Pamela J. Asquith is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her research interests are in the anthropology of science, comparative cultures of primatology and modern Japanese views of nature. Heita Kawakatsu is a Professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, Japan. His specialization is comparative socio-economic histo0ru and his research interests are intra-Asian competition and British Imperial History. Shusuke Yagi is Associate Professor of Japanese and Asian Studies, Furman University, USA. His fields of research include transdisciplinary studies, modern Japanese literature and popular literature, non-western epistemology/ontology, and IT application to classroom teaching. Hiroyuki Takasaki is Associate Professor in the Department of Biosphere-Geosphere System Science at Okayama University of Science. Japan. His research areas are biological anthropology and primatology.

• Editor's preface Note on Japanese names The World of Living Things by Kinji Irnanislzi Author's preface 1 Similarity and difference 2 On structure 3 On environment 4 On society 5 On history