Abstract
The Tokugawa era (1603–1868) witnessed a dramatic expansion in the creation and circulation of maps, which moved from being comparatively rare items at the beginning of the period to banal objects of mass-circulation at the end. Yet the shape of Japan being represented on these maps was greatly altered over the course of this period, particularly with regards to the amorphous area north of Japan, known as Ezo. This transformation in geographical representation similarly affected visions of Japan held beyond its shores, which were partially the product of an increasingly, if punctuated and inconsistent, global circulation of geographic materials in comprehensible forms.
The geography of these northern areas of Japan was gradually clarified by the early nineteenth century, as European efforts at mapping the region were combined with the results of a succession of Tokugawa state-sponsored exhibitions that explicitly aimed to increase the state’s knowledge of its diffuse northern reaches. It will be argued here that the relational aspect of cartographic exchange is crucial to the demarcation of this territory as being Japanese and under the authority of the Tokugawa state. Greater appreciation for the exchange involved in cartographic territorial creation not only allows for the transnational process of state demarcation to be recovered, but also hints at the inherently relational nature of the imperial sovereignty that came to literally remap vast areas of the globe during the nineteenth century.
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Notes
- 1.
In what follows, Ezo is a geographical designation, while Ezo refers to the people who inhabited this land of Ezo.
- 2.
‘Ex recentissima Russici Impery Mappa’.
- 3.
This was a Gerasim Gregorievich Izmailov, who many years earlier had been abandoned on one of the Kuril Islands by the Hungarian adventurer Benyowsky during the course of the latter’s escape from Kamchatka (Akitsuki 1999: 172).
- 4.
In his application of Latour’s notions to the Japanese expedition of Mamiya Rinzo, Brett Walker asserts that Broughton was seeing Sakhalin a “second time” (Walker 2007: 294), but it seems unlikely that this was the case. Barry Gough concludes that “[d]etails of [la Perouse’s] geographic discoveries, which had been sent back to Paris in September 1787 from Petropavlovsk, were apparently not known to Broughton, though if they were (and it seems unlikely) Broughton gives no hints” (Gough 2010, “Introduction”: xxii).
- 5.
Edney notes this is what Harley calls the “illusion of cartographic mimesis” and Wood and Fels the “cartographic myth”.
- 6.
It is unclear whether the map was originally part of the text or was added later, but it seems more likely that Kato drew this map of Bering voyages on the basis of discussions with, or maps received from, Laxman at Nemuro. This would mean the map was drawn and added to the Matsumae-shi at least a decade after the latter was originally written. This is the interpretation accepted by Japanese historians. Note, though, that the representation of Ezo adopted on this map is far closer to the maps Hironaga drew earlier for the Matsumae-shi than to Kato’s understanding shown on the ‘Matsumae-Chizu’.
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Acknowledgements
Attendance at the Dubrovnik Conference was possible thanks to a JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B) ‘Scaling borders: Tension and deterritorialization, Japan and beyond’, 2016–2019 (Project No. 16K17071).
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Boyle, E. (2018). Cartographic Exchange and Territorial Creation: Rewriting Northern Japan in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. In: Altić, M., Demhardt, I., Vervust, S. (eds) Dissemination of Cartographic Knowledge. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61515-8_6
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