Interview with W. Puck Brecher, author of “Loving and Loathing Wildlife in Japan”
W. Puck Brecher is a professor of Japanese history at Washington State University. His new book is Loving and Loathing Wildlife in Japan: Four Animal Conservation Paradigms (University of Hawaii Press, 2025). He was kind enough to chat about the book, conservation, wilderness, and Japan.
How did you become interested in this topic? Did you come to it from an interest in wildlife? Or conservation? Or Japan? Or something else?
I have an academic interest in everything I write, but I have great personal interest in wildlife. So the process of researching and writing this book was more intimate and emotional for me than any of my other work. For years my family has enjoyed looking for and watching wildlife, and we have set up trail cameras in the mountains and forests near our home and collected videos of the wildlife living there. I suppose it was just a matter of time before I joined my professional interests as a researcher of Japanese history with my personal interests in wildlife.
What do you hope this book will accomplish in the world? What impact would you like it to have?
To say that Japan is a land of contradictions is a cliché, but that sentiment certainly captures how the international community tends to view Japan’s record of environmental exploitation. There is a lot of confusion and anger about Japan’s historical treatment of wild animals – most famously its hunting of whales, bears, wolves, and many other charismatic species. On the other hand, Japan is also a famously animal-loving society. Pets, zoos, and birdwatching are immensely popular. I really wanted to make historical sense of those so-called contradictions, and I also wanted to trace how conceptualizations and treatment of wildlife evolved over the course of Japanese modernization. It’s important for foreigners to understand that Japan’s so-called transgressions against international environmental protections stem from lessons that the country learned from Western countries in the late 19th century. Global biodiversity loss is largely a legacy of Western colonialism.
Your book looks at four paradigms for wildlife conservation—compassionate control (pre-1868), utility (1868–1945), conservation (1868–1980), and welfare (1902–1999)—could you explain them just a little bit for our readers?
The first, compassionate control, was rooted in Japanese religious beliefs advocating for the moral treatment of animals, though primarily pets and livestock. In contrast, the utility paradigm emphasized the material exploitation of wildlife within public and legal contexts, though it also served as a guiding principle for animal resource management. The third paradigm, conservation, sought to reconcile the first two—compassion and utility—by promoting human stewardship over wildlife. The welfare paradigm, finally, focused on moral education and emotional attachment, prioritizing selective stewardship rather than universal responsibility for all animal life. Of course, these four concepts were neither mutually exclusive nor chronologically independent. They proved to be perennial sources of contention.
Japan doesn’t have a very good reputation for protecting wildlife. What are the historical factors that have made Japan different from many other developed countries on this issue? And what are some common misconceptions about Japan and conservation?
That’s the big question – how and why has Japan continued to defy international norms of animal protection despite aligning itself so closely with the international community on almost everything else? There are too many pieces to that puzzle to summarize easily, but one key factor is the enduring power of humanism in Japan. Yes, Japanese often develop close bonds with animals and display deep compassion for them, but those impulses can be undermined by systemic privileges afforded to human society and its institutions. In Japan, animal welfare can only proceed in ways that are perceived as advantageous to humans. Whereas “rights” is the core concept grounding animal welfare in many Western societies, in Japan the core concept is “responsibility.” Responsibility to the human tends to override the rights of animals for their own sake. Animals that do not fulfill some sort of responsibility for societal stability are systemically unprotected.
As for common misconceptions, I think one is that Japanese have either failed to achieve or lag terribly behind the so-called advancement of animal rights and protections seen in Euro-America. But Japan has not failed to achieve desired goals in that area. It has made deliberate choices to depart from international norms, choices that align with its own values and priorities. It has been successfully toeing that tenuous line for a long time.
What are some features of Japanese wildlife, like different plants and animals, that many people may not know about?
The first thing that comes to mind is that Japan is recognized as one of only thirty-six “biodiversity hotspots” on earth. Biodiversity hotspots are defined as “a combination of quantified species endemism (at least 1,500 endemic plant species…) and habitat loss (70% or more of an area’s primary vegetation).” For its size, Japan indeed claims an impressively diverse array of wildlife: about 90,000 animal species, including 241 mammal, 700 bird, 97 reptile, and 64 amphibian species.
Collectively, hotspots account for only 2.5% of the earth’s land area. Their unusual biological richness makes them critical to the maintenance of global biodiversity, and their extreme vulnerability to habitat loss makes their preservation especially urgent. Japan’s inclusion on the hotspot list is distinctive given that hotspots are areas, not countries, and that most reside within the developing world.
I think when many people think about conservation, they probably just think of themselves as “for” or “against” it. How might the conversation change if we thought about it in a more complex way and considered different paradigms of conservation, etc?
This is an important question. Most people talk about conservation as if it were a simple choice: either you care about nature or you don’t. But that hides the fact that there are different kinds of conservation that can appear to conflict with each other.
Some approaches try to protect wilderness by keeping people out. Others focus on using forests, rivers, and wildlife sustainably so humans can keep benefiting from them. Some emphasize restoring ecosystems and bringing back lost species, and others prioritize the needs of local communities who depend on the land. These approaches can clash. Protecting a predator might hurt ranchers; removing an invasive species might raise animal welfare concerns.
So the real question isn’t “Are you for or against conservation?” It’s “What kind of conservation do you support, what goals matter most, and what trade-offs can you accept?” Thinking this way is more honest and more useful because it recognizes that conservation is about choices, values, and consequences.
Some people say that there really isn’t any “wilderness” left today, for a variety of reasons, but I think including the fact that some of what we might consider wild is protected and made artificial in other ways. Do you think there is still wilderness around? Or how do you think through that topic, generally?
It’s true that human fingerprints are everywhere we look and there is no going back. That’s the sad reality, and it’s an immense responsibility. Minimizing human impacts and biodiversity loss is in everyone’s interest. Degrees of wilderness can and are being preserved, and I think the great majority of people recognize the dystopian consequences of failing to do so.
Interview conducted by Elizabeth Stice
