the formations of class, race, and religious distinctions? Historians of human–animal relations should under- take the intellectual task of responding to these questions when revisiting social histories, or else the field would lose much of its justification. A possible venue for approaching this challenge and going beyond an- imals as accessories in all-too-human power dynamics is implicitly suggested in the abundant references to emotions in Meat, Mercy, and Morality. Samanta describes how animals in colonial India triggered, among other emotions, “panic, fear, and devotion” (p. 28). This set of affects enriches and complicates the material role of animals in empire building. Shira Shmuely Shira Shmuely is an assistant professor at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of The Bureaucracy of Empathy: Law, Vivisection, and An- imal Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cornell, 2023). Aya Homei. Science for Governing Japan’s Population. (Science in History.) 300 pp., notes, bibl., index. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. £75 (cloth); ISBN 9781009186834. E-book and open access available. With the increasing attention to the concept of population in recent scholarship, Aya Homei’s Science for Governing Japan’s Population makes both responsive and unique contributions to the critical historiography of modern population governance. While her work engages in dialogue with landmark studies on popula- tion governance and knowledge networks—for example, Alison Bashford’s Global Population (Columbia, 2014) and Michelle Murphy’s The Economization of Life (Duke, 2017)—it revisits the history of Japan’s nation- and empire-building and postwar reconstruction projects through the heretofore understudied yet central aspect of modern governance—that is, population (jinko ̄ ). Homei pays particular attention to what she calls the “science–policy nexus” (p. 24), which indicates the interaction of and co-production between population science and state-led population management in the making of the regime of population governance in modern Japan. At its core, the book situates “population” within the complex web of state administration, research and technical bureaucrats, and domestic and trans- national population networks, as opposed to equating it with an indisputably objective, quantitative category of selected people. Homei’s approach to tracing the historical trajectory of the science–policy nexus in Japan is reasonably straightforward, as she meticulously and extensively analyzes key actors in consolidating population science and governing technologies in different periods between the 1860s and the 1960s. Structured chronologically, the book begins with the development of modern statistics, which coincided with the nation-building and co- lonial expansion process led by the Meiji bureaucrats (Ch. 1). Chapter 2 turns to “vital statistics” ( p. 60), which refers to the system of statistical production based on a set of measurements of population qualities and exam- ines the making of such corporeal “truths” about the Japanese population by focusing on modern midwives, who served as a liaison between the state and individuals. Chapters 3 and 4 primarily discuss the roles of re- search and technical bureaucrats in generating policy-oriented demographic knowledge in the interwar period and, ultimately, in making wartime policies pertaining to the management of human resources. As Homei sharply notes, there is a salient continuity between the wartime and postwar periods in the primary actors of the population governance system. Chapter 5 shows that although Japan’s politico-economic conditions changed to justify birth control for national reconstruction in the postwar era, wartime state institutions and population experts—for example, Tachi Minoru and Koya Yoshio—continued to play a vital role in launching population control measures, including family planning campaigns. Chapter 6 contains an extensive discus- sion of how the family planning project evolved out of the entanglements between the local, the national, and the transnational against the backdrop of Cold War tensions and rising developmentalism. 194 Book Reviews: Modern