Though Anglo writers may have romanticised albatrosses, Japanese attitudes toward the birds were brusquely unsentimental. Indeed, the Japanese name for Steller’s albatross translates simply as ‘stupid bird’, and by the eve of World War II Japanese bird-hunters had pushed the species to the brink of extinction. But in the post-war period Japanese attitudes toward albatrosses changed utterly. The birds became the object of a sustained conservation campaign: in 1958 their nesting grounds on Torishima were designated a ‘natural monument’ of the nation, and Japanese ornithogists successfully lobbied to have the species added to the IUCN’s embryonic biodiversity database.

Conservationists have generally framed this sea-change in atitudes toward albatrosses as part of a trajectory of national moral renewal. But this framing omits the class politics that often characterise wildlife conservation in practice, as well as the post-colonial context distinctive to post-war Japan. Bird conservation provided a way for Japan’s overwhelmingly aristocratic ornithologists to carve out a new public role for themselves in post-war society. They did so by consciously fashioning the fall and rise of Torishima’s albatrosses as an allegory for mid-twentieth-century international relations, exploiting ambient anxiety about Japan’s compromised sovereignty following defeat in World War II.

In the summer of 1902 two ships raced from opposite sides of the Pacific toward a reef-ringed atoll covered only in birds and birdshit. The rock was named Marcus Island (J: Minami-torishima), and despite its minuscule size it now threatened to provoke a diplomatic confrontation between the United States and Japan, two empires that in the previous years had expanded across the Pacific towards each other with startling rapidity. This chapter explores how booming demand for commodities such as plumage and guano fertiliser encouraged prospectors to stake claims to uninhabited or marginally inhabited bird islands. To do so they deployed the rhetoric of colonial boosterism, exploiting ambient cultures of imperialism to persuade their governments to assert territorial sovereignty over them. Yet international law was vague as to what constituted legitimate occupation of ‘uninhabited’ territory, setting the stage for confrontations over atolls such as Marcus in 1902.