Kinji Imanishi - A Japanese View of Nature: The World of Living Things by Kinji Imanishi

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A Japanese View of Nature

Although Seibutsu no Sekai (The World of Living Things), the seminal 1941 work of Kinji Imanishi, had an enormous impact in Japan, both on scholars and on the general public, very little is known about it in the English-speaking world.

This book makes the complete text available in English for the first time and provides an extensive introduction and notes to set the work in context. Imanishis work, based on a wide knowledge of science and the natural world, puts forward a distinctive view of nature and how it should be studied. Ecologist, anthropologist, and founder of primatology in Japan, Imanishis first book is a philosophical biology that informs many of his later ideas on species society, species recognition, culture in the animal world, cooperation and habitat segregation in nature, the life of nonliving things and the relationships between organisms and their environments.

Imanishis work is of particular interest for contemporary discussions of units and levels of selection in evolutionary biology and philosophy, and as a background to the development of some contributions to ecology, primatology and human social evolution theory in Japan. Imanishis views are extremely interesting because he formulated an approach to viewing nature that challenged the usual international ideas of the time, and that foreshadows approaches to study of the biosphere that have currency today.

Japan Anthropology Workshop Series (JAWS)

Series editor: Joy Hendry

Oxford Brookes University

Editorial board: Pamela J. Asquith, University of Alberta; Eyal Ben-Ari, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Hirochika Nakamaki, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka; Wendy Smith, Monash University; and Jan van Bremen, University of Leiden

A Japanese View of Nature

The world of living things

by Kinji Imanishi

Translated by Pamela J. Asquith, Heita Kawakatsu, Shusuke Yagi and Hiroyuki Takasaki

Edited and introduced by Pamela J. Asquith

Seibutsu no Sekai first published in 1941 by Kbundshob

English edition first published in 2002
by RoutledgeCurzon
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by RoutledgeCurzon
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

Seibutsu no Sekai 1941 Kinji Imanishi, 1993, 2002 BunatarImanishi

Translation 2002 Pamela J. Asquith, Heita Kawakatsu, Shusuke Yagi
and Hiroyuki Takasaki
Introduction and editorial matter 2002 Pamela J. Asquith

Typeset in Times by
Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0-7007-1631-9 (hbk)
ISBN 0-7007-1632-7 (pbk)

Cover photo: Grasshopper nymph (sp. unknown) on a leaf, Hokkaido.
Photo by Hirotaka Matsuka, Tokyo

Printed and bound by Antony Rowe Ltd, Eastbourne

To the memory of Kinji Imanishi (19021992),
and of Junichir Itani (19262001)

Figures

Note on the translators

Pamela J. Asquith is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta, Canada. She received a BA (Anthropology and Psychology) from York University, Canada and a DPhil (Biological Anthropology) from Oxford University, England. Her research interests are in the anthropology of science, comparative cultures of primatology, modern Japanese views of nature and the archives of Kiniji Imanishi. Hobbies include historical biography and adventuring with her giant schnauzer, (TH) Huxley.

Heita Kawakatsu is a Professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, Japan. He received a BA and MA (Economics and Economic History) from Waseda University, Japan, and a DPhil (Economic History) from Oxford University, England. His specialization is comparative socio-economic history and his research interests are intra-Asian competition and British imperial history.

Shusuke Yagi is Associate Professor of Japanese and Asian Studies, Furman University, USA. He received a BA from the International Christian University, Tokyo and a PhD (Anthropology) from the University of Washington, USA. His fields of research interest include transdisciplinary studies, modern Japanese literature and popular literature, non-Western epistemology/ontology, and IT application to classroom teaching.

Hiroyuki Takasaki is Associate Professor in the Department of Biosphere-Geosphere System Science at Okayama University of Science, Japan. He received his BSc and DSc (Biological Anthropology) from Kyoto University, Japan. His research areas are biological anthropology and primatology. His hobby is collecting and breeding butterflies and beetles.

Foreword

As if climbing a favorite mountain

This small book is worth reading many times. I read it in a paperback edition for the first time when I was 17 years old. The pages of my first copy became too loose for easy holding after reading it eight times in five years. Since then I have bought two additional copies, and have ceased to count the number of times that I have read it. A copy accompanied me on many fieldwork trips, and still does. Whenever I read it, in particular high above the earths surface on intercontinental flights, the opening passages impress me anew. It is unbelievable that this book was written before we witnessed our blue planet from space.

Among the works left by Imanishi, this book constitutes just a small portion. It occupies only about one-third of the first volume of his Collected Works, which amount to 14 volumes. Ten volumes were published in 1974 while Imanishi was still an active writer, and four supplementary volumes appeared in 1993 following his death in 1992. In other words, this book comprises less than three per cent of all his printed works. However short it may appear, it bears the essence of all of his work; so he placed it first in his Collected Works. The opening three paragraphs in his own preface well explain the reason for the enigma of the iridescence of this work. He wrote this as his self-portrait to leave behind in case he died, which he thought was fairly likely in the war. Though written by a biologist, this book does not read at all like a book of biology. It is, rather, a book of philosophy written by a naturalist who was a thinker faithful to his own beliefs.

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