Imaginative Mapping: Landscape and Japanese Identity in the Tokugawa and Meiji Eras by Nobuko Toyosawa (review)

With Imaginative Mapping: Landscape and Japanese Identity in the Tokugawa and Meiji Eras, Nobuko Toyosawa adds a compelling case study to the ever-growing body of historical scholarship seeking to reveal the intellectual and ideological forces at work in charging landscapes with the power to command our attention, define our identities, and shape our sense of belonging to communities. The book approaches Japan's landscape (fūdo) as a discursive space grounded in topographical features, and so will find its rightful place on the shelf next to studies by Sugimoto Fumiko, Marcia Yonemoto, Mary Elizabeth Berry, and Kären Wigen about the meaning-making functions of Japanese geography.¹ For her part, Toyosawa is chiefly concerned with how and why an eclectic set of thinkers active from the mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries used their imaginations to encode a sense of shared Japanese identity into the landscape.

Toyosawa may seem to be covering familiar ground by analyzing works by well-known intellectual luminaries such as Yamazaki Ansai (1618–1682), Kaibara Ekiken (1630–1714), Hayashi Razan (1583–1657), Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843), Miyake Setsurei (1860–1945), and Shiga Shigetaka (1863–1927), but the way she writes these figures into an ambitious narrative according to their intellectual use of topography—not something with which any of them is typically associated—is distinct. The book's winding path through the historical formation of Japanese subjectivity in spatial terms amounts to a refreshing reimagining of these thinkers that transcends narrow focus on the schools of thought with which they are conventionally identified. For as Toyosawa makes explicit, contemplating their intellectual output only from the boxes into which intellectual historians have tended to put them (e.g., Neo-Confucian, Kokugaku, Western Empirical) runs the risk of ignoring the rich cross-fertilization at play in their solutions to the broader question of what it meant for Japanese people to experience identity-defining affinity with the land they inhabited.

The core argument is twofold. First, intellectuals of the Tokugawa and Meiji periods deliberately imparted to the Japanese landscape qualities that their inhabitants—as a collective—could admire and identify with: Tokugawa thinkers by promoting an exceptional landscape teeming with living deities (shinkoku or "divine land"), as detailed in chapters 1 through 4; and, their Meiji counterparts by advancing the notion of a sublime landscape of superlative beauty without the deities, as discussed in chapters 5 and 6. Second, this stark difference between Tokugawa and Meiji thinkers is best understood, paradoxically, as originating in something they shared: the tendency to leverage ideas originating in an influential cultural Other for the purpose of mapping out the specialness of the Japanese landscape, and then to suppress the outside influence so as to stress that specialness. For the Tokugawa intellectuals investigated, these obfuscated influences were Neo-Confucian cosmology and metaphysics; for the Meiji intellectuals, Western philosophy and empirical science. In short, Imaginative Mapping unearths the transcultural flow of ideas at the heart of a gradual but concerted process of portraying Japan as the most privileged place in the world.

In the second half of the seventeenth century, traces of the divine began to be documented and made more widely known, a necessary step before intellectuals could imagine for others a landscape populated with deities. Chapter 1 describes how the revival of fudoki (regional gazetteers) and similar projects of local topography contributed to this metaphysical exposure. Although fudoki had not been produced since the imperial court ordered their compilation in the Nara period, several Edo-period domains resumed the practice after the daimyo Hoshina Masayuki spearheaded the compilation of one for Aizu. Challenging the view that domains had negligible capacity for self-determination due to an inviolable shogunate, Toyosawa claims that Masayuki exercised authority both within the domain and vis-à-vis the shogunate by using the first Aizu fudoki (1665–1666) to master his lands for...