Printing Landmarks: Popular Geography and "Meisho Zue" in Late Tokugawa Japan by Robert Goree

Abstract

Reviewed by: Printing Landmarks: Popular Geography and "Meisho Zue" in Late Tokugawa Japan by Robert Goree R. Keller Kimbrough Printing Landmarks: Popular Geography and "Meisho Zue" in Late Tokugawa Japan. By Robert Goree. Harvard University Asia Center, 2020. 400 pages. ISBN: 9780674247871 (hardcover). Collectors, bibliographers, and even amateur aficionados of early modern Japanese woodblock-printed books tend to be familiar with the vast and varied genre of illustrated meisho zue "gazetteers," a distinctive type of popular publication that took the Japanese book market by storm from around the end of the eighteenth century. Indeed, meisho zue were printed in such great numbers that the shelves and catalogues of antiquarian book dealers today can be hard to peruse without encountering multiple examples from the genre. Nevertheless, until now there has been no book-length English-language study of these works, largely because of the confining nature of our own disciplinary boundaries and the difficulty of categorizing meisho zue—as literature, art, cartography, or some other publishing genre. Robert Goree's Printing Landmarks: Popular Geography and "Meisho Zue" in Late Tokugawa Japan remedies this omission by addressing the history and conventions of meisho zue from the eighteenth century through the early Meiji period (1868–1912). Goree's work is methodologically rigorous, insightful, and well researched in English and Japanese, and Goree rightly maintains that meisho zue, which he describes as a kind of "nonfictional fantasy geography," belongs to "the history of Japanese literature and cartography" (p. 67, emphasis in original). To make sense of an enormous and relatively diverse corpus of texts, Goree focuses on two foundational works: Akisato Ritō's Miyako meisho zue (Illustrated Collection of Famous Places in the Capital; 1780) and its sequel, Shūi Miyako meisho zue (More Famous Places in the Capital; 1787). Over the course of his introduction and five subsequent chapters, Goree discusses dozens of other contemporaneous works as well, providing a rich historical context for the principal objects of his study. The book presents a focused and clear central argument—that "the popularity of meisho zue lasted for decades because they were innovative maps of landmarks that advanced a convincing vision of abundance, experienced virtually by readers, in a format established by Ritō and sustained by others linked to him" (p. 7). The monograph's written style is scholarly, sophisticated, and engagingly journalistic, and for those with an interest in the history of Japanese books, it will be a pleasure to read. Better still, Printing Landmarks contains 125 mostly monochrome images of maps, meisho zue, and a wide variety of other woodblock-printed works (artistic prints, travel guides, picture books, and the like), providing a great visual depth to Goree's study and allowing readers to see and learn about a plethora of relatively obscure publications that they might have otherwise never encountered. In chapter 1, "The Reader as Virtual Traveler," Goree explores the concept of gayū (imaginary/dream travel; literally to "lie down and go" [p. 12]), which the [End Page 341] court noble Fujiwara no Takasuke (1741–1804) invoked in a preface to Shūi miyako meisho zue to articulate the work's appeal for contemporaneous audiences. Gayū is a key concept for Goree (as well as for the editors and consumers of meisho zue, he argues), and he pursues it throughout his study. As Goree explains, gayū "might be considered the equivalent to armchair travel in Western cultures, insofar as it rhetorically describes the power of books and other media to enable discovery of a place without visiting it" (p. 41). He further argues that Ritō and some of his successors promoted gayū as a clever "marketing strategy" to encourage "reading as a form of virtual travel" (p. 35). Goree associates gayū with a particular "mode of reading" (p. 66), and he attributes it—or the marketing of it—with the success of Miyako meisho zue and subsequent meisho zue in the marketplace of books. In chapter 2, "The Documentation and Display of Place," Goree focuses on editors, artists, and the editorial processes behind the compilation of meisho zue. Taking Miyako meisho zue again as his exemplary case, he argues that "meisho zue resonated with readers because they were compiled according...