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Paper short abstract

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.