A Subject on the Map

Abstract

What kind of meaning did the map attached to the “A Country Schoolteacher” of Tayama Katai include ? From the change of the geography textbooks in the late Meiji era we know that the geographical map was organized from the vertical gaze of the Japan Empire. Katai adopted this gaze to his novel, “A Country Schoolteacher”. He put the hero on a map and moved him on it. This operation made the time, the space and the description of the novel. Katai got this viewpoint from his experience of the Rosso-Japanese War. Under the gaze a young man of a country was grasped as a subject of the Japan Empire. As the result, the tragedy of the hero of the novel came to cause the sympathy of the people of the 'imaged community' of Japan.