Mapping Early Modern Japan: Space, Place, and Culture in the Tokugawa Period (1603-1868) (review)

In this intriguing interdisciplinary work, Yonemoto integrates historical analysis, map interpretation, and literary criticism to reveal how mapmakers, travel writers, encyclopedists, and satirists in the Tokugawa Period enriched the understanding, interpretation, and portrayal of geographical and societal space in early modern Japan.

In Chapter 1, "Envisioning the Realm: Administrative and Commercial Maps in the Early Modern Period," Yonemoto explores how the shogunate's official mapmaking projects, as well as the work of such commercial mapmakers as Ishikawa Ryusen and Nagakubo Sekisui, created visual and verbal conventions for characterizing the space and culture of Japan, and simultaneously promoted map reading as a commonsense skill.

Yonemoto next examines, in a chapter titled "Annotating Japan," how travel writing was reinvented by, and for, non-elites in the late 1600s. Rather than primarily describing famous places from poetic works, as classical and medieval travel diarists had done, the new travel writers such as Kaibara Ekiken focused on conditions of ordinary places and people throughout Japan, thus connecting cartography and ethnography. Another key difference was that classical travel writers wrote from a capital-outward or capital-downward orientation, whereas early modern travel writers adopted varied viewpoints as they described their travels throughout Japan, reflecting the development of a broader, more varied transportation network and a market economy.

Next, in "Narrating Japan," Yonemoto demonstrates how, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, travel writers such as Nagakubo Sekisui, Furukawa Koshoken, and Tachibana Nankei created diverse marketing niches as they used the subjective experience of travel to position themselves as authorities on a broad range of subjects. Yonemoto argues that their works reveal ambivalence between description and literary embellishment, between landscapes as shapers of human perception or as shaped by human perceptions.

In her next chapter, "Imagining Japan, Inventing the World," Yonemoto explores how encyclopedias and fictional accounts of foreign travel served to inform the educated urban commoner about the world beyond Japan and to re-characterize the relationships between Japan and other countries in the region. This chapter emphasizes the role of Hiraga Gennai's satirical travel writings' "thinly veiled double meanings . . . [that point out] that truly 'civilized' behavior is rare, within as well as outside of Japan" (125).

Yonemoto's chapter on "Remapping Japan: Satire, Pleasure, and Place in Late Tokugawa Fiction" demonstrates an even closer connection between geography and satire. She shows how writers and texts used fictionalized province maps, cosmological diagrams, pilgrimage guidemaps, et al. to remap "the small, self-contained world of the pleasure quarters as a separate country, one that, like the foreign countries of earlier satirical fiction, often bore an uncanny resemblance to Japan itself" (129).

With her skillful integration of historical analysis of Edo-era maps, travel writing, encyclopedias, and satires, Yonemoto offers a fascinating view of how Japanese came to know and think about the geography, space, place, and culture of their land in early modern Japan. She argues that this blossoming of travel writing fostered, and was fostered by, the increasing spatial knowledge and sophistication of the populace.