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 and “the West” on the other, camels became one part of a visual vocabulary of Orientalism. This function of the camel imaginary is in some ways unchanged today, even if the political valences of camel iconography is new and different.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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