Description: 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.
Review Quotes: "A bold and ambitious work that traces the ways Japanese people have drawn maps and represented travel from ancient times through the mid-nineteenth century. It contains a novel juxtaposition of maps in all shapes and sizes, poetry, travel accounts, encyclopedias, satire and parodies, and demonstrates how these shared the same mental universe. In short, this is one of the best examples I have seen of the 'new' cultural history in a Japanese context."