Love Between Enemies: Western Prisoners of War and German Women in World War II

Abstract

collecting data on them transformed Japanese ornithology from the 1930s. Japanese, European and American ornithologists converged in their promotion of the new bird science through the international fellowship of bodies like ICBP. These exchanges not only took place in university departments and committee rooms but were played out through forms of imperial adventure. As Culver shows, European ornithological adventurers like Jean Delacour studied birds in the prewar period in French colonial Indochina. Delacour, a leading figure in IBCP, was well connected with his Japanese counterparts like Yamashina. But Japanese ornithologists themselves travelled widely across Japan’s own imperial territories to study and catalogue birds. It is a central contention of Culver’s study that the scientific expeditions of these Japanese ornithologists amounted to a form of ‘avian imperialism’ and served as a means for Japan’s ruling elites to exert colonial power over its colonised regions. Japan’s Empire of Birds is an engaging and informative study. It fleshes out the role of Japanese ornithologists in the development of the ‘new ornithology’ from the 1920s, complementing other studies which have foregrounded the role of Anglo-Americans in the shaping of the bird science. The book also tells a compelling story of the continuing role of imperial elites in Japan’s post-war democratisation. In its desire to emphasise the ways ornithology was woven into Japanese politics, Japan’s Empire of Birds oddly underplays the place of birds and the human feelings for them within ornithological science. Culver’s account tends to look through birds to undercover the role of imperial forms of masculinity within Japanese society across the ‘transwar’ period. But we are left with little discussion of the subjective attachments and varied passion for birds which undoubtedly animated the lives of bird scientists. We needed to hear more on the emotional and subjective ordering of human/avian relations within the ‘more-than-human’ worlds in which Culver’s elite Japanese men moved.