KURODA (Nagamichi).
Wild Duck Hunting at Haneda.
From a famous Japanese ornithologist to a celebrated American geologist/oceanographer
An association copy of Kuroda Nagamichi’s work on how to hunt wild ducks in Haneda, an area that is now famous for its airport. Kuroda Nagamichi (1889–1978) was a well-known ornithologist and nobleman. The book was gifted to, and bears the ownership inscription of, T. Wayland Vaughan (1870–1952), an American geologist and oceanographer.
Kuroda had written previously in Japanese about wild duck hunting on his grounds in Haneda and the clever European system of ‘decoy ponds’. The present book was produced on the occasion of the Third Pan-Pacific Congress taking place in Tokyo. As he explains in the preface ‘I have arranged to invite international zoologists…to my Haneda wild duck hunting ground and to have a pleasant day of hunting wild ducks with them there’.
When searched together, Kuroda and Vaughan appear in various reports and papers, and seemed to have had a long association. One particular paper from 1930 records that they were both on the American Society of Mammalogists’ Council for the Preservation of Whales. Both men were highly distinguished academics in their fields, and from the 1930s Vaughan visited Japan more frequently, in part due to his love of Asian art. Vaughan took steps to lean the Japanese language and became a lecturer in Japanese art. He later received the prestigious Order of the Rising Sun from Emperor Hirohito, whom he had met before. This was possibly through Kuroda, who was himself a member of the Imperial Japanese household.
Very rare. OCLC locates copies at the NDL, London’s Natural History Museum, Harvard and Stanford.
