春雨直播app

Maps are important tools for communicating with and influencing “others” beyond limited communities. This book takes this understanding as its starting point and discusses the significance of the act of mapmaking in a historical context.
 
This book is underpinned by a journey of twenty-odd years that began with the adoption of a project funded by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (International Scientific Research, Joint Research) and titled “Social Information and Political Culture in Medieval and Early Modern Japan: Focusing on Ezu Historical Sources” (principal investigator: Kuroda Hideo, professor, University of Tokyo; FY 1995–97) when I was a university assistant, and it has continued through various joint research frameworks with researchers and diverse professionals from both Japan and abroad, during the course of which I have pursued the question of “what is a map?”
 
As I was compiling this book, I could not help but recall the pleasures of discussing findings gained from examining original maps with various experts, each bringing their own specialized knowledge to the table, and the true joys of joint research as new landscapes previously hidden from view emerged before our eyes as a result of these discussions.
 
In the introduction to (Mapping and politics in premodern Japan; edited by Kuroda Hideo, Mary Elizabeth Berry, and Sugimoto Fumiko, University of Tokyo Press, 2001), which was published as part of the findings of the above-mentioned international joint research, I pointed in my capacity as one of the editors to an interdisciplinary trend since the 1980s which, rather than viewing a map as “a neutral mirror reflecting nature,” as had been the case in the past, and positioning it within a linear history of scientific map development, understands it as something that selectively interprets a complex and multivalent world and converts it into a two-dimensional representation. In this research trend, the power inherent in mapmaking has attracted attention.
 
Focusing on early modern Japan, which created a highly sophisticated map culture, this book also paints a concrete picture of how various forces and groups in society have survived in confrontation with other groups and nature by producing maps. A distinctive feature of this book is that, as well as meticulously analyzing relevant written sources related to the production and use of these maps, in order to analyze maps as a method of representation going beyond mere written descriptions by making full use of colours, diagrams, and lines it has adopted a methodology that takes into account the meaning of colours and objects in a class society and the characteristics of mapmakers and readers and explores the meaning of the act of producing map.
 
Another unique aspect of this book is that it presents the perspective of reconsidering “Japanese” history from the perspective of the ocean. The discovery of a collection of nineteenth-century nautical charts in the Akamon Archives, a repository at the University of Tokyo’s Historiographical Institute inherited from its predecessor government organization, and my overseeing of a project to undertake an examination of these nautical charts as historical sources with a view to making them publicly accessible made me realize that until then I had been unconsciously viewing history from a land-based perspective.
 
I then reinterpreted as “modern nautical charts” these charts, which contain longitudinal and latitudinal data and the surveying, production, and sale of which were overseen by the state, and discovered the fresh perspective of changes in connections between the ocean and people that were brought about by the practical application of these “modern nautical charts” and steam sailing ships. I set about rethinking past research on this transitional period, clarifying how in the course of modernization these changes transformed views of national territory and society that had been built on land.
 
While doing so, I discovered  that the wood-block Survey Map of Japan Published by the Government (Kanban jissoku Nihon chizu 官板実測日本地図) published in the mid-nineteenth century was in fact a map of “national territory” that had been produced by the Kaiseisho 開成所, the shogunate’s institute for Western studies, with the aim of presenting for the first time in its history the scope of “Japan” and that it was an expression of extremely cautious deliberations that took into account the contemporary political situation in the Pacific Ocean and was an uncommon map that in its delineation embodied a transition from an early modern view of territory to a modern understanding of national territory.
 
I wish to bring these introductory remarks on my book to a close with the following quotation from the final chapter:
 
In order to survive, humans have formed groups and battled against nature and other humans. In the course of these struggles, representations in the form of maps have given a comprehensible shape to the world and society, which cannot be seen in their entirety, and have become powerful tools making it possible for humans to take some sort of action towards the world or society. The act of representing the world and society diagrammatically and visually has close bearings on control, agreements, and assertions directed at others.
 
As has been shown in this book, it is only when they are placed within the context of the dynamics of these endeavours, clashes, agreements, and manoeuvres underpinned by the characteristics of each period that visual representations of the world and society begin to speak eloquently to us about the meaning and functions that they possessed at the time.
 
Herein lies the significance of the “historical study of maps.”
 
 

(Written by SUGIMOTO Fumiko, Professor, Historiographical Institute / 2024)