Issue #17: Spring 2007

The High Art of Japanese Maps

by Josephine Anderson

Maps of the Tokugawa Era provide dramatic insight into the history and culture of Japan during one of its most restrictive periods.

When we look at a map, many of us see the city, the country, the world itself, scaled to fit on a piece of paper. We expect mapmaking to be carried out with relentless precision. Besides some colour coding, artistic expression takes the backseat: first comes accuracy. Then there are old maps, narrated by the brown stains of age, which have a way of reaching beyond the scientific.

When UBC purchased the largest collection outside Japan of Tokugawa era maps and guidebooks (circa 1600-1868), scholars, students and library staff welcomed the event with excitement. The year was 1964, and before long the new department of Asian Studies and various divisions of the UBC Library were abuzz with ideas on how best to showcase the George Beans collection (named after its original collector), which consists of some of the earliest maps ever printed in Japan. Most of the maps, though not all, offer the basic navigational instructions we expect from maps, but after that utility is a raw allure. To the keen observer, these prints are portholes into one of the most restricted segments of Japan’s past.

“A lot of the maps drawn in the 17th and 18th centuries are not what we think maps should be today,” says social anthropologist Tama Copithorne. “Many of the maps are not scientific, but more visual. These are by artists, not cartographers.”

Copithorne wrote a curatorial paper on the Beans collection in 1987, when a traveling exhibition was in the works. Advocates foresaw showings all over Canada and Asia. But the sponsorship fell through, and the traveling exhibition never happened. For 42 years the Beans maps remained relatively hidden away in UBC’s Rare Books and Special Collections, accessible only by request and susceptible to the destructive effects of air and light each time viewed. Then last year, 285 Beans pieces were digitized in the first of a two-phase project that will display about 1,000 items when completed. Those who have been labouring to spotlight the collection call it a triumph. Now anyone who feels like it can click ‘zoom’ and analyze each item in minute detail online.

“You know, it’s our crown jewel here and it’s gotten very little attention,” says Peter Nosco, head of Asian Studies at UBC. “Everybody would agree that it’s one of the three best collections in the world of maps from that era. It shows one how people from a broad range of classes situated themselves spatially, oriented themselves to their community, to their country, the world around them. That notion of a kind of orientation in time and space is not something that would be of concern to most people in most times,” he adds. “It’s part of a modern consciousness.”

Given the limitations imposed by Japan’s shoguns during the Tokugawa era, also called the Edo period, it could have been a time of stunted growth. For these 250-some years, Japan was strictly isolated from the rest of the world by a policy called Sakoku, literally “closed country.” Trade was restricted to China and the Netherlands. International travel was banned. Yet UBC’s maps, layered with text and much more pictorial than European ones of the same time, trace a curiosity for the unknown brewing on the inside of the tightly lidded country. As with a child whose curiosity increases with the size of a secret, Japan’s intense restrictions actually fed the growth of this modern consciousness.

“The Japanese are well-known travelers. That goes way back to the Edo period,” says Copithorne, who is a case in point herself. She was raised in Tokyo, and was the first Japanese exchange student to attend UBC in 1955. “They’re always interested in what other people are doing,” she adds.

The collection holds several pocket-sized maps, which helped inquisitive citizens situate themselves in relation to other regions in Japan. Tomoko Goto, Japanese reference librarian at UBC’s Asian Library, says that these were originally meant for the Samurai ruling class.

“Strictly speaking, commoners were not allowed to travel except when they went to temples and shrines, or to hot springs to cure disease,” she says. But those persistent enough found ways around limiting laws. Commoners disguised themselves as pilgrims, trekking to the Imperial Shrine of Ise in central Japan, for example, and afterwards extended their trips. Following map routes, they stopped to sightsee in new places, so that in the end it was two or three months before they returned to their village and had to trade in their carefree, nomadic lifestyle for the regimented order of home.

More and more as the Tokugawa era progressed, ordinary commoners began to lay out huge, picturesque maps on their tatami straw mat floors. One Beans map covers more than 30 square feet in area when folded out. In this way, those who could not afford a journey indulged in armchair travels around Japan or even the world, says Copithorne. “That’s why these are so beautifully drawn. You have to realize, it’s not just maps. I remember my father was a collector of antiques and we also had a number of old maps,” she says. “Even today you see a lot of Japanese traveling. Culturally they’re curious people.”

Beautiful sea maps guided merchants and Samurai through the Japanese archipelago. Urban maps, frequently of Edo (now called Tokyo), led city dwellers about their surroundings in innovative ways, indicating, for example, entertainment districts. Maps of port towns, like bourgeoning Yokohama or Nagasaki, document Japan’s acceptance of foreign trade and its exit from solitude at the end of the Tokugawa era.

But given that Japan was isolated for two and a half centuries, its earliest world maps are perhaps some of the most telling. Leaving accuracy aside, these usually depict Japan, India or China centered and oversized, with North America not always shown at all. In some, mythical lands are drawn as close to Japan as real countries like Korea and China. “It’s very interesting what the worldview was in those days, completely unscientific, but fascinating,” says Copithorne.

Over the years, the collection has been studied in a few scholarly papers, but the digitization, a collaboration between UBC Library’s University Archives and Rare Books and Special Collections, is its first big public exposition. In the first phase of the project, all single-sheet maps were digitized. In the second phase, all atlas maps will be digitized. To those who were left with what Nosco calls “a little bit of a bad aftertaste” when the traveling exhibition flopped, detailed online access to the Beans maps is a fresh mint.

The website cataloguing the maps was set up in time for the Early Modern Komonjo and Kuzushi Workshop, co-hosted by UBC and Stanford University in the summer of 2006, where experts were trained to read a certain kind of cryptic Japanese script. Few people in the world can interpret the squiggly writing, which is apparent on several Beans pieces.

Christina Laffin, an assistant professor in the department of Asian Studies and co-director of the month-long workshop, hopes it helped open the Beans pieces to more researchers. Her impression is that the collection has been relatively closed to the public, probably unintentionally. Now that it’s online, educators, graduate students, curators, archival specialists, collectors and geographers are expected to use the collection in greater depth. “It makes a huge difference,” says Laffin, “because no scholar has to come here to actually physically see the collection.” Nosco adds that since the maps are catalogued in English, readers don’t need to know Japanese to appreciate them.

The Beans digitization is part of a larger movement by many institutions, such as uc Berkeley, which has a similar website showcasing its Tokugawa maps, to make their collections more public and more usable, says Laffin.

The workshop and the hiring of digitization expert Bronwen Sprout at University Archives were the final elements needed to get the initiative off the ground.

“It was a kind of perfect storm in a sense,” says Nosco. “You had all the ingredients now there to bring attention to the maps, to do this very high-powered workshop, to get the maps digitized, to promote this as a kind of public treasure.”

“It’s a gift from UBC to the public,” he says proudly.

That it is. ¤

Josephine Anderson is in her fourth year at UBC, majoring in English Literature.