著者

近森 高明

出版者

京都大学文学部社会学研究室

雑誌

京都社会学年報

巻号頁・発行日

no.8, pp.81-96, 2000-12

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This article deals with the animal anti-cruelty movement in Meiji era Japan. Since the first years of the era, some people noticed rampant cruelties towards working horses on the street. The movement to prevent such cruelties began in 1899 with an article which appeared in a popular magazine Taiyou (The Sun) by Tatsutaro Hiroi, a scholar of religion. Since then he eagerly engaged himself in joumalism to admonish and call on people to prevent cruelty to animals. Finally he founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1902. What makes us curious is the fact that around the year 1900 a lot of other social problems occurred and drew public attention such as problems of poverty and suffering of factory laborers. We can describe the situation around the time as this: a (socially constructed) gaze which notices "pain and suffering of others" has spread among Japanese society. But then a question occurs to us. Why was the problem of animals raised at the same time as the problem of workers was raised? Usually people would think that problems concerning human beings have to be solved at first and only then the problem of animals, but why were the course of the facts not this way? The clue to answer this question is the social class to which those who joined in the animal anti-cruelty movement belonged: they were almost all from the upper class. A possible interpretation is as follows: on the one hand, the upper class people internalized the gaze directed to "pain and suffering of others" and noticed the problems of poverty and suffering of workers, but on the other hand, they couldn't make an overall reformation of the social structure because of their class interest. To solve this dilemma, the suffering animals on the street were focused on and the upper class people (unconsciously) tried to concentrate public attention on the problem of animals. The pain and suffering of animals were, as it were, discovered as a safe target of humanity.