Mapping Early Modern Japan

by Yonemoto, Marcia

• ISBN13: 9780520232693
• ISBN10: 0520232690
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Marcia Yonemoto is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Notes to the Reader	xi
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction	1	(7)
Envisioning the Realm: Administrative and Commercial Maps in the Early Modern Period	8	(36)
Annotating Japan: The Reinvention of Travel Writing in the Late Seventeenth Century	44	(25)
Narrating Japan: Travel and the Writing of Cultural Difference in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries	69	(32)
Imagining Japan, Inventing the World: Foreign Knowledge and Fictional Journeys in the Eighteenth Century	101	(28)
Remapping Japan: Satire, Pleasure, and Place in Late Tokugawa Fiction	129	(44)
Conclusion: Famous Places Are Not National Spaces	173	(6)
Notes	179	(32)
Bibliography	211	(16)
Index	227