.

Paper long abstract

This paper uses animal fossils to discuss Japanese scientific interest in the geology and fauna of the Indian subcontinent and consider how such research was connected to investigations of extinct prehistoric fauna in the Japanese archipelago. Japanese interest in the fauna of the Indian subcontinent was mediated, in a first instance, by the specific circumstances of British imperialism in South Asia. The discovery and subsequent study, from the early nineteenth century onwards, of sizeable collections of mammalian fossils in the Outer Himalayas rendered the fossil record of the Indian subcontinent relevant to scientific investigations on prehistoric fauna in Japan. South Asian fossils became important for purposes of comparison and correlation, especially after fossil remains of prehistoric elephants were discovered in the Japanese archipelago from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Himalayan fossils circulated globally, often as casts sold by British, German and French dealers who tapped into trans-imperial networks to ply their trade in natural history specimens.

Some of these fossils ended up in the collection of The Tohoku University Museum. Purchased shortly after the establishment of the Department of Geology in 1911, these specimens were incorporated into new institutional and political imaginaries. Notably, they became objects of scientific investigation for palaeontologist Matsumoto Hikoshichirō (松本彦七郎, 1887-1975), one of several Japanese scientists who made significant contributions to the study of fossil elephants. Matsumoto’s research was located at the intersections of two empires: the British and the Japanese. He included the South Asian specimens into a broader study of fossil mammals from Sichuan, collected by geologist Sakawa Eijirō (佐川栄次郎, 1873-1941) and presented to the Zoological Institute of the Tokyo Imperial University. In the charged geopolitical climate of WWII, the fossils also became a tool for some of Matsumoto’s palaeontologist colleagues to criticize British imperialism in Asia.

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This paper looks into how some Japanese teacher-cum-naturalists in one province of colonial Korea tried to make their studies on plants locally rooted (鄕土), by importing folk knowledge from Japan.

Paper long abstract

As well known, public schools in colonial Korea were the Japanese equivalent of Christian churches in Western colonies, and Japanese teachers, recruited with scholarships and other benefits, were expected to become missionaries for the Japanese civilizing mission in colonial Korea. By the 1930s, some of these teacher-cum-naturalists had established themselves in the colonial administration and the imperial university in Keijo to launch ambitious research projects. For example, they carried out a ten-year study involving 300 elementary schools in South Jeolla Province, led by their model and leader, teacher-turned-scholar Mori Tamezo (森爲三, 1884-1962), at Keijo Imperial University. Echoing the move for locally rooted (鄕土) studies in Japan, they planned to make a new list of regional plants by making a regional plant collection. They “requested” teachers in 300 provincial schools to send specimens for 100 summer and 100 autumn plants from their vicinity. By 1938, the provincial education office had accumulated 63,000 dried specimens, which in quantity almost matched the collections at the Tokyo Imperial University. This paper discusses the making of this unique "plant archive" in colonial Korea. These activities of Japanese teacher-cum-naturalists in Korea help us discuss several aspects of Japanese colonialism in Korea: the existence of long-term Japanese colonial residents moving towards scientific professionalization in competition with simultaneously shaping mainland authorities; the similar move of colonized Korean teachers at Korean-funded private schools, who embraced their collection trips and studies on Korean plants as correcting their "unscientific" past; the active renegotiations of shared and folk traditions between Japan and Korea, both emerging as political entities in these interactions. This paper looks into how some Japanese natural history teachers in colonial Korea had shaped their own civilizing mission by "regionalizing" their studies on plants in South Jeolla with folk knowledge from Japan, making a new path in between the imperial authority in Tokyo and Koreans remapping everything in their self-civilizing mission.

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This presentation critically examines ornithological specimens collected in colonial Korea, currently held at the Yamashina Institute for Ornithology in Japan and the National Science Museum in South Korea, as “natural archives.”

Paper long abstract

This presentation critically examines ornithological specimens collected in colonial Korea, currently held at the Yamashina Institute for Ornithology in Japan and the National Science Museum in South Korea, as “natural archives.” These collections were products of intersecting agendas between mainland Japanese ornithologists and Japanese settler naturalists, such as Yamashina Yoshimaro, Mori Tamezō, and Orii Hyojirō. While digitization initiatives—like the Yamashina Institute’s database—have improved global accessibility and stewardship , they also provide a crucial opportunity to historicize the development of these archives to evaluate their past and present significance.

The core of this study focuses on the “depoliticization” of these natural archives following the 1945 liberation. Despite the inextricable link between colonial knowledge-making and imperialism, postwar actors in both Japan and Korea have systematically obscured the colonial contexts inherent in these specimens. By constructing narratives centered on scientific objectivity, nationalism, or nature conservation, these actors have effectively masked the archives’ origins as tools of empire.

By tracing the “post-colonial” afterlives of these bird specimens, this presentation seeks to repoliticize natural history collections that are often overlooked in debates regarding cultural property due to their perceived neutrality. Evaluating their historical development uncovers how the professionalization of science under Japanese settler colonialism integrated natural archives into the political projects of empire- and nation-building. Ultimately, this research offers a critical perspective on the decolonization of museums and contributes to the trans-imperial history of science by revealing the overlooked political afterlives of seemingly objective scientific objects.

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This paper analyzes trans-regional natural history in the Japanese empire through Yamamura Yaeko, a woman collector active between Japan and the Philippines in the 1920s–30s. It shows how imperial science relied on mobility, gendered labor, and unequal collaboration beyond formal institutions.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the making of trans-regional natural history in the Japanese empire through the largely overlooked figure of Yamamura Yaeko (1899–1996), a woman collector who moved between Tokyo and the Philippines in the 1920s and 1930s. Yamamura never received formal scientific training, held no formal institutional post, and published no academic articles. Yet she assembled and prepared specimens—birds, insects, and marine shells—that became research material for male zoologists and assets for metropolitan museums and imperial scientific collections.

Drawing on press coverage and institutional records of donation, I argue that Yamamura’s work illuminates how “Japanese” natural history was produced not within national boundaries but through mobility, extraction, and uneven collaboration across imperial and local environments. Her first extended stay in the Philippines in the mid-1920s initiated sustained collecting practices; subsequent donations to Tokyo institutions and imperial biological facilities linked field sites in Southeast Asia to metropolitan regimes of classification, display, and authority.

At the same time, Yamamura’s career foregrounds the gendered politics of scientific participation. Contemporary newspapers celebrated her as a “lady scientist” while framing her hunting and specimen preparation as unfeminine. Over time, she reportedly shifted from bird collecting to shells, a transition that reveals negotiation between scientific contribution and cultural expectations of femininity. By centering a woman collector positioned as “subordinate” to professional male scientists—and by attending to the often-erased labor of local assistants who enabled fieldwork—this paper reframes imperial natural history as a trans-regional enterprise sustained by heterogeneous actors. Yamamura Yaeko’s collecting practices thus provide a lens onto the infrastructures, hierarchies, and intimate negotiations through which nature, empire, and knowledge were co-produced across Japan–Philippines circuits in the early twentieth century.