Printing Landmarks: Popular Geography and Meisho Zue in Late Tokugawa Japan by Robert Goree (review)

Ever since Peter Kornicki's 1998 The Book in Japan, there has been a sustained academic interest in the print culture of early modern Japan.¹ However, grasping both the range and the specificities of a particularly varied published output is daunting, especially for the second half of the Edo period. This is what Printing Landmarks sets out to do via an in-depth exegesis of a landmark publication, Akisato Ritō's 1780 Miyako meisho zue (hereafter MMZ), that fans out into an analysis of the broader genre of meisho zue. The book and the genre will be familiar to many scholars of early modern Japan, but surprisingly this is the first monograph on the topic. This is due to the sheer scale of the books, the fact that they don't fit snugly into any established discipline, as well as a comparative scarcity of Western-language studies on late eighteenth-century Japan.

Goree addresses these difficulties with a crossdisciplinary approach that parallels Ritō's own trajectory: from an initial grounding in literature toward a collaborative network of references that includes visuality, geography, and cultural history. The books in question are investigated holistically as "material objects, semiotic spaces, and commercial products" (p. 10). The chapters are clustered around the facets of what Goree identifies as the five reasons for the genre's success: astute marketing, the construction of an imaginative travel experience, cartographic elements adapted to the book format, the highlighting of abundance and auspiciousness, and an extended collaborative production network.

The opening chapter looks at meisho zue from the point of view of marketing and reception, aspects which are usually afterthoughts in most studies. Full use is made of senryū poems and diaries to show that the books were "souvenirs, gifts and amusements" (p. 54) for a socially diverse readership. This included foreigners, and Goree intuits correctly that employees of the Dutch East India Company would have acquired such gorgeous books (p. 54)—copies of MMZ and its sequel can be found for example in the Siebold collection in Leiden University Library (Ser. 294, 295). Goree integrates the comparatively recent concern in book history studies with the materiality of the book and of the reading experience, by considering the influence of the books' size on their illustrations (p. 85), pointing to cognate display practices such as kaichō and catalogues of materia medica (pp. 108–10, the latter drawing on the work of Federico Marcon) and showing that "the notion of geographic abundance could manifest in a book's materiality as an object" (p. 268). This enables an assessment of the books as "both crafted material objects and distinctive modes of rhetorically sophisticated geospatial discourse" (pp. 69–70).

The rhetoric of meisho zue prefaces is carefully weighed with a critical eye to hyperbole. However, the mention of MMZ being sold "as unbound sheets with covers and binding string" (p. 38) does not necessarily mean runaway success. This was a common way to market books in Qing China and would have been a way to reduce the otherwise high purchase cost and allow customization by the readers.² The rush to characterize this as an anomaly stems from an implicit assumption of the printed text as final fixed form, challenged among others by Adrian Johns in The Nature of the Book.³ Goree does discuss meisho zue that remained in manuscript form—most interestingly, one of these was offered to the Sumiyoshi shrine, showing its "status as an auspicious object" (p. 275). There is, however, a lingering bias toward print, while much work remains to be done in the field of Edo-period manuscript culture.

One of the central themes of Printing Landmarks is that meisho zue "tapped into a widespread cultural practice of simulation" (p. 35) to offer an "imaginary experience of travel mediated by artistic or literary media" (p. 12, also pp. 43–44), subsumed under the term gayū. As...