A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912 Marcia Yonemoto A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912. By Kären Wigen. University of California Press, 2010. 340 pages. Hardcover $45.00/£30.95; softcover $34.95/£24.95. A colleague in Asian history who has used cartographic materials as historical sources once drily observed that, "The problem with working on maps is that people always assume you know something about geography." Kären Wigen both works on maps and knows her geography, as she demonstrates in the clear prose and ample illustrations of A Malleable Map. Wigen was trained as a geographer but has made a career as a historian; as such, she is a rare example of a post-linguistic-turn historian with a humanist's understanding of text and meaning and a social scientist's inclination toward the explanatory value of system and function. Both sets of skills are successfully applied in her analysis of Shinano province's transformation into Nagano prefecture over the course of the Tokugawa and Meiji eras. A Malleable Map is not simply "regional history": from a methodological and theoretical point of view the author tackles head-on one of the most intractable issues in the historiography of modern Japan—the question whether the political and social transformations of the Meiji period are best characterized as a modern revolution or as an imperial restoration. Ultimately, Wigen makes the somewhat paradoxical, but ultimately sensible, argument that it was the visual and verbal language of restoration—specifically the purposeful resurrection [End Page 178] of the early imperial spatio-cultural concept of the kuni, or province—that enabled the revolutionary establishment of the modern nation-state. Wigen's argument is based on a close reading of textual evidence from what she calls Japan's early modern and modern "chorographic archive": maps, atlases, gazetteers, statistical yearbooks, school textbooks, and regional newspapers. The first half of the book, "A Province Defined," is comprised of three chapters on maps of Shinano province and Nagano prefecture from the early seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries. In Chapter 1, Wigen analyzes several types of maps produced in the medieval and early modern periods. She begins with depictions of the province of Shinano in the earliest maps of the Japanese archipelago, the so-called Gyōki-style maps, the extant examples of which date from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These highly schematic works did much to establish the visual image of the sixty-six provinces and the trunk roads that connected them to the imperial capital of Kyoto. The author contends that these early stylized maps offer a view from the perspective of Kyoto that envisioned Shinano as a far-flung frontier outpost. This image, however, changed significantly in the early modern period, as new maps commissioned by the Tokugawa shogunate emphasize Shinano's importance in controlling access to "backdoor" approaches to the military capital at Edo. Finally, road or itinerary maps, which were published in great numbers in the mid- to late Edo period, disaggregated the province of Shinano into a network of famous places and potential travel destinations. Throughout this long span of time, in maps made in different genres and for various purposes, "provinces remained the general-purpose framework for making sense of national space" (p. 54). The book then segues into its most compelling chapter, "Shinano Up Close." Here, Wigen systematically analyzes the Shinano kuniezu, the official provincial maps that were commissioned by the Tokugawa government and compiled and drawn up by local map intendants beginning in the seventeenth century. Her careful and persuasive reading of kuniezu allows for a new and revealing analysis of these maps' discursive functions and latent messages. This may be the closest that historians can come to understanding how these richly informative documents, until now difficult to access and apprehend, were viewed and used. She begins her textual analysis by reading kuniezu for what they convey about physical terrain, power relations, economic production, trade and communication, and perspective. However, the revelatory nature of her treatment stems from the way in which she interprets these "layers of data" individually, but then also critically assesses them...