A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912 (review)

Institutions shape identities. Categories like "black" and "white," "male" and "female" have complex histories, but once institutionalized they are naturalized and reified in ways that rarely fit all the people they are meant to classify. Likewise with spaces: draw a line around a chunk of territory, give it a name and an administrative structure, and odds are the space will eventually assume an identity of its own, maybe even one so apparently natural and timeless that people overlook its manifest constructedness. Take New Jersey. Residents know that south and north diverge markedly in dialect, politics, and cultural orientation. All the same, folks throughout the Garden State share an identity as New Jerseyans-an identity they would not have shared had the Founding Fathers run a state border through Somerset County.

The same is true of Nagano, the historical geographer Kären Wigen argues in A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912. Just as there is nothing natural or obvious about New Jersey, the process of transforming the hodgepodge of minor domains, bannerman fiefs, and shogunal territories in Shinano Province into the modern prefecture of Nagano was a fraught and contested business, fought out in a variety of media of spatial representation.

Wigen divides her explication of Nagano's invention into two parts, which split the book chronologically and thematically. In the first, she focuses on the Tokugawa era and the representation of Shinano Province in maps and gazetteers. In the second, she moves into the Meiji period and dwells on textual sources. Throughout, she engages in a series of very close readings of the materials at hand, be they large-scale maps of Shinano commissioned by the shogunate or geography primers written for the edification of Nagano schoolchildren. The overriding aim of the exercise is, as the promotional text on the dust jacket phrases it, to "redefine restoration (ishin) in modern Japanese history" as "a three-centuries-long project of rehabilitating an ancient map for modern purposes."

The "ancient map" whose rehabilitation Wigen chronicles is composed of kuni-conventionally translated as "provinces" but generally left in the Japanese here. For a time after their demarcation in the seventh century, the kuni were genuine units of provincial governance, but the last vestiges of administrative meaning had disappeared long before the founding of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603. Yet the kuni remained relevant throughout the early modern era. People used them to identify their homelands and their shop names. Many high-ranking warriors and Shintō priests bore honorific titles as provincial governors. And the province was the spatial unit of many genres of maps, ranging from huge official maps, or kuniezu, to practical, pocket-sized guides for travelers. The division of Japan into prefectures in the early Meiji period did not purge the kuni from the spatial vernacular. Even today you can get on the Inbi (Inaba-Mimasaka) line in Tottori and consult with your companion in salty Kawachi dialect about where to have a bowl of tasty Sanuki udon when you get off the train in Tsuyama.

The ancient province of Shinano, kept alive in maps, gazetteers, and pilgrimage guides, served as a template for the modern prefecture of Nagano. Not only did Nagano eventually come to inhabit Shinano's borders more or less exactly, the province's spatial and cultural legacy provided the material with which to fill in the content of the prefecture's identity as a single place. Despite what seems in retrospect to have been a natural transition from province to prefecture, the journey from Shinano to Nagano was not easy. The difficulty lay partly in Shinano's patent artificiality as a region. Travel within the province was difficult because of the high mountain ranges separating its northern and southern reaches, and in any case its major watersheds oriented its several regions away from one another. So long as the province was more an...