Imaginative Mapping: Landscape and Japanese Identity in the Tokugawa and Meiji Eras by Nobuko Toyosawa

Abstract

Reviewed by: Imaginative Mapping: Landscape and Japanese Identity in the Tokugawa and Meiji Eras by Nobuko Toyosawa Rex J. Rowley Imaginative Mapping: Landscape and Japanese Identity in the Tokugawa and Meiji Eras. Nobuko Toyosawa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019. Pp. xiii+305, illustrations, color maps, notes, index. $60.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-674-24112-1. In recent decades historical and historical geography scholarship about Japan has oft en focused on Japanese identity and Japanese essence. Of particular interest to geographers are those studies that ask, What is Japan? How have actual and perceived borders evolved over time? How have various internal perceptions in the context of shift ing national power structures affected Japanese identity? And how have international geopolitical relationships further altered an understanding of Japaneseness? Nobuko Toyosawa addresses such questions in her book Imaginative Mapping: Landscape and Japanese Identity in the Tokugawa and Meiji Eras. Toyosawa analyzes the influential works of several early-modern and modern Japanese scholar-writers that exemplify how the natural landscape has long been a source of power and as a defining core of Japanese identity. Whereas Toyosawa's approach is that of a historian, her multidisciplinary study on landscape's influence dips its toes variously in history, philosophy, religious studies, and geography. Toyosawa makes two critical contributions in Imaginative Mapping. First, she expressly points to the power that landscape has in creating a national narrative. Toyosawa analyzes changes in that narrative over time as seen through a series of local mapping projects, regional topographic surveys, and travel guidebooks conducted by various Japanese scholars across a swath of Japanese history stretching from the 1600s to the earlier days of Japanese imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the time of their publication, she argues, these works—each with legacy ties to similar topographic surveys (called fudoki) done centuries earlier—provided an important and familiar touch point connecting the Japanese people to the landscape, which their writers used to promote ideals that influenced the construction of Japanese identity. Toyosawa shows how local topographies of the 1600s and travel guidebooks widely published in the early 1700s were leveraged by Tokugawa scholars, who invoked and altered neo-Confucianist ideas from China, to promote Japan as shinkoku, a "land [that] had inscriptions of various divine traces" (63). Then she argues how the idea of shinkoku shift ed with the adoption of Western philosophies and [End Page 186] physical geography scientific approaches in the 1800s. Shunning longstanding Chinese influence, late Tokugawa and early Meiji scholars shift ed inward, but they invoked Western ideas such as natural selection as they resurrected origin stories of the Japanese nation (including a strong connection between Heaven and Earth with Japan at its center) to strengthen Japanese identity and promote feelings of nativism. This, of course, paralleled Japan's rising political influence and dominance within the Asian sphere leading, eventually, to the events of World War II. In short, Toyosawa describes how shift ing senses of space, place, and landscape are perceived and then mobilized to create a narrative that has yielded a sense of national community and, eventually, nationalistic power amid changing geopolitics (what Toyosawa calls the "spatializing" of Japan relative to its neighbors). Toyosawa's second key contribution to historical scholarship is in identifying how an ostensibly unique Japanese narrative is dependent on that country's relationship to external geopolitics and philosophies. Toyosawa draws a strong thought line from the spiritual leanings of earlier narratives of Japanese nature as the home of divinities as influenced by Chinese philosophy, to Japanese physical geographies of the Meiji era wherein rational scientific perspectives imported from the West drove descriptions of the expanding Japanese homeland as special, beautiful, and sublime. In doing so Toyosawa argues that Japanese identity, while centered in the space of the Japanese homeland, exists in the context of the ever-present Other. In her words, "the spatialization of Japan was promoted and mediated by the Other, even though the representations of Japan imply its exclusively Japanese space" (7). Imaginative Mapping readers will also gain other important insights into Japanese identity. Readers will recognize the historical roots of sociocultural phenomena still at work today within Japanese society, including...