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

This book is "a history of mapping as an idea," not a cartographic history, Marcia Yonemoto warns us at the outset. Her intent is to identify "the elusive processes by which people came to name, to know, and to interpret the natural and human worlds in which they lived" (pp. 1-2). Her more specific objective is to capture the Tokugawa geographic consciousness or spatial sensibilities as they are represented in maps as well as texts, especially travel accounts, both real and imaginary. Yonemoto aims to show how writers, mapmakers, and artists helped shape the Japanese mapping of place and its relationship with identity and culture.

Early Japanese maps were patterned after Chinese cadastral maps. Then, in the late sixteenth century, missionaries introduced Western-style maps. The mapmaking that became a common government practice beginning in the early Tokugawa period combined characteristics of both styles. When the official maps were commercially reproduced, they underwent continual and numerous innovations. A thriving printing and publishing industry made them plentiful by the early eighteenth century. But this conventional cartographic enterprise is only the starting point for Yonemoto's book. Her emphasis is on the travel narratives that translated mapping into a literary and imaginative process—or a "geosophy," as she wishes to call it.

The initial literary travelers were government officials. Then, during the Tokugawa period, in addition to samurai, daimyo themselves traveled regularly as the Shogunate required them to divide their time equally between their home domains and Edo (Tokyo), the capital. Some of these high-ranking travelers kept diaries. Later, as they were joined by less elite travelers, travel writings became more diversified. In these writings, Yonemoto discerns two modes of mapping. The first, from the mid-seventeenth century to the early eighteenth, was an annotative mode that sought a spatial order in the human and natural world and emphasized direct observation. The second, from the mid-eighteenth century through the early nineteenth, was an embellished narrative mode that sought to impose order on things and stressed active observation. The latter style also lent itself to play, satire, and fictionalized accounts during a period when actual foreign travel was forbidden. Imaginary journeys were often taken to analyze and critique the familiar.

Though Yonemoto does not offer a full explanation for this radical transformation, she points to market forces: writers felt increasing pressure to produce work that appealed to a wider audience. In doing so, they transformed the nature of their writing. This is perhaps how motifs of pleasure and the exotic found their way into the Tokugawa narratives. The Yoshiwara, the notorious pleasure quarters in Edo, along with similar places in Kyoto, Osaka, and Nagasaki, became the most frequent subjects of detailed description. Some narrators even went so far as to offer in the Yoshiwara an alternative Japan, the "Land of the Rising Moon," to mirror the Land of the Rising Sun.

Such mappings of pleasure emerge as a main theme of Yonemoto's book. The real landscape of Mount Fuji, which appears on the cover, and which many see as central to Japanese thinking, is mentioned only by allusion. In fact, the "place" of nature and its relation to culture and identity are completely absent from the discussion. Likewise, the Tokugawa woodblock prints, an enduring and popular pictorial genre, get no attention, even though they do reveal spatial sensibilities—for example, in their depictions of urban and rural places and landscapes.

While Yonemoto does not consider the technological aspect of her story, her attempt to define Tokugawa spatial sensibilities may nevertheless interest historians of technology, especially insofar as it can show what difference new technologies of the nineteenth century made to the ways in which the Japanese perceived and represented "place" as geographic concept. Yonemoto's use of primary and secondary sources in Japanese makes...