New Books In East Asian Studies

Ayelet Zohar’s The Curious Case of the Camel in Modern Japan: (De)Colonialism, Orientalism, and Imagining Asia (Brill, 2022) traces the use of camels in the visual vocabulary of Japan’s definition of itself in the world―especially vis-à-vis “Asia―from the Edo period to the present.” In other words, Zohar uses representations of camels as a lens to view the ways in which Japan has both attempted to leave or conquer Asia on the one hand and to find solidarity in a shared Oriental/Asian identity on the other.  The core of The Curious Case of the Camel is the last two centuries, beginning with the introduction of a pair of live camels in 1821. Zohar shows that camels quickly became objects of popular fascination, polyvalent symbols understood in different ways in different contexts, but that they took on a particularly political dimension in the context of modern Japanese imperialism. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, as Japan sought to define its position in the world vis-à-vis Asia on the one hand a