Another book on maps and Japanese history. Twenty years after Marcia Yonemoto's foundational essay on the “spatial vernacular” published in this journal in 2000 and seventeen since her Mapping Early Modern Japan (2003), fourteen years since Mary Elizabeth Barry's Japan in Print (2006) and ten since Kären Wigen's A Malleable Map (2010), the Anglophone historiography of Japan of the twenty-first century once again confirms that maps—their production, circulation, and consumption—constitute one of its centripetal focuses of scholarly interest.1 Undergraduate courses and graduate seminars, fields in general examinations, and international conferences on early modern and modern Japan appear incomplete without mentioning its cartographic production. The recent Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps (2016) was indeed a celebration of maps (and space) as one of the most compelling areas of research for Japan specialists.2
Maps are cartographic representations that are taken to mirror spatial imaginations and territorial communities within...
