ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Travelling Animals, Travelling Ideas: The Hagenbeck Circus and the Remaking of Zoo Space in 1930s Japan

• In Event: Animal Networks. Zoos in the Peripheries 2

English Abstract

This paper examines the understudied transnational entanglements between Japanese zoological institutions and Hamburg’s Hagenbeck enterprise during the early twentieth century, focusing in particular on the case of Higashiyama Zoo in Nagoya. While previous scholarship tended to frame the influence of the Hagenbeck Zoo and Circus in terms of a straightforward diffusion from European centre to non-Western periphery, this study proposes a more complex model of knowledge translation. Central to this inquiry is the 1933 Japanese tour of the Hagenbeck Circus, led by Lorenz Hagenbeck (1882–1956), whose public lectures and demonstrations introduced Japanese audiences and zoo professionals to the animal husbandry practices and display techniques developed at Stellingen. From around 1932, the Nagoya Zoo was preparing to relocate to a new site, actively seeking innovative exhibitionary strategies. The encounter with the Hagenbeck Circus did not simply transmit a fixed architectural formula; rather, it stimulated professional dialogue and local experimentation. The subsequent incorporation of the Tierpanorama into the zoo’s redesigned grounds, opened in 1937, illustrates how imported ideas were selectively reinterpreted to suit regional expectations, material constraints, and institutional priorities. By situating the Nagoya case within broader networks of professional exchange, this paper argues that the circulation of zoo-making knowledge rested not only on formal plans or published treatises but also on tacit skills developed and adapted through practical expertise. Such encounters played a significant role in shaping modern Japanese zoos, fuelling public interest in novel exhibition forms and fostering a hybrid mode of animal display that was neither purely local nor simply derivative of European models.

Author

• Ayako Sakurai, Senshu University