Mapping Early Modern Japan

Space, Place, and Culture in the Tokugawa Period, 1603-1868

Marcia Yonemoto

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780520232693
• eBook ISBN: 9780520928305
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

This elegant history considers a fascinating array of texts, cultural practices, and intellectual processes—including maps and mapmaking, poetry, travel writing, popular fiction, and encyclopedias—to chart the emergence of a new geographical consciousness in early modern Japan. Marcia Yonemoto's wide-ranging history of ideas traces changing conceptions and representations of space by looking at the roles played by writers, artists, commercial publishers, and the Shogunal government in helping to fashion a new awareness of space and place in this period. Her impressively researched study shows how spatial and geographical knowledge confined to elites in early Japan became more generalized, flexible, and widespread in the Tokugawa period. In the broadest sense, her book grasps the elusive processes through which people came to name, to know, and to interpret their worlds in narrative and visual forms.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes to the Reader
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Envisioning the Realm: Administrative and Commercial Maps in the Early Modern Period
• 2. Annotating Japan: The Reinvention of Travel Writing in the Late Seventeenth Century
• 3. Narrating Japan: Travel and the Writing of Cultural Difference in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
• 4. Imagining Japan, Inventing the World: Foreign Knowledge and Fictional Journeys in the Eighteenth Century
• 5. Remapping Japan: Satire, Pleasure, and Place in Late Tokugawa Fiction
• Conclusion: Famous Places Are Not National Spaces
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index