A malleable map: geographies of restoration in central Japan, 1600-1912 9780520945807, 9780520259188, 9780520272767

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A Malleable Map

ASIA: LOCAL STUDIES/GLOBAL THEMES

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Karen Wigen, and Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Editors 1. Bicycle Citizens: The Political World of the Japanese Housewife,

by Robin M. LeBlanc 2. The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, edited by Joshua A. Fogel 3. The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, by Hue-Tam Ho Tat 4. Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader, edited by Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom 5. Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915—1953, by Susan L. Glosser

6. An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai (1898-1975), by Geremie R. Barmé

7. Mapping Early Modern Japan: Space, Place, and Culture in the Tokugawa Period, 1603-1868, by Marcia Yonemoto 8. Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories, by Madeleine Yue Dong 9. Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China, by Ruth Rogaski 10. Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China, by Andrew D. Morris 11. Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan, by Miyako Inoue

12. Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period, by Mary Elizabeth Berry 13. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination, by Anne Allison 14. After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai, by Heonik Kwon 15. Tears from Iron: Cultural Responses to Famine in Nineteenth-Century China, by Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley

16. Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth-Century China, by Paul A. Cohen 17. A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912,

by Karen Wigen 18. Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China, by Thomas S. Mullaney

GEOGRAPHIES OF RESTORATION IN CENTRAL JAPAN,

1600-1912

Karen Wigen

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2010 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wigen, Karen, 1958—

A malleable map : geographies of restoration in central Japan, 1600-1912 / Karen Wigen.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical reterences and index. ISBN 978-0-520-25918-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Nagano-ken (Japan)—Historical geography.

2. Nagano-ken (Japan)—History. 3. Japan— Administrative and political divistons—History.

4. Japan—Maps—History. 5. Cartography—Japan— History. 6. Japan—Historical geography. I. Title. DS894.59.N331I9W54 2010

QIT .520903—dc22 2009042967 Manufactured in the United States of America 19). 48). AF? 4G: 245, - BAS 5. I OEE “TO

LO 32 A Go eh, Sn SR oT This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine tree. It ts acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.

OUR LAND SHINANO (SHINANO NO KUNI)

1. The land of Shinano borders on ten provinces. How high its towering mountains! How long its flowing rivers! Its four plains—Matsumoto, Ina, Saku, Zenkoji—are rich in fertile soils. Although it has no seacoast, it is rich in resources; Blessed with abundance, it lacks for nothing. 2. Mountains tower in all directions: Ontake, Norikura, Komagatake. Asama is an active volcano that cannot be controlled, yet it too defends the land. As for the pure waters that flow through the province, In the north are the Sai and Chikuma rivers, In the south, the Kiso and the Tenrya. These are Shinano’s sinews, nourishing the land. 3. In the Kiso Valley, cedar and cypress stand rank on rank; In the lake of Suwa, fish are bountiful. Thus the people’s livelihood flourishes. Is a single village lacking in the five grains? Not only can they catch deer, they gather mulberry as well; Feeding it to the silkworms, they start an enterprise. Although its thread is slender, the cocoon is hardly slight; The lifeline of the province is carried by this thread. 4. The curious seek out Sonohara; the weary rest at Nezame-no-Toko. But watch your step when you visit Kumeji-bashi, Dangerous since the day when the road jutted out over the ravine of Kiso. Travelers swarm to the spa at Tsukama; famed for its moonlight is Obasuteyama. Thus do Shinano’s famous places, sung by poets from of old, enjoy eternal fame. 5. Her great men are peerless, soldier and scholar alike: The Asahi shogun [Kiso] Yoshinaka, [the warlord] Nishina no Gord Nobumori, And the great masters Dazai Shundai and Sakuma Shézan. Standing tall alongside her mountains, they are admired by all; Mighty like her rivers, endless is their renown. 6. In the age of the gods, Yamato Takeru climbed the forbidding Usui Pass, Homesick for his wife. Today, the pass is pierced by Tunnel 26; A railroad runs beneath it. Is it not like a dream? Following in their footsteps, as the train rolls on its track, Might we not equal those great men of the past? Have not the towering mountains and rivers of Shinshi nurtured giants from of old?

ASAI KIYOSHI, 1899

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CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1x CONVENTIONS FOLLOWED IN THE TEXT § xiit ACKNOWLEDGMENTS eV

Introduction 1 PART ONE

A PROVINCE DEFINED 25

1 / Shinano inthe Nation 31

2 / Shinano Up Close 56 3 / Shinano inthe World 89 PART TWO

A PROVINCE RESTORED 129

4 / The Poetry of Statistics 139 5 / Pedagogies of Place 167

6 / APan-Provincial Press 193 Conclusion 221 NOTES 239 BIBLIOGRAPHY 281 GLOSSARY-INDEX 309

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ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATES (FOLLOWING PAGE 88)

1. Detail from Dai Nihon koku no zu (Map of Great Japan), 1548 2. Nakabayashi Kichibei, Fusokoku no zu (Map of the Land of the Rising Sun), 1666 3. Muhitsu choho kuni-zukushi annai (Convenient Pictorial Guide to the Provinces), mid-nineteenth century 4. Takebe Takahiro, Kyoho nendo bakufu sen Takebe Takahiro Nihon zu (Map of Japan by Takebe Takahiro), 1719

5. Detail from Torigai Dosai, Dai Nihon dochii kotei saiken ki (Handy Guide to the Roadways of Great Japan), 1770 6. Detail from Mabuchi Jikoan, Kaisez Dai Nihon zenzu (Revised Map of Great Japan), ca. 1800 7. Nagakubo Sekisui, Kaisez Nihon yochi rotei zenzu (Revised Complete Road Map of All Japan), 1779 8. Kisai Rissho, Dai Nihon meisho ichiran (Panoramic View of Famous Places in Great Japan), mid-nineteenth century 9. Shoho Shinano kuniezu (Shoho map of Shinano), 1647 10. Shinano no kuni zenzu (Complete Map of Shinano Province), ca. 1871

Ix

11. Tempo kaisei shochu Kyo ezu (Revised Pocket Map of Kyoto in the Tempo era), 1841

12. Shinano no kuni zenzu (Complete Map of Shinano Province), 1850s 13. Hibata Shotaro, Kaisez Shinano no kuni zenzu (Revised Complete Map of Shinano Province), 1878 14. Takahashi Kageyasu, Nihon zu: Higashi Nihon (Map of Eastern Japan), n.d. (detail) 15. Shinshit saigai no zu (Map of the Great Earthquake and Flood in Shinano Province), 1847 16. Shinetsu kokkyo zu (Map of the Boundary between Shinano and Echigo Provinces), n.d. MAPS

1. Early modern Japan / 3 2. Chikuma and Nagano prefectures, 1871-1876 / 6 3. Current prefectures superimposed on old provinces / 13 4. Untitled Gyoki-style map of Japan from the Nichiireki, early

Kamakuraera / 35 5. Dai Nihon koku no zu (Map of Great Japan) from the Shigaisho,

Keich6 edition (detail) / 36 6. Nihon kairiku kandan koku no zu (Map of the Cold and Warm

Provinces of Coastal and Inland Japan), 1690 / 38 7. Dai Nihon koku no zu (Map of Great Japan), late Edo era

woodblock / 39 8. Map of Japan on Imari plate, late Edo era / 40 g. Origins of the Tokugawa house / 41 10. Reference map for Torigai Dosai’s Dai Nihon dochi kotei saiken ki

(Handy Guide to the Roadways of Great Japan),1770 / 47

11. Shinano Province / 59 12. Early modern district divisions (gun) in Shinano / 65 13. Jinkokki (Biographical Notes and Sketches of the Provinces), 1701

(detail) / 86 14. Ino Tadataka, Chizu sessei binran (Index Map), 1821 (detail) / 94 15. Ind Tadataka, Dai Nihon enkai yochi zu (Complete Survey of the

Japanese Coast), late Edo (detail) / 95 X ILLUSTRATIONS

16. Gifu Nagano Ishikawa Fukui yonken zu (Map of Four Prefectures), from Dai Nihon fuken bunkatsu zu (Separate Maps of the Munici-

palities and Prefectures of Great Japan), 1881 / to1 17. Ando Rikinosuke, Saishin chodsa Nagano-ken zenzu: kaisei shichoson

(Complete Map of Nagano Prefecture, Based on the Latest Surveys and Showing Reformed Cities, Towns, and Villages), 1907 / 116

18. Detail from Mapi7 / 117 19. Detail from Shasei nijiman bun no ichi zu fukkoku ban: Naganoken zenzu (Composite Map of Nagano Prefecture Based on Repro-

ductions of the 1:200,000 Topographic Quadrants) / 118 20. Yoshizawa Takaaki, Shinano no kuni jigun no zu (Map of the Ten

Districts of Shinano),1744 / 222 FIGURES

1. Diagram of Map 4 / 35 2. Diagram of Maps / 36 3. Diagram of Plates / 47 4. Legend for Map 16, Gifu Nagano Ishikawa Fukui yonken zu

(Map of Four Prefectures), 1881 / 103 5. Legend for Map 17, Saishin chosa Nagano-ken zenzu (Complete

Map of Nagano Prefecture), 1907 / 120 TABLES

1. Sites in Shinano most commonly featured on printed maps

of Japan issued during the Edoera / 52 2. Features identified in the legend accompanying the Daz Nihon fuken bunkatsu zu (Separate Maps of the Municipalities and Prefectures of Great Japan), Tokyo, 1881 / 104 3. Features identified on the formal key of the mid-Metji topo-

graphical quadrants / 111 4. Contents of the 1882 Japanese statistical yearbook / 151 5. Contents of the 1884 Nagano statistical yearbook / 154 6. Subheadings under “Land” in the 1884 Nagano statistical year-

book / 159 ILLUSTRATIONS XI

7. Traditional manufactures, 1884 / 161 8. Licensed practitioners of regulated trades, 1884 / 162 9. National titles reprinted in Nagano in 1878 / 172 10. Contents of Shinano no kuni chishiryaku (Abridged Topography

of Shinano Province), 1883. / 175 11. Contents of Shogaku Shinano chishiryaku (Elementary Shinano

Topography: Abridged Edition), 1888 / 178 12. Contents of Shinano shin chishi (A New Topography of Shinano),

1899 / 181 13. Contents of Shogaku Shinano rekishidan (Elementary Shinano

Historical Tales), 1894 / 183 14. Contents of Shogaku sosho Shinano no kuni: Nogyo hen (Vhe Land of Shinano—Agricultural Edition: An Elementary Reader), vol. 2,

1907 / 186

XII ILLUSTRATIONS

CONVENTIONS FOLLOWED IN THE TEXT

Macrons are used in the text to indicate long vowels in Japanese, except in the case of very frequently used names and terms (daimyo, shogun, Tokyo, Kyoto, and the like). Japanese personal names are indicated in the Japanese fashion: surname

first and given name following. The names of Japanese and JapaneseAmerican authors writing in English are given in the reverse order, typical of English.

XIII

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The path to this book was not a straight one, and I have incurred many debts along the way. The idea of looking at Nagano regionalism as a modern artifact was first floated at the “Mirror of Modernity” workshop led by Stephen Vlastos at the University of Iowa. I want to belatedly thank Stephen for including me in that conference, whose participants posed the probing questions that set this project in motion. It was also at Iowa that I met Hashimoto Mitsuru, who generously served as my sponsor for a six-month research trip to Shinshii Daigaku on a Japan Foundation grant. While in Matsumoto I was assisted by Professor Murayama Ker‘ichi and his generous wife Takako, as well as by a group of supportive Shindai faculty in-

cluding Oki Hiroko, Nitta Reiko, and Funatsu Emiko. For their friendship during a difficult period in my family’s life, I remain deeply grateful. A residential fellowship at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina provided leave time to begin writing. | much appreciated the cheer and resourcefulness of the center's staff, especially librarian Eliza Robertson; her help made possible the broader reading that gradually led me to recast a history of regionalism as separate studies of alpinism and chorography. Subsequent research trips to Nagano and lokyo were underwritten by the Japan Fund at Stanford University. A sabbatical at the Stanford Hu-

manities Center—generously supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the XV

School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford—provided the time and space to draft the manuscript. It is a joyful duty indeed to acknowledge the help of my indomitable research assistant, Sakakibara Sayoko. Her knowledge, acumen, and companionship enriched both the manuscript and the research experience immeasurably. This book would not exist without great research libraries and the publicminded intellectuals who run them. Like colleagues across the country, | have benefited greatly over the years from the skills and friendship of Kristina Kade Troost at Duke, Naomi Kotake and Julie Sweetkind-Singer at Stanford, and Hisayuki Ishimatsu at U.C. Berkeley. In Shinano, thanks are due to the accommodating staff of the Nagano Prefectural Museum of History

in Chikuma City, the Nagano Prefectural Library in Nagano City, the Shinsht University library in Matsumoto, and the delightful Nakasendo Rokujiakyitsugi Shiryokan in Karuizawa. In Tokyo, research was facilitated by knowledgeable professionals at the National Diet Library, Japanese National Archives, Japan Textbook Research Center, and the Historiographical Institute at the University of Tokyo, and by the generosity of collector

Kazumasa Yamashita. Particular thanks are due to Kodama Takubumi, Ishigami Eiichi, and Kishimoto Yutaka for sharing their expertise and enthusiasm about Japanese documents and landscapes, and to map aficionado David Rumsey, who has joined forces with Hisayuki Ishimatsu to make the University of Californias marvelous Mitsui collection of Japanese maps available to the public at large. Working with the talented team at the University of California Press has been a privilege. Reviewers Anne Walthall and Raymond Craib gave the manuscript thorough and critical readings, and each came up with many ideas for improving it. I am very grateful to both of them for sharing their time and expertise and only regret that I could not act on every suggestion. | am also indebted to Kalicia Piviroto, who handled a large volume of correspondence and kepta keen eye on the details; to Lia Tjandra for combining professionalism with flexibility in the book design; to Sharron Wood for meticulous copy-editing; to Jacqueline Volin for masterfully choreographing the production schedule; and above all to Reed Malcolm, editor and diplomat par excellence, who found a way for this design-intensive book to see the light of day. Special thanks as well to Don Pirius, the creative mind behind dpmaps.com, who did a consummate job on the maps. While formal institutions provide irreplaceable support for a study of this kind, informal networks are also crucial to intellectual work. Friends from across the Japan field, fellows at the humanities centers where I was priviXVI ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

leged to work, audiences at various venues where I have tried out ideas, and treasured colleagues and students in the Triangle and the Bay Area offered support and stimulation at every step. Three people in particular made im-

portant interventions: Beth Berry forced me to fundamentally rethink the architecture of the book; Henry Smith pushed for a stronger political story, as well as more and better maps; and Fabian Drixler engaged at every level with the penultimate draft. While none will be wholly satished with the final version, I thank each for caring enough about the project to offer honest feedback at crucial moments in its evolution. It is also a pleasure to acknowledge Mitani Hiroshi for generously sharing his expertise on the Meiji Renovation, Raja Adal for his knowledge of the Meiji curriculum, Hilde de Weerdt for musings on maps, Nirvana Tanoukhi for sharp thinking on scale, Yosuke Nirei and Peter Duus for insight on Meiji politics, and Caroline Winterer for savvy reflections on classicism. More generally, this book bears the mark of long-running exchanges with Andrew Barshay, Bruce Batten, Lauren Benton, Prasenjit Duara, Sabine Friistiick, Takashi Fuyjitani,

John Gillis, Andrew Gordon, Ann Jannetta, William Kelly, James Ketelaar, Sconmin Kim, Angus Lockyer, Mark Metzler, Peter Nosco, Catherine Phipps, Brian Platt, Marie Price, Ravi Rajan, Mark Ravina, Linda Rupert, Irwin Scheiner, Franziska Seraphim, Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Melinda Takeuchi, Stefan Tanaka, Thongchai Winichakul, Susan Thorne, Ronald Toby, Conrad Totman, Umezawa Fumiko, Brett Walker, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Peter Wood, Wen-Hsin Yeh, and Marcia Yonemoto. My family has waited a long time to see this book in print. It is gladdening to know that their mother’s obsessions have not kept Evan and Eleanor from developing a passion of their own for books, maps, and travel; it was wonderful to be able to introduce them to Japan as the writing was

coming to a close. Deepest thanks to their grandmother Nell for all her help on the home front these past few years. Finally, Martin Lewis has been the best coach, colleague, and companion | could have hoped for. To him, and the prospect of collaborations to come, this book is dedicated.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XVII

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Introduction Once a landscape has been established, its origins are repressed from memory. It takes on the appearance of an “object” which has been there, outside us, from the start. KOJIN KARATANI

THE MAP OF JAPAN AS IT APPEARS TODAY—a collection of forty-three

prefectures, forming a smooth arc from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south—is so familiar as to seem timeless. Yet that apparently stable configuration is the product of a contentious history, one whose contours, especially in the premodern era, are only now becoming clear. Its best-known episodes took place along the state's borders. Through a millennium of war-

fare and diplomacy, conquest and compromise, the Yamato chiefdom fitfully expanded from its original home in western Honshi until its descendants had claimed most of the archipelago. The story of that expansion has been compellingly told in recent years, reconstructed from material artifacts as well as maps and texts.’ Much murkier is its internal counterpart: the process by which the domestic armature of the state came into being. How did the prefectures of the modern map take shape? When did they take hold as the commonsense framework of everyday life? And what prior geographies were displaced or deployed in the process? In other words, how did modern Japan acquire its regional architecture? One way to tackle those questions would be to write a fine-grained political account, centered in Tokyo and set in the year 1871. For it was there and then, in the compressed space of a few months, that the modern political map was essentially put in place, sweeping away a complex patchwork of fiefs in favor of a nested administrative hierarchy with classical roots.

E

The political wrangling that went into the details of that map makes for a fascinating story, one whose highlights will be recounted in what follows. But my chief interest lies elsewhere. Viewing the modern map from the perspective of a premodern province, I see 1871 as but one moment in a drawn-out drama of geographical restoration: a drama as much cultural as political, and one that took hundreds of years to unfold. For the rehabilitation of ancient Japanese administrative spaces, while formalized in highlevel negotiations in Tokyo, also entailed breathing life back into a oncedormant imperial geography, animating what (after John Gillis) we might term “provinces of the mind.”* That diffuse and protracted process is my subject here. Since it took place in the countryside as well as in the capital, the actors who populate this book are primarily local literati; and since it transpired largely through regional maps and geographical writings, those genres form my core archive. The present study traces the restoration of one bounded region in central Honshu. Its terrain—the sprawling district known officially as Nagano Prefecture, or more colloquially by its older labels, Shinsht and Shinano— is in many ways a singular place (Map 1). Like the ancient province whose territory it inherited, Nagano straddles the rugged mountain ridge that runs the length of Honsha. As a result, it is at once a central region and a centrifugal one: a prominent province without a clear core. Likewise, it occupies a distinctive niche in the Japanese imagination. The ur-landscape of a mountainous archipelago, Shinano is known to schoolchildren across the country as the home of Japan's highest ranges, longest rivers, and biggest ski resorts. Its proximity to Tokyo (less than two hours away by bullet train) tempts millions of urban Japanese every year to take in its alpine vistas and secluded villas, its hot springs and historic landmarks. And even for those who cannot visit, Shinano’s scenic attractions are never far from view. In 1996 the Nagano Olympics filled the airwaves for weeks with images of its regal temples and towering volcanoes, its fire festivals and sulfur springs. A decade later, a yearlong television drama centered on its sparring medieval

warlords once again put Shinano squarely in the public eye.’ Thanks to these recurring promotional opportunities, Nagano has a vivid and distinctive identity throughout Japan. Nor is a strong sense of the region limited to outsiders. Within the region as well, the word “Shinshu” conjures a consistent set of associations. Besides taking obvious pleasure in their celebrated landscapes, residents make much of their social reputation: as determined debaters, diligent workers, ready innovators, and excellent students. All know that their homeland zZ INTRODUCTION

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Map 1. Early modern Japan, highlighting Shinano Province (later Nagano Prefecture)

was the core of Japan’s silk industry a century ago, and many have made a hobby of studying the region’s rich historical lore. Such interest feeds a robust market for local research. In 1991 an authoritative bibliography listed more than sixty-four thousand articles, books, and documents on the region;* by the curn of the twenty-first century, nearly a hundred new books were being added to that total every year.’ This disproportionate interest

in the homeland has itself become fodder for prefectural pride. The fact that more than half of all adults who grew up in the prefecture can sing at least one stanza of its poetic anthem, “Our Land Shinano,” is cited again and again in regional tracts.° What goes unsaid is that this was not always the case. If Nagano’s identity today is unusually vivid, its production was also unusually fraught. In fact, for the first five decades of Japan’s modern era, Nagano was a problem. That problem exploded into public view in late 1890, when a group

of disgruntled assemblymen from the southern part of the prefecture protested their placement on Japan's political map. These politicians were deeply unhappy with an arrangement that required them to trudge over high mountain passes to reach the prefecture’s administrative offices and its newly opened assembly hall, both of which were located in the far northern town of Nagano. In the interest of equity, they insisted, it was time to move the prefecture’s headquarters to a more central location. The obvious choice was Matsumoto. A former castle town, Matsumoto had been the largest settlement in premodern Shinano, as well as the major marketing center in the mountains. In 1890 it remained an educational and commercial powerhouse, and the city fathers were anxious for Matsumoto to take ona political role commensurate with its size and status. The stakes could hardly have been higher. Embarking on its third decade of modernization under the reform-minded Meiji regime (1868-1912), central Japan at the time was being rapidly refashioned by a state-led industrialization push. Before the decade was over, the country’s modern military machine—built in part on profits from Nagano silk—would defeat China in Japan's first imperial war. Local leaders were caught up in a headlong race for resources, jockeying to position their hometowns at the head of the lucrative sericulture industry. In such a context, competition between localities for railways, road improvements, and riparian works was relentless, and access to state officials was paramount. It was in this feverish environment that a bill was submitted to the newly created prefectural assembly calling for the prefectural capital to move from Nagano to Matsumoto. For a brief moment it appeared that the southern faction might win the 4 [INTRODUCTION

day. Before the assembly could consider the bill, however, the debate spilled

into the streets. An angry Nagano crowd, determined to keep the prefectural headquarters in their hometown, began attacking the houses of the bill’s supporters. Thugs sought out and beat Koyama Tetsuji (dates unknown), one of two northern assemblymen who had betrayed their faction by speaking in favor of the move. Koyama had to be rushed to a hospital; he remained in critical condition the next day. Anxious to press their temporary advantage, the northern representatives now took an extraordinary step. Bodily carrying the unconscious Koyama out of the hospital and into the assembly hall, they declared a quorum and forced a vote. With Koyama technically present but unable to voice his support, the relocation bill went down in defeat. An appeal protesting these strong-arm tactics was swiftly lodged, and then just as swiftly killed; then-governor Narasaki Hironao (1841-1895) sanctioned the vote, and the prefectural offices stayed in the town of Nagano. By spring, Matsumoto residents were in open revolt. Hundreds of property holders in the southern city refused to pay their local taxes,

and on May 23, 1891, a relocation rally turned out fifteen thousand supporters. [he mood turned ugly as the day wore on; by nightfall, rioters had thrown rocks at the Matsumoto police station, assaulted police ofhcers, and attacked the house of the local district chief.’

This was not the first time that residents of northern and southern Nagano had publicly clashed over the configuration of their prefecture. Nor would it be the last. For more than half a century, Nagano was a cauldron of conflict. In the long view, that conflict was rooted in the geography of a rugged region, one that straddled the major cultural and physical divides of Honshu. In the eyes of would-be secessionists, however, the issue was the high-handedness of powerful men. For a brief period, starting in 1871, Nagano’ southwestern counties had enjoyed a separate administration under the short-lived Chikuma Prefecture (Map 2).° That arrangement literally went up in smoke in 1876 when a suspicious fire destroyed the prefectural offices in Matsumoto. Rather than rebuild, the Japanese leaders simplified their political map by eliminating Chikuma altogether. Western Chikuma (the area formerly known as Hida Province)

was ceded to a neighboring prefecture; the remainder was put under the jurisdiction of Nagano. This decision caused jubilation in the north, for it meant that Nagano Prefecture now encompassed the entire terrain of ancient Shinano Province. But many in the southwestern counties were bitterly unhappy. A petition to restore autonomy to Chikuma Prefecture was submitted to Tokyo within weeks. Four years later, a bid to move Nagano’s

INTRODUCTION 5

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Map 9. Origins of the Tokugawa house. Adapted from Conrad Totman, Politics in the Tokugawa Bakufu, 1600-1843 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).

Plain, Shinano’s primary axis began to pivot eastward. Its expansive horse-

breeding grounds made the highlands a critical arena for the Kamakura shogunate (1185—1333), the first warrior regime to govern from the military

frontier. Boosted by Kamakura, one local clan, the Ogasawara, gradually emerged as the most powerful warlords in Shinano, achieving a preeminence they would retain for more than a century. When the Ogasawara split over a succession dispute in 1440, the region—along with the country— descended into civil war. That war was still under way when Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616) came of age. As a warlord raised along Honshti's Tokai coast (the stretch of Pacific shoreline directly east of Kyoto), Ieyasu had grown up with Shinano at his back. ‘The future shogun was born in the coastal province of Mikawa, where his father had been installed in the castle town of Okazaki (Map 9). Okazaki controlled an important trade corridor to central Shinano, one that ran from the salt-producing coast all the way to Lake Suwa and the Matsumoto basin.

Moreover, the family castle overlooked a crucial junction in the regional SHINANO IN THE NATION 41

transport network: the point at which packhorse goods from Shinshu were transferred to river barges for shipment to the Ise Bay and beyond.”? A clearer lesson in the strategic importance of Japan’s interior could hardly be imagined. It was under Ieyasu that the Tokugawa expanded their holdings east and north, flanking and eventually penetrating Shinano itself.*! In 1565 the clan took over the whole of Mikawa; five years later, Ieyasu seized the neighboring province of T6tomi from a rival warrior band and moved the Tokugawa headquarters to the port town of Hamamatsu. From this new base the Tokugawa controlled two more corridors into Shinano: the Tenryt River and the Akiba Road. Ieyasu would take advantage of this position to pursue a ten-year rivalry with Takeda Shingen (1521-73), an ambitious warlord who ruled most of Shinano from his home base in nearby Kai Province.** In 1582 Ieyasu isolated the Takeda by seizing their southern flank, the province of Suruga. The Tokugawa now controlled all three of Shinanos southern neighbors—and the lion’s share of its outlets to the Pacific coast. Invading the provinces of Kai and Shinano later in the decade, Ieyasu managed to wrest the bulk of both for his own retainers. The Tokugawa domain now embraced Mikawa, Totomi, Suruga, and Kai, as well as southern Shinano. In 1590 leyasu's overlord, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-98), ordered the To-

kugawa to vacate the Tokai coast and move east to a larger but more distant fief in the Kanto Plain. Historians have interpreted this as a strategic move to reward Ieyasu while “putting him out of dangerous proximity to central Japan.”*° In the long run, however, shifting Ieyasu eastward had the unintended effect of solidifying a new center. Chabu (literally “the middle part’) may have historically designated Kyoto and the five home provinces, but by leyasu’s day the Kanto Plain, rather than constituting a genuine periphery, loomed sufficiently large to form a second powerful core. If proof were needed, the new Tokugawa domain in the Kanto was larger than that of Hideyoshi himself.

From the standpoint of a military government headquartered in Edo after 1600, then, the notion of Shinano as a throughway to the remote East was obviously obsolete. On the one hand, Shinsht was no longer far away; on the contrary, it was the ruling clan’s backyard. By the time Ieyasu assumed the title of shogun in 1603, his retainers had personally occupied much of the province. On the other hand, from his final seat of power at Edo, Shinano lay not to the east but to the west. This would be reflected

in a fundamentally new geography of transportation. Although the To42 A PROVINCE DEFINED

sando, or Eastern Mountain Circuit, would persist as a regional designation, the road of that name was henceforth erased from the landscape. In its place the Tokugawa regime developed a new turnpike through the interior of Honshi: the Nakasendo, or Middle Mountain Road. Along with its new name, this road had a new function; it linked the imperial capital of Kyoto not to an unsettled military frontier, but to the shogun’s castle town in the Kanto. As one of early modern Japan's five major turnpikes (gokaido), the Middle Mountain Road would become the most prominent feature associated with Shinano on many Edo-era maps. The message of such maps was clear. Shinano was no longer a gateway to Japan's east; toponymically, the Tokugawa had proclaimed this interior province part of the nation’s core.”4

Meanwhile, the province's newfound centrality was underscored in another way. After the first century of Tokugawa rule, national maps began to locate Shinano not only on the Middle Mountain Road, but also along a second strategic axis: a north-south corridor connecting the shogun’s head-

quarters to the resource-rich Japan Sea coast. Popularly known as the Hokkoku Kaido, or North Country Road, this corridor was officially designated a secondary route (wakidkan) in the nation’s transportation taxonomy, yet its role was greater than its rank might suggest. During the wars of unification, when control of Shinano was contested by powerful lords from Japan's Pacific coastal belt and their rivals based along the Japan Sea (especially Uesugi Kenshin [1530—78]), dominating this vital throughway had been an essential step in leyasu’s project of subduing the country. With the subsequent development of gold and silver mines on Sado Island and extensive reclamation of rice fields in northern Honshi, the Japan Sea coast continued to bea strategic region that the shogun could ill afford to neglect. The starkest visual evidence for this comes from a hand-painted map made for the sixth Tokugawa shogun by Takebe Takahiro (Plate 4).*? Conspicuous for its accurate depiction of northern Honshi (which had often been drawn in truncated form), this map is equally notable for the way it

emphasizes the nation’s most important transportation arteries with a heavy black line.?° The resulting diagram unmistakably marks the northsouth corridor leading from Edo to the Japan Sea as a national trunk line— trumping, in its visual iconography, several stretches of the official turn-

pikes. The route in question actually consisted of parts of two roads maintained by the Tokugawa shogunate. From Edo to the Shinano border it followed the Nakasend6 turnpike, but at the post station of Oiwake, rather than continuing west and south to Kyoto, it branched off to the north along SHINANO IN THE NATION 4 3

the North Country Road. From the point of view of the shogun’s chief cartographer in 1719, this corridor was one of the top priorities in the land. The same view would gradually infuse commercial cartography as well. In a word, although Kyoto had construed Shinano as an outback, Edo positioned the same province as its back door. Two of the five most important turnpikes in the nation now converged there, as did two of the most formidable barriers in the land (at Usui Pass and Kiso-Fukushima). Dozens of smaller barriers also oversaw traffic on the minor passes over the mountains. When the shogun wanted to tighten security in the Kanto, Shinano was included. Commercial ties were equally close; Shinano people migrated

frequently to Edo for jobs, and many Shinano products entered Edo by boat over the Tone River. Culturally, too, Shinano’s image underwent a metamorphosis. Unlike earlier centuries’ visitors from the refined and temperate realms of the west, those entering Shinano from Edo were inclined

less to disparage Shinano’s rustic people and landscapes than to admire them.” A traveler from the Kant6 crossing over the Usui Pass might still have the sensation of entering “another world” (betsu sekai), but it was a less forbidding and more appealing world than it had been in the past. As Nagano’s official historians would later put it, the Tokugawa spatial order transformed Shinano from an outer periphery (henkydchi) to an inner chamber (okuzashiki).°®

THE VIEW FROM THE ROAD

This brings us to the last subset of national maps: commercial cartography catering to travelers. In a testament to the enormous importance of pilerimage and touring in early modern Japan, this genre—identified as itinerary maps (dochiizu) by Japanese scholars—accounts for the largest single category of Tokugawa cartographic output.~’ In their handling of national space, itineraries varied greatly in design.*° At one extreme were stylized diagrams that abstracted the road network from

its provincial ground entirely, treating each route as an independent line that could be laid out on the page as the designer saw fit. At the other extreme were pictorial images, which adapted the conventions of landscape painting to highlight the chief tourist destinations in the land. But whether practical or playful, whether meant to be consulted on the road or admired at home, itinerary maps consistently highlighted features of the countryside that might be expected to interest a populace on the move.*! Generally speaking, this meant privileging two types of information: transit fa44 A PROVINCE DEFINED

cilities and destinations. Provinces per se were of little interest to this clientele. Rather than forming the bedrock of the map as it did on the Gydkrzu, the kuni on a commercial itinerary was reduced to the barest of background matter: a point of reference, but often little more. The effect of such priorities on the rendering of provinces generally, as on Shinano in particular, was profound. The most prevalent type of itinerary map was the diagram, delineating

one or more transportation routes. The simplest such maps took a linear form, unrolling a single transport corridor (either on land or on water) from right to left.’? But capturing Japan’s complex spider web of turnpikes in its entirety in this format required a more complex structure. To accommo-

date the road network of an archipelago on a single strip of paper, diagrammatic maps typically reduced the nation’s transit corridors to a series of parallel lines, linked to one another at a few major junctions but otherwise unfolding independently across the length of the scroll.°? A classic example is Torigai Dosai’s (1721-93) “Handy Guide to the Roadways of Great Japan” (Dai Nihon dochii kotei saiken ki) of 1770 (Plate 5). Given the ubiguity of this itinerary and others modeled on it, an extended look at how Torigai treated provincial space is in order. For starters, Torigai’s “handy guide” does not represent Japan as a single, unified space. Rather than offering an overview of Japan’s terrain, this popular commodity offered a composite of separate horizontal bands, each representing a single roadway. Six to twelve such bands might occupy any given stretch of the map; each was formally walled off from the others. It did not matter exactly how the separate bands were spliced together; so long as the

roads joined up at the right junctions, the precise arrangement of the strips was flexible, if not completely arbitrary. From one edition to another, such major landmarks as Mount Fuji and the castle town of Kanazawa could literally slide past each other without jeopardizing the map’s coherence. A second feature of this schema is the way it treats each strip less as a geographical space than as a textual plane. The margin of paper below a given road functioned as a place to put notes about that route. Here the viewer could find the names of post stations, the distances between them, and information about river crossings, bridge tolls, barriers, passes, and more. In the case of a major turnpike, the margin was widened to accommodate rectangles representing the castle towns through which the road passed (each containing the ruling house’s name, its crest, and the size of its domain), as well as occasional pictorial elements: a blue lake or river here, a green

mountain there. But these elements cannot be read as occupying geoSHINANO IN THE NATION 45

graphical space in the usual cartographic sense. Rather, each represents a landmark visible from the road in whose annotation space it falls. The rest of the national terrain is simply not represented. The effect of this procedure was not so much to compress the countryside as to caricature it; the only landscape elements represented at all are those that formed a spectacle for the traveler.*4

Treating space in this way meant that diagram makers freely violated the integrity of the bounded province. While meticulously noting the linkages and distance between each successive pair of post stations, they made a discontinuous hodgepodge of provincial borders. Nonetheless, all such maps cross-referenced the kuni framework. On Torigai’s “Handy Guide,” provinces were present in two attenuated forms. First, wherever a major road crossed from one kuni to another, the border was marked with a small black triangle; the names of the two provinces were noted beneath the triangle in phonetic script. Thus, to the left of Mount Fuji, below the thick line depicting the Nakasendo turnpike, a triangle identifies the Shinano-Mino border. Farther to the left, along a lesser road that ran south of the Nakasendo, appears another such triangle, this time labeled “Kai/Shinano.” Meanwhile, black labels along the top edge of the strip suggested to the reader that the routes depicted in that section of the map traversed the provinces named. Here “Shinano” functioned essentially as an index tab, a device to help viewers get their bearings in a map that was too long to take in at a glance. Due to its sheer size, its many roadways, and its north-south extension, Shinsha ended up being flamboyantly distorted on a horizontal strip map of this kind. Nonetheless, using the reference devices provided by the mapmaker, it is possible to locate the province's borders on the Torigai itinerary. Such an exercise reveals several remarkable findings. First, the various routes through Shinano turn out to extend over nearly a quarter of the map. To help the reader find them, this province is marked by no fewer than three separate index tabs in the upper margin of the strip, one each over its northern, central, and southern reaches. Between them lies more than a meter and a half of paper.’? Equally striking is the way this distended province is aligned relative to Edo. On any conformal map of Japan where north is at the top of the page, Shinano can be found to Edo’s left. On Torigat’s diagram, however, the province's northernmost castle town (Iiyama) lies far to Edo’s right. Effectively, the whole elongated province has been rotated on its side and pivoted into place directly over the shogun’s capital (Map 10 and Figure 3; compare Plate 5). One consequence of this novel design was to put northern and southern 46 A PROVINCE DEFINED

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Shinano into fundamentally disparate regions of the nation. In the structure of the Torigai diagram as a whole, urban icons divide the Japanese archipelago into three roughly equal parts: an east (Ezo to Edo), center (Edo to Kyoto), and west (Kyoto to Kyisha). By rotating Shinano into position above Edo, the mapmaker has placed the southern part of the province squarely in the nation’s midsection while aligning northern Shinano— which stretches away from Edo to the right—with Honsht’s east. This in turn produces another surprise. The only way to sustain the continuity of the main route through Shinano while positioning half of the province to Edo’s right was by introducing into the Nakasendo a nonexistent hairpin turn, depicting that turnpike as if it reversed direction at Oiwake. A hypothetical traveler interested in tracing the Nakasendo route would look for a thick black line leading out of the capital to the north (i.e., along the city icon’s upper edge) and follow it to the right, through the various post stations of the Kanto provinces to the barrier at Usui Pass (the famed entry point into Shinano). Continuing past Mount Asama (indicated by a ereen hill sign) and Karuizawa (the first station inside the Shinano border), the reader reaches Oiwake, junction of the Nakasend6o and the North Coun-

try Road. Marked on this map with a large yellow circle, Oiwake constitutes a pivot in the diagram’s design, the point at which the line representing the Nakasendo reverses direction to continue its journey toward the home provinces. As it tacked its way back across the surface of the map, the Nakasendo strip would be punctuated by numerous landmarks in Shinano, including Lake Suwa, positioned here directly above Edo. Whether or not this was a deliberate move, there is an undeniable logic in representing Shinano this way. As it happens, the cultural boundary between eastern and western Japan runs right through the province, cutting diagonally through Lake Suwa. Whether mapped in terms of dialects, confessional communities, or ethnographic indicators, northern Shinano is consistently aligned with the Kanto and Japan Sea regions, while southern Shinano shares more traits with the Kyoto-Osaka area.°° Environmentally as well, Suwa marks a meaningful divide; the rivers to its north flow through the “snow country” into the Sea of Japan, while those to its south connect to the more temperate Pacific coastal belt. But perhaps most importantly, orienting Shinano in this way clarified the role of northern Shinano as Edo’s shortcut to the Japan Sea coast. By situating Oiwake far to Edo’s right, Tori-

gai managed to maintain the visual integrity of the North Country Road, rendering the whole route from Edo to Sado Island as one straight line. What anchored this route on maps made for the traveling public was the 48 A PROVINCE DEFINED

enormous multi-denominational temple complex of Zenkoji. Founded in the eighth century, this venerated site housed an Amida Triad reputed to be the oldest Buddhist icon in Japan, “an icon so infused with spiritual force that believers were convinced that it guaranteed rebirth in paradise.”°’ This belief served Zenkoji well during the early modern era. Not only was it one

of the top four pilgrimage destinations in the entire country, but after the temple burned repeatedly in the seventeenth century, its custodians requested permission to take the temple's treasures on the road (degaichd) to raise funds for rebuilding. Although the revered Amida Triad itself did not travel, a sacred stand-in (itself usually kept secret from the public) was brought to Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto, drawing throngs of believers anxious to partake of its healing powers. The first such traveling exhibit, held in 1692 and 1693, was a huge success; what was scheduled to be a sixty-day exhibition in Edo closed after fifty-five days, and the three-city tour raised a remarkable thirteen thousand ryd for the temple.’® Repeat exhibitions were staged at regular intervals thereafter to raise money for refurbishing and expanding the facility. Of all the regional degaicho in Edo, the Zenkoji events were allegedly the most sensational and drew the biggest crowds; they have been likened to a Tutankhamun exhibit in contemporary New York.*? And when local merchants protested that carting the icon off to Edo hurt pilgrimage business back home, the priests organized special showings of these normally secluded treasures in front of Zenkoji itself. Taking place approximately every seven years during the last century of the Edo period, these well-publicized events drew thousands of travelers up the Hokkoku Kaidé.*? Meanwhile, popular histories of Zenkoji also contributed to bringing Shinano into pub-

lic view.*! Such publicity helped the North Country Road attract a large number of Edo-era travelers; Matsuo Basho (1644-94), Sugae Masumi (1754-1829), and Hasegawa Settan (?—1843) all took this route,** as did throngs of anonymous pilgrims from the Kanto who detoured to Zenkoji on their way back from the grand shrines of Ise.4? While it may not have been “the spine of Japan,”** the North Country Road became a major cultural and commercial corridor in its own right. It is thus not surprising that on itinerary maps for commoners, as on manuscript maps for the rulers, the North Country Road came to figure prominently. The popular cartographer Ishikawa Ryiisen (active ca. 1680-1720)

would depict this route in detail using the same iconography with which he marked the country’s major turnpikes.4? Mabuchi Jikdan (dates unknown) would do likewise in his “Revised Map of Great Japan” (Kazsei Dai

SHINANO IN THE NATION 49

Nihon zenzu), published at the turn of the eighteenth century (Plate 6). While both of these early itinerary maps kept Kyoto at their geographical core, each conveyed an up-to-date Edo-centric road network. (The Mabuchi map, by adding a shipping route to Sado Island, further underscored the salience of the north-country route to the new regime.) The result was a new map of Shinano, one that moved it firmly into the core of the country, elongated it north-to-south rather than east-to-west, and located it at the intersection of two axes of power. Popular though they may have been, however, route maps were not the only ones that recentered Shinano in the nation. At the other end of the design spectrum were more decorative maps that pushed the transportation network into the background or dispensed with roads altogether, crowding the viewer's visual field instead with a variety of attractive destinations. [he standard map of this type was Nagakubo Sekisui’s (1717-1801) “Revised Complete Road Map of All Japan” (Kaisez Nihon yochi rotei zenzu),

first published in 1779 (Plate 7). In addition to marking eight castle towns, Sekisui identified seven peaks in the province, making his one of the first images of Shinano to identify mountains by name.*° But it was the famousplace panoramas (meisho ichiran) that took the focus on destinations to its logical extreme. These innovative prints distilled the view from the road in a pictorial format by depicting the archipelago as a collection of colorful tourist attractions, drawn from an oblique aerial viewpoint. Two panoramas of this kind were published as woodblock prints during the nineteenth century: Kuwagata Keisai’s (1764-1824) celebrated “Picture Map of Japan” (Nihon ezu),*’ and Kisai Rissh6’s (1826—69) less known “Pan-

oramic View of Famous Places in Great Japan” (Dai Nihon meisho ichiran)

(Plate 8). Neither made any attempt to plot provincial borders. For their creators, the landscape of Japan was a seamless whole, where one kuni melded into another. Yet that did not mean they dispensed with provincial markers altogether. On the contrary, the most conspicuous blocks of text on each image are bold rectangles (red for Rissho) bearing the names of the

sixty-six kuni. Surrounding each such label is a constellation of famous places, the primary way in which both prints figure the province in question. For Shinano, Rissho’s image identifies a score of landmarks. Two famous places (Mount Asama and Zenkoji) are singled out for bold yellow labels, the highest form of exaltation and emphasis used on this map. Also named are three other mountains (Togakushi, Koma, and Yatsugatake), two passes (Usui and Wada), two rivers (Kiso and Tenrya), the famous place where the road protruded from a cliff over a steep ravine (Kiso no kake50 A PROVINCE DEFINED

hashi), and one lake (Suwa). Last but not least, the cartographer has sketched

in donjon icons for half a dozen named castle towns. The same roster of features, represented again and again on commercial maps, came to constitute the face of Shinano for the Tokugawa public (Table 1). The disposition of these features in the picture plane suggests that Kisai Rissho had studied the strip-map treatment of Japanese space, for, like Torigai, he elongated and rotated Shinano so that its northern tip extends well to the right of Edo. The message such maps conveyed was a novel one: Shinano in this view

was neither a source of tribute (as it had been for Kyoto), nor a strategic crossroads (as it was for Edo), but a geo-cultural assemblage. Place-names associated with the classical court joined monumental temples, castles, and natural landmarks to form a pool of cultural capital, gracing the landscape with a poetic aura and a prestigious pedigree. The cultural knowledge that Edo-era map users could glean from Torigai, Rissho, and their ilk was scattered and schematic, to be sure. But it was also substantive enough, and consistent enough, to suggest that by the end of the Tokugawa period, the name “Shinano” could be counted on to conjure a set of specific, widely shared associations. Anchored by the massive Buddhist establishment at Zenkoji in the north, the towering Ontake in the west, and the smoldering Mount Asama in the east, Shinano Province was taking shape as a constellation of prominent, visible places, compelling to pilgrim and poet alike.

In [ppon michi to nettowaku (Routes and Networks), physicist and cultural critic Hori Junichi posits a useful distinction between scaled maps (kiku chizu) and topological maps (isd chizu). Whereas the former are defined by regular expressions of scale and direction,*® the latter are diagrams in which scale and direction are fluid, varying in an unsystematic and even haphazard way. Any subway map Is a case in point. Hori invites us to imagine imprinting a precisely scaled image on soft clay or Silly Putty and then stretching or bending that surface. The result would be a topological map. The one thing that the creator of such a map must not do is violate the cartographic surface by slicing into it, reordering the pieces, or putting holes in its fabric.*? So long as variations of scale and distance are continuous and gradual, the map will remain faithful to the topology of the surface it represents. While its planimetry may be severely distorted, it will retain the es-

sential point-to-point connections that characterize the original. The resulting map can bea highly efficient way-finding guide, as long as one keeps to the highlighted routes.”° SHINANO IN THE NATION 51

TABLE I

Sites in Shinano most commonly featured on printed maps of Japan issued during the Edo era Castle towns (from north to south)

Iiyama 20,000 koku*

Matsushiro 100,000

Ueda 53,000

Komoro 15,000

Matsumoto 60,000 Takashima 30,000

Takat6 33,000

lida 20,000

Religious compounds, battlefields, and poetic places

Zenkoji Temple Multidenominational Buddhist center housing an ancient icon said to be the first Buddhist statue brought to Japan from the Asian mainland.

Suwa shrines Headquarters of a Shint6 cult for which hunting rituals were central; patronized by many of Japan’s warrior clans.

The hanging ledge of Kiso _A precarious passage alongside the roiling Kiso River, this protruding ledge (kakehashi) was noted in poems and maps of the classical era. By the Tokugawa era, it had been replaced by a safer inland passage.

Obasuteyama “Grandmother-Throwing-Away Mountain,” referring to a popular (if unfounded) legend that residents of the Shinano uplands would cast their elderly parents on the mountain to die.

Kawanakajima Battlefield where Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin clashed repeatedly in the late sixteenth century.

Hori’s samples show that this mode of representing space has been deemed useful by a wide variety of mapmakers and clients, from medieval pilgrims to airline executives.?' His discussion also proves helpful for understanding how Shinano was represented in premodern maps of Japan. What mattered to the makers of such maps was certainly not the province's shape, which might as easily be elongated east-to-west as north-to-south. More important was its position in a network. The same cartographers who played fast and loose with the province's boundaries always got its relational 52 A PROVINCE DEFINED

TABLE 1 (continued)

Mountains

Ontake An ancient center of worship and focus of pilgrimage whose name means “Holy Mountain” or “Sacred Peak.”

Kiso Also known as Kiso-Koma or Komagatake, an extinct volcano in the Central Japanese Alps, between the Kiso and Ina valleys.

Asama Shinano’s most prominent volcano. Togakushi Nationally famous as a center of shugendo, or ascetic religious practices. Originally associated with the esoteric cult of Shingon, it later came under the sway of the Tendai sect.

Yatsugatake An extinct volcanic cluster along Shinano’s eastern border whose name means “Eight Peaks.” Lakes and rivers

Lake Suwa Large, shallow lake at the center of Shinano. Kiso River River that runs through the steep, forested Kiso canyon in southwestern Shinano.

Tenryt: River Flows through the Ina Valley, from Lake Suwa to the Pacific. Chikuma River River draining northeastern Shinano; it becomes the Shinano River at the provincial border. Passes and barriers

Wada Pass Highest pass on the Nakasend6; north of Lake Suwa. Usut Pass Primary entry point into Shinano from the Edo region. Fukushima Barrier Checkpoint in the Kiso Valley where all travelers on the Nakasendo were subjected to inspection. “These numbers represent the size, in assessed rice yield, of the corresponding fief toward the end of the lokugawa era. One koku was approximately five bushels of rice; 10,000 koku represented

the threshold for daimyo status.

coordinates right,?* and many went further, anatomizing Shinano’s transportation routes in detail. What defined a Japanese province on maps of the nation throughout the premodern period was its location in a nationwide circulatory system. Early modern maps of the Japanese nation were fundamentally diagrams of a network, one whose essential nodes were sixty-six kuni, joined by a set of radial roads. Some maps foregrounded the kuz, outlining their loSHINANO IN THE NATION 53

cations in a loose jigsaw-puzzle arrangement; others focused on the circuitry,

detailing the roads and their post stations. But whatever the cartographer's emphasis, the size, shape, and orientation of each province could vary from map to map. In comparison with fixing Shinano’s coordinates in the system of circuits, fixing its boundaries was not a primary concern. Particularly in maps for the traveling public, kumi shapes might be wildly contorted for the convenience of the designer or the amusement of his clientele. When the countryside was represented for travelers, provincial borders might even be reduced to dots. Diagrammatic itineraries in particular bring home the point that the primary feature of the province in the national-map genre was not its exoskeleton but its infrastructure, the corridors that connected it to the major metropoles of the land. In Hort’s sense, all the maps considered here were topological to one degree or another; what mattered was less the shape of the &uni than the coherence of the network. All the same, it bears repeating that provinces remained the generalpurpose framework for making sense of national space. No matter what a maps primary concern might be, no matter where it located the country’s core, every member of the Nihon sozu genre referred its users through one device or another to provincial geography. That principle has been illustrated here by looking at how successive paradigms of national cartography mapped Shinano. In some ways, Shinshu was peculiar. Being located between the old and new capitals, it registered the rise of Edo more keenly than most regions; being elongated north to south, it suffered exaggerated distortions when translated onto the horizontal strip maps of the day. But in structural terms, Shinano Province was treated like any other comparable unit. All £un7 were located relative to Kyoto, Edo, or the road; all were cavalierly contorted to fit the cartographer’s design; and all came to be represented by a similarly fixed repertoire of famous sites. In this sense, Shinano was fully representative.

The final lesson of this corpus is its multiplicity. In the earliest provincial paradigm, dictated by the conceits and concerns of the imperial capital, Shinano took shape as part of a rugged Eastern Mountain circuit. Later, the same province was pulled firmly into the country’s core, replotted as Edo’s strategic backyard. Still later, maps catering to travelers recast the region as a landscape of passage punctuated by a series of notable landmarks.

The point is that no single vision triumphed over the others; the market kept all three perspectives in play. The same nineteenth-century map user who might display an antiquated Gyoki-style map on his snuftbox was likely

to consult a sheet map based on shogunal surveys for an authoritative 524 A PROVINCE DEFINED

overview of the archipelago, and to take a strip map like Torigai’s along when he set out on a pilgrimage. Like medieval mapmaking in Europe, Tokugawa cartography was “a thoroughly heterogeneous enterprise.”?? As we shall see, such heterogeneity ensured that national maps imparted a complex legacy to those who would seek to recast the province as a prefecture

in the modern era. Still, the coverage of a place like Shinsht on a national map was necessarily limited. While useful for locating a province in context and highlighting its key features, the all-Japan maps left most provincial spaces literally blank. The ground around Shinano’s landmarks—the landscape of livelihood for those who actually dwelled there—could not be rendered visible in a cartography committed to covering the nation on a single sheet or scroll. Only on large maps that depicted the kunz up close could landmarks be situated in a matrix of production and politics, the spatial fabric of everyday life. It is to such maps that we now turn.

SHINANO IN THE NATION 55

TWO

Shinano Up Close

THE RISE OF WARRIOR POWER in the Kanto effected an upheaval in Japan's

geography. As shown in the previous chapter, maps of the nation after 1600 registered that upheaval by giving Shinano a new address, one that moved it into the country’s midsection, while locating it along a new north-south spur as well. But the cartographic vision emanating from Edo differed from

that of eighth-century Kyoto in more than a spatial sense. For when the Tokugawa set out to plot the provinces, they did so from a novel political position as well. In some ways, that position was characterized by constraints. Unlike the sovereigns who first put Shinano on the map, the Tokugawa could not presume to appoint provincial governors to execute their directives in the countryside. Nor was the shogun capable of demanding tribute from each province. Despite his glowing titles and massive estates, leyasu was in many ways still a regional warlord whose allies and erstwhile enemies alike enjoyed sovereign rights within their own domains. Yet in other ways, the Tokugawa enjoyed more power than any classical hegemon. The early shoguns moved local lords around the landscape like chess pieces, commandeered regional manpower for national projects, and conducted surveys throughout the archipelago, intruding into other lords’ holdings to do so. Most importantly for our purposes, they demanded geographical data about the entire national terrain, province by province, at an unprecedented scale of magnification. | 56

This chapter essays a sustained reading of three successive Shinano kuniezu, or “picture maps of the province,” dating from the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Given their scale, scope, and compound structure, finding an entry point into these maps is a challenge. None comes equipped with a comprehensive key; although the color scheme used to

distinguish the Runs ten districts is routinely explained, the rest of the iconography is not. Nonetheless, by selecting one topic at a time from the maps crowded visual field, it is possible to analytically peel the kuniezu into a series of legible layers. Here the discussion begins with the physical terrain, then proceeds with an analysis of the maps’ agricultural, commercial, and political patterns. We start with physical geography. Although it has been argued that the subject of the kuniezu was the social and political relations of the land more than the land itself,* the uniezu convey important empirical information about the natural environment. Rivers created their dominant visual framework, and drainage patterns were meticulously rendered; mountains as well were drawn with care. Variations of color and line conveyed meaningful ecological details, distinguishing small streams from large, bare rock from wooded peaks, conifers from broadleaf forest.’ For Shinano, the overall pattern suggested by this layer of the kuniezu is one of physical fragmentation. A similar message comes through in the rendering of political, agricultural, and commercial geography. Although Shinano is a mountainous place, its agricultural wealth was its main attraction to the feudal lords. Surveyors would estimate the province's yield at 400,000 koku in the 1590s, and new-field development would steadily push that figure up in the succeeding decades. By 1647, Shinano’s aggregate assessment stood at nearly 545,000

koku; by 1730, it had risen to more than 615,000 koku.* But in contrast to most kuni, Shinano’s agrarian riches were not concentrated in a single region. The distribution of agricultural settlements is clearly shown on these maps, confirming the province's polycentric character. Similar patterns can be detected in the cartography of commercial corridors and political divisions. At every turn, the kuniezu reveal a province divided. Yet fragmentation is ultimately not the most striking message of these maps. The deepest impression left by the kuniezu derives from their overall design, whose visual elements fit together to confer cohesion on the province as a whole. Coherence was embodied in the map through the orientation of symbols and text, the depiction of boundaries, and the framing of the province as an isolate. Exploring these features in turn shows how the makers of the Shinano kuniezu gave the kuni an unmistakable visual SHINANO UP CLOSE Sor

unity, transcending its fractured features. The devices by which the picture maps conferred a cohesive identity on their subject—and the ramification of that vision for the province's ongoing restoration—are the subject of the chapter's conclusion. As this overview suggests, the following discussion aims at a synthetic reading of the Shinano kuniezu corpus. Since many elements of both the cartographer’s idiom and the region’s geography remained relatively stable from the first to the last of these maps, I have found it useful to emphasize their commonalities more than their differences.’ But if this approach works well for the geographies of production and transportation, it works less well in the political realm, where change over time was marked. Since contemporary mapmakers discreetly avoided plotting the contours of Shinano’s individual domains in any case, the geographer must turn to local histories to reconstruct this aspect of the regional landscape. As it happens, those same reference works prove indispensable in other ways as well. My read-

ing of these maps accordingly follows a method akin to triangulation. Tacking from map to text and back again, I focus on what the kuniezu disclose—and on what they fail to disclose—about the watersheds, polities, settlements, and roads that together gave shape to Shinano (Map 11). To frame that analysis, it is essential to begin by considering how these unprecedented maps were produced in the first place. From the start, the Tokugawa were keen to collect data in cartographic form; in fact, commissioning a map of each province was one of Ieyasu's first moves after unifying the country.° An order issued in 1604 (Keiché 9)—just one year into leyasu’s tenure as shogun—called for fief holders throughout the archipelago to lay bare for shogunal officials not just the whereabouts of their castles and the scope of their holdings, but also the precise location and yield of every village in their jurisdiction. As Mary Elizabeth Berry explains, calling for such documents was a radical step. Aside from an ineffective effort by the founder of the Kamakura shogunate to collect local maps and provincial land registers in the late twelfth century, no one had attempted such a comprehensive undertaking for centuries. The limited mapmaking that had taken place before Ieyasu was local in origin and small in scope; “particularity prevailed.”’ Yet if the Tokugawa achieved a more comprehensive cartography, they did so only by yielding claims to comprehensive authority. [he process that produced their detailed maps of the provinces bespoke not only a new capacity for surveillance, but also a new constellation of power, one premised on the parcellization of sovereignty. As we

58 A PROVINCE DEFINED

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Plate 16. Shin etsu kokky6 zu (Map of the Boundary between Shinano and Echigo Provinces), n.d.. Manuscript, 74 x 131.2 cm. Courtesy of Yamashita Kazumasa.

THREE

Shinano in the World

AS COMMERCE ENVELOPED EARLY MODERN JAPAN, Shinano was altered

in fundamental ways. During the seventeenth century, the hallmark of the agrarian economy had been quantitative expansion; in the eighteenth century, it was qualitative change. Specialty crops and commercial fertilizers transformed farming, making it more intensive and more diverse. Meanwhile, brewing, weaving, sericulture, and paper craft made possible a dense web of protoindustrial enterprise.' But innovation was not confined to the productive sphere. Shinano also participated in the eighteenth century's exuberant experimentation in the arts and letters. After 1720, when the sixth shogun, Tokugawa Yoshimune (1684-1751), relaxed the ban on foreign books, the conceptual horizons of literate Japanese throughout the archipelago began to expand. The latest works of Western science (in mathematics and astronomy in particular) began to be actively imported, and a small but seminal school of Dutch studies gained a foothold in Nagasaki. Over the course of the eighteenth century these developments would transform the study of the natural sciences and medicine, introduce novel techniques into the visual arts, and deepen Japanese understandings of global history and geography.’ None of this was reflected in the kuniezu. In precisely the period when the leading states of Europe and North America embarked on ambitious projects that revolutionized cartographic practice and created scientific im89

ages of their terrain,’ Japanese domestic cartography essentially stagnated. Except in pockets of intensive new-field reclamation, surveying came to a halt; villagers largely kept the Tokugawa’s cartographers—and tax collectors—at bay. To be sure, the shogunate commissioned a new set of kuniezu in 1647 and 1702—although even these rare commissions may have been initiated more as a ritual of identification with the deified Ieyasu than as an attempt to glean practical information about the national terrain.* But after 1702, shogunal officials did not even bother to update their picture maps for more than a hundred years. In contrast to the rhythms of cultural and economic development in other spheres of Japanese life—and to the crescendo of cartographic energy in many other parts of Eurasia—provincial mapping in Nihon settled into a period of arrested development.’ The most persuasive explanation for mid- Tokugawa cartographic inertia may be the absence of warfare. Field surveying is a costly business, typically driven by territorial ambitions or the need to raise revenues for defense. Neither imperative was particularly powerful in eighteenth-century Japan. Successive shoguns surely would have liked to raise revenues, and some of them tried, but when peasants rose up to block those efforts, the shoguns backed down. In Shinano, at least, “successive peasant demands and appeals transformed the original tax regime until it came to serve local interests.”° If those appeals succeeded, it was in no small part because foreign pressure on the regime was weak. The compliant Dutch had been put under virtual house arrest in the Nagasaki harbor since the 1630s, and the more belligerent Catholic states were barred from the archipelago altogether. Even Japanese merchants had been forbidden to go abroad, reversing a century of active mercantile expansion in Southeast Asian waters.’ These policies allowed the shogunate to successfully deter foreign ageression for nearly two centuries. Without an urgent need to arm the na-

tion, there was no pressing need to antagonize the populace by raising taxes—and correspondingly no need to update the nation’s maps.® Yet the exclusion policies of the 1630s could not be sustained forever. By the end of the eighteenth century Europeans were circling Japanese waters once again, flexing a new kind of military muscle. The Russians were the first to arrive. Having occupied the Kurile Island of Urupp in 1766, a Russian commander sailed boldly into Hakodate Bay at the southern tip of Ezo (Hokkaido) before the end of the century, pressing for trading privileges on behalf of the czar.” This provocation, and others that swiftly followed, created a climate of crisis in Edo by 1800, prompting the first truly new mapping effort since the Tokugawa had come to power. Within twenty years QO A PROVINCE DEFINED

Japan would be plotted in a new global idiom, its coordinates fixed by precise astronomical calculations. The necessary foundation for that new vision was a century of patient work in applied mathematics.'" Yet the ini-

tiative for putting this knowledge to work came not from the shogunate but from a humble commoner. The new map of Japan materialized because a sake brewer and amateur astronomer named Ino Tadataka offered to lead a small team of assistants from Edo to Ezo and back again at his own expense, measuring each step of the way. Only after shogunal officials saw the remarkable results did they commission In6’s team to plot the coastline of the entire archipelago."! To this day Ino is revered in Japan for his coastal maps. Accounts of his life invariably culminate with the story of a British naval ofhcer who, presented with a copy of Ino’s charts in 1861, concluded that the British would not have to survey Japanese waters for themselves.'* But maritime maps were not the only outcome of In6’s vision. Equally important was the way his project translated the geography of the interior into the language of coordinates. Ino did not plot Shinano from the perspective of the capital, the castle town, or the road; he plotted it from the perspective of the stars. The effect was a startlingly unfamiliar image of the national terrain, anchored not in a historical framework but in a mathematical one. Even for a landlocked place like Shinano, this paradigm would have radical implications,

although it would take time for them to become apparent. When shogunal officials ordered new maps of the provinces in the decade after In6’s death, they instructed the daimyo merely to update the traditional picture maps. It would require the overthrow of the Tokugawa state to effect an overhaul of Japanese state cartography. Analyzing this protracted process requires subjecting the scientific maps

of the nineteenth century to the same conceptual and contextual procedures essayed in previous chapters for their predecessors. The logical start-

ing point for such an inquiry is the work of Ino Tadataka. To be sure, Shinsht was not a high priority for In6’s team; in fact, this interior region initially came onto In6’s map less as a destination than as a space of passage. Of their first six expeditions, only one traversed Shinano at all, and then only as a shortcut home.!? All the same, replotting roadways on a coordinate grid was a crucial first step in modernizing Japanese geographic practice. The first part of the chapter explores how this early experiment transformed the map of the province. If mathematization was largely an abstract matter of representation, the second step, standardization, was more wrenching. Implementing this piece SHINANO IN THE WORLD QI

of the modern geographical agenda required a revolutionary act: the termination of parcellized sovereignty. Rhetorically, this was accomplished in 1871 with the famous edict abolishing the domains and establishing prefectures (haihan chiken); institutionally, it would take another decade to work out.!4 The second part of the chapter accordingly jumps forward to 1881, when the new political order was first displayed in the form of an official government atlas. A veritable blueprint for the modernizing state, this atlas announced Tokyos determination to transform traditional landscape elements into tools of central power. Its map of central Honshi filtered the familiar geography of Shinano through a novel administrative mesh, turning an inherited patchwork of polities into a unified prefecture whose features were re-coded for service as instruments of top-down rule. Once the domestic terrain had been standardized, the third step was to nationalize it. That agenda pervades the first detailed topographical quadrants of the region, produced by the Japanese military between 1886 and 1889. Since the nationalization of the countryside took place in both a men-

tal and a material register, my approach to these mid-Meiji quadrants is twofold. On the one hand, | attend closely to their formal key, whose elaborately ordered categories continued the project of recasting a fractured landscape as a fractal one. On the other hand, | point to places where the Nagano quadrants reveal how the region was steadily being physically re-engineered

to serve Tokyo's ends. At the time these maps were made, that transformation was at an early stage. Yet large-scale images from the later 1880s allow us to see where Tokyo had already moved beyond naming and sorting

to begin controlling and developing the region's resources, appropriating Nagano for the nation through every means at its disposal. The last section of the chapter revisits prefectural cartography twenty years

on, when the apparatus of the modern state was well entrenched. By this time the mathematization, standardization, and nationalization of provincial space were faits accomplis. But the very success of those procedures had

given rise to a new problem: could a countryside that had been neutered in this way support a sense of regional identity? Were aerial cartography and top-down bureaucracy compatible with native-place sensibility? It was left to private publishers to solve this conundrum. Their solution involved grafting a kuniezu sensibility onto images of the political artifact that was Nagano, creating in effect a combinatory visual idiom, one that made scientifically surveyed spaces available not just as instruments of central rule but also as objects of local attachment.!? Commercial maps of Nagano from the early twentieth century show how that was done, suggesting that mod92 A PROVINCE DEFINED

ern geography ultimately entailed a fourth and final step: the (re)-animation of bureaucratic space. Since rupture preceded recuperation, however, it is with the cartographic innovations of the early nineteenth century that our story begins. PUTTING SHINANO ON THE GRID

Early in the twelfth year of Kansei (1800), an unusual proposal arrived at the shogun’s offices in Edo. Through the intercession of his well-connected teacher and patron (the samurai scholar Takahashi Yoshitoki [1764—1804]),

a commoner named Ino Tadataka (1745-1818) offered to undertake a coastal survey of Ezo (Hokkaid6) at his own expense. The motivation behind this extraordinary request was a combination of scientific curiosity and social ambition. An amateur astronomer, [no aspired to determine the earth’s magnitude, a calculation that would require precise measurements of a long arc of the earth’s surface. To make such a measurement palatable to the authorities—and to secure the permissions he would need to trespass upon the lands of the many daimyo between Edo and Hokkaido with suspicious-looking scientific instruments—In6o proposed to use the same trip to “make maps that might serve as reference to the coming generation.”!° As an early biographer points out, this self-representation was probably disingenuous; it is unlikely that the maps for which Ino would become famous were a mere afterthought. Nagakubo Sekisui, a geographer of commoner extraction like Ino, had been elevated to samurai status a decade earlier for his improved map of Japan.'’ In due time, the same honor would be bestowed on Ino as well.'® Whatever Ino’s motives, his offer came at an opportune moment for a government that was growing obsessed with coastal defense. Permission was granted, officials along the route were ordered to cooperate, and the foray to the north began. For six months in the year 1800, Ino traveled from Edo to the far reaches of Ezo, taking measurements first along the Oshii Road and then around the southern coast of Hokkaido as far as Nishibetsu. His procedure was not that of the full-blown trigonometric survey, a tedious and expensive procedure whereby a team of surveyors blanketed an entire countryside with a net of precise triangles, measured by means of a theodolite. Even in Europe and its colonies, such state-of-the-art triangulation surveying was limited at the time.'” Instead, Iné and his team relied on the traverse survey, an older technique in which the cartographer combined a handful of points fixed by astronomical observations with others fixed by SHINANO IN THE WORLD 9 3

Map 14. Detail from Ind Tadataka, Chizu sessei binran (Index Map), 1821. Prepared as an appendix to the Yochigu jissoku roku (Collection of Land-Survey Data), the notes from the survey of Japan by In6 Tadataka and Takahashi Kageyasu between 1800 and 1821. Manuscript, 107 x 121 cm. Courtesy of the National Archives of Japan, Tokyo.

taking bearings (with compass and sextant) to distant objects visible from the route.*? Twenty-one sheets on a scale of 1:43,636, as well as a summary map at one-tenth that scale, were presented to the Department of Ezo Affairs the following year.*! Impressed with the results of this first self-funded ex-

pedition, the shogunate proceeded to authorize and underwrite another eight expeditions covering the entire perimeter of Japan. The chief mission

of this enormous twenty-year project was to secure an accurate chart of Japan's coastlines, starting in the north (where the foreign threat had first made itself felt) but eventually extending the length of the archipelago, encompassing Honshi, Shikoku, Kyishi, and a score of smaller islands. Ino 94 A PROVINCE DEFINED

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Figure 4. Legend for Map 16, Gifu Nagano Ishikawa Fukui yonken zu (Map of Four Prefectures). From Naimusho Chirtkyoku, Dai Nihon fuken bunkatsu zu (Separate Maps of the Municipalities and Prefectures of Great Japan) (Tokyo, 1881). Courtesy of the Digital Library from the Meiji Era, the National Diet Library, Tokyo. For English translation, see Table. 2.

split Shinano’s six largest premodern districts (and others like them across the archipelago) into smaller, more useful administrative counties without creating a whole new nomenclature. By delineating a new boundary between northern and southern Saku, eastern and western Tsukama, upper

and lower Ina, and so on, Tokyo's geographers endowed all sixteen of Nagano’s new counties with resonant, antique names. For nearly half a century, these reinvigorated gun would constitute a crucial layer of state power

in Japan. In an explicit example of geographical restoration, an ancient SHINANO IN THE WORLD 10 3

TABLE 2

Features identified in the legend accompanying the Dai Nihon fuken bunkatsu zu (Separate Maps of the Municipalities and Prefectures of Great Japan) (Tokyo: Naimusho Chirikyoku, 1881)

Kokkai Provincial border

Gunkai District border

Bungunkai Subdistrict border Kencho Prefectural headquarters

Meiyit Famous place Eki Post station

Mura SaibanshoVillage Court of law

Gunku yakusho District office, county seat

Denshinsho Telegraph ofhce

Keisatsusho Police office Chindai Regional military headquarters Bunei Regiment headquarters Yabin kawasesho Postal exchange office

Todai Lighthouse Funa todai Floating lighthouse lomari Anchorage

chorographic scale was reactivated, updated, and turned into a useful device through which to disseminate orders and coordinate compliance at the local level.

The fourth entry in the key returns the viewer's attention to the prefectural level by signaling the existence of a newly centralized office for regional administration: the prefectural headquarters (kenchd). Given the early decision to consolidate local lands into contiguous prefectures, designating a central place from which to govern them was a logical step. But in a re-

gion as fractured as Shinano, deciding where to put the headquarters was anything but easy. The cool authority of this official map, marking Nagano town as the sole headquarters of Nagano Prefecture, masked years of turmoil over that issue. It also marked a key departure from imperial precedent. From the eighth to the sixteenth century, Shinano’s provincial headquarters (kokufu) had been situated not in the Chikuma River valley but astride the old Eastern Mountain Road, in the Matsumoto Plain. Asa castle IO 4 A PROVINCE DEFINED

town and marketing center throughout the early modern period, Matsumoto had continued to be a more commanding seat of power than its northern rival; in fact, the settlement named Nagano was but a minor village on the outskirts of Zenkoji, all but invisible on the kuniezu. That Meiji officials chose to bypass Matsumoto in favor of Nagano when siting the headquarters for their new prefecture represented a triumph of strategic imperatives over imperial precedent. The North Country Road had emerged as a vital throughway between Tokyo and the Japan Sea coast; while Matsumoto enjoyed the advantages of antiquity and centrality, Nagano was easier to access from Tokyo. It also lay within striking distance of the most restive villages in the region, whose headmen had staged a major uprising just ten years before this atlas was published. The designation of this nondescript northern town as Nagano’ modern capital shows the regime’s pragmatic approach to its geographical agenda. The next entry, famous places (mezyii), seems an anomalous intrusion of cultural considerations into a still-unfinished political roster. Only a close

examination of the map reveals what constituted a “famous place” for Tokyo's official geographers in the fourteenth year of Meiji. Zenkoji, Kawa-

nakajima, Obasuteyama, and the rest of Shinano’s top tourist attractions do not merit this symbol. The only places distinguished by the large round mark for mezy# are lida, Takato, Matsumoto, Iwamurata, Suzaka, Matsushiro, and Iiyama, all former castle towns.”? If it is easy to see why the government would have wanted to map these nodes of local power, it is harder to divine why they chose such a bland and potentially misleading label. The

answer may simply be that 1881 was still too close for comfort to an era when castles had served as rallying points for armed uprisings against the new regime. It was only ten years, after all, since the Nakano rebels had massed at Matsushiro castle, a monument that government officials had angrily razed in retaliation. Calling these sites “famous places” rather than “for-

mer castle towns” may have served to deflate their political significance.” Two more entries round out the settlement taxonomy, adding icons for post stations (ei) and villages (mura). This distinction represents another Edo-era holdover. Unlike the shogunate, the Meiji government did not mandate that a fixed number of porters and horses be kept at post stations for official use. Moreover, ek and mura were merged in the population tables that accompanied each map, where the relevant categories were those not of function but of size. Yet distinguishing the onetime stations from other villages evidently remained important; the same classifications would appear on the first-generation topographical sheets as well. A close look at SHINANO IN THE WORLD IO§

how these symbols were distributed on the Shinano map reveals how the eki/mura distinction worked and why it mattered. In effect, the only rural settlements identified in this first official atlas were those that served a major transportation function: all were stopping points on marked roads.*! In areas where agrarian hamlets were thick on the ground, only ekz made it onto the map; mere “villages” were noted only in the lightly populated fringe.*? In this context, highlighting former post stations would help traveling officials— or salesmen—gauge where food and lodging would be available along the roadways through the province.**

The next six items in the key indexed vital but spare government installations. At the time this atlas was made, Nagano had only one court of law and one regimental headquarters. Both were located in Matsumoto, a powerful sign of that former castle town’s continuing importance as the prefecture’s second city. Matsumoto did not yet have a telegraph office, however. That icon could be found only at Nagano and Ueda, the two most important nodes in the corridor that connected Tokyo to the Japan Sea coast. Police headquarters were also relatively rare; besides Nagano and Matsumoto, branches of the prefectural police could be found only in lida, liyama, Ueda, and Iwamurata. The striking thing about this roster is the extent to

which it was skewed toward the castle towns of the old North Country Road. The Meiji government had decided to concentrate two-thirds of its prefectural police power, as well as its modern infrastructure of communication, in this well-traveled corridor to the Kanto. By virtue of these allocations, southern and western Shinano were effectively demoted to secondary status—a move that turned the province's classical, Kyoto-oriented geography on its head. The last items in the atlas key (apart from maritime features not found

in Shinano) are county seats (gunku yakusho) and post ofhices (yubin kawasesho). With county seats the prefecture was liberally supplied, having one designated yakusho for each of the sixteen modern counties. Looking closely at their distribution suggests that several principles were at work in the location of these gun headquarters. Most had long served as seats of local authority, whether as castle towns (half a dozen cases) or shogunal intendancies (Nakano); the rest were former inspection stations (Fukushima,

Toyoshina, Omachi) or major post stations (Ina, Kami Suwa, Usuda). As for post offices, their distribution at this time was remarkably sparse. Only ten such symbols appear in all of Nagano: five in the Chikuma River corridor, and five from Matsumoto to lida.“4

106 A PROVINCE DEFINED

In sum, the 1881 atlas provides not only a glimpse of government priorities but a valuable snapshot of the regional landscape in early Meiji, when the main cartographic achievement of the state was standardization. Its maps reveal the nodes and networks of local administration at a moment when the Japanese state was still thin on the ground, before the convulsions of the mid-1880s brought the mature Metji government into being. What is striking at this stage is the continuity and compromise between the old order and the new, the makeshift arrangements by which a medieval spatial matrix was corralled into the neoclassical model and subordinated to Tokyo. The basic concerns of governance—keeping the peace, sustaining the fisc, maintaining communication—were familiar, after all; what had changed was the scale of coordination. Erecting a modern state on the remains of a parcellized polity entailed not the abolition of prior geographies so much

as their absorption into standardized territories over which central rule could be exercised. If the most archaic feature of the new geography was its counties (the newly restored gun), its most novel element was the conversion of sixteen disparate local power centers into nominally equivalent— and strategically subordinated—county seats. The location of all those county seats (and of the ten post offices as well) along two major corridors through the prefecture reveals a final pattern worth noting: the sharpening distinction between provincial cores and hinterlands. Taking an uneven landscape and skewing it further, Tokyo initially concentrated almost all governmental assets along the main roads through the ken. As we have seen, the most important resources were restricted to the prefectural headquarters (Nagano) and the artery that connected it to Tokyo. Matsumoto was marked as a secondary hub, with modern installations radiating outward through the Sai, Ina, and Kiso valleys. The rest of the countryside, unmarked, was left as hinterland; its fate at this point was to be taxed and policed more than actively developed. By showing that principle at work, the 1881 atlas reveals a new model of topdown authoritarian governance, one that would not only use the unevenness that it found in the landscape but actively enhance it. Not that this would go uncontested. Over future decades, localities across Nagano would fight fiercely for the kinds of installations noted in the atlas key, hoping for higher rankings in the prefectural pecking order. But if these maps masked that long-running story of sectional conflict and local boosterism, their overall message was accurate enough. It was Tokyo that picked the winners— and Tokyo's verdicts, once engraved in steel, tended to stick.

SHINANO IN THE WORLD IO7

NATIONALIZING NAGANO: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL QUADRANTS OF THE I880OS

The atlas of 1881 served a crucial purpose for Meiji bureaucrats. Whether posted to the prefectures or detailed downtown, Tokyo's civil servants now had a convenient skeleton key to the administrative units of the nation. But this level of resolution, while indispensable, was not enough. With dams to build, minerals to extract, forests to manage, and roads to upgrade, the Meiji ministries needed large-scale maps as well. Early proposals were grandiose, envisioning coverage of the entire country at a scale of 1:20,000 or even 1:5,000, but those plans were soon abandoned. Instead, the Land Survey Department (Rikuchi Sokuryobu) settled ona cruder scale of 1:200,000. In 1884 the task was transferred to the army, and within a decade every corner of the archipelago had been mapped.” If this rush job met an urgent demand, it did so by resorting to expedients. While carefully plotted on the basis of polyhedric projection,*° the first generation of topographical maps relied on provisional surveying without triangulation. The army’s cartographers entered contemporary spatial data onto a base map that was cobbled together chiefly from two Tokugawa sources: Ino ‘Tadataka’s charts from the 1820s and the Tempo picture maps of the provinces from the 1830s. Neither offered a detailed rendering of the extensive upland terrain of Nagano that lay off the main roads, but surveying those high-altitude zones would have to wait. For now, the military cartographers proceeded by transposing the kuniezu data onto Ino’s grid, superimposing both on Greenwich coordinates and adding new data where they could. The resulting composite maps of central Honshu (like those covering most of the nation) were finished between 1886 and 1891 (with Hokkaido following in 1891-93). In another break with Tokugawa practice, the state actively disseminated these up-to-date cartographic images. Starting in 1887, each quadrant was printed in bulk as soon as it was ready, to be sold through the Geographical Bureau to the public at large. As a medium for apprehending the prefecture of Nagano, these firstgeneration topo maps are a mixed bag. On the one hand, the level of local specificity is singularly rich. The miniaturizing of typeset text—as much as the magnification of overall scale—permitted finer distinctions and more information than had ever been plotted on Japanese chorographic maps. And because they went out into the field at a time when the state had begun to thicken its presence on the ground, the army's cartographers found telegraphs, railroads, post offices, barracks, schools, and other accoutrements 108 A PROVINCE DEFINED

of modern statehood blanketing the countryside. On the other hand, like all topographical quadrants, the Meiji maps cannibalized the ken. Following international precedent, the army's cartographers carved the countryside into arbitrary rectangles. Nagano was split between eight quadrants, which had to be cumbersomely reassembled to provide an overview of the whole.*” Even then, the sheer mass of visual detail—especially the profusion of hachure marks—made it impossible to gain a synoptic picture of the prefecture. Accordingly, I have found it useful to subject these maps to a dual reading, one that attends to cartographic practice as well as the patterns it reveals. The entry point for both is the maps’ formal key. The first item on that key is the transportation network. The army surveyors led readers into the map by distinguishing four tiers of roadways: national, prefectural, village, and rural. Within Nagano, only two routes were assigned to the first tier: the old Middle Mountain Road (Nakasendo) and

the North Country Road (Hokkoku Kaido). The growing importance of the latter was told by a fifth item in the key, the icon for railroads. Trains were just beginning to penetrate central Japan at this date. On these sheets, their stippled symbol can be seen in only two places: the northern and southern ends of the Hokkoku Kaido route. One track snaked southward from the Japan Sea through the Zenkoji Plain, ascending the Chikuma River as far as Ueda; its counterpart, pushing north from the Kanto, had reached the foot of the Usui Pass. This work in progress, more than any other feature on the map, documents the incipient industrialization of the region. The two tracks would meet in 1893 to form the Shin’etsu (Shinano-Echigo) Line, a national railway linking Tokyo to the Japan Sea coast at Naoetsu that brought

new prominence to the old North Country corridor.*® Although it ran through only a quarter of the prefecture, the Shin’etsu Line would transform Nagano’s economy. Nationalization in the most material mode had begun.*”

Second only to transportation was the geography of jurisdiction. Two decades into the Meiji era, the borders of the old provinces continued to be prominently marked alongside the new prefectures. If anything, the old boundaries were the more eye-catching; kuni were marked with crosses

alternating with dots (+-+-+-+-+), while ken got a simple dashed line (------------), Where the two coincided (as around the borders of Shinano/ Nagano), the mapmakers used both symbols in alternation (+-+-+-+-+-noe nnnnnn nn $-$-t-4-4-------------), concisely encoding the continuities of regional administration. But these Meiji quadrants also include a third type of jurisdictional boundary: the line delimiting military districts (shikan). To demarcate these units of its own domain, the army’s cartographers used SHINANO IN THE WORLD IO9

crosses alternating with dashes (+----+----+----+), a symbol whose visual prominence rivals that for kuni boundaries. Where shikan coincided with province and prefecture, all three symbols alternated on the map. Such was the case around the edges of Nagano. Unlike most prefectures, however, Nagano had not one but two military districts, one headquartered in each of its rival towns. Close observation of the Nagano quadrants thus reveals a military border running like a fault line down the middle of the recently united prefecture. If its iconography highlights the power of the military in the prewar countryside, the placement of this boundary reminds us that Nagano was still a prefecture divided. Having identified five tiers of transportation and four kinds of boundaries, the key goes on to offer an intricate iconography of settlement. While continuing to distinguish post stations (ek) from ordinary villages (mura), the army surveyors overlaid this functional binary with new gradations of size. The result was a finely specified settlement grid, showing four classes for rural places and five for (proto-) towns.?? Putting this kind of demographic information on a map was unprecedented in the Japanese tradition. Abstractly speaking, labor power had displaced harvests as the mea-

sure of place.?' Significantly, no attempt was made to map municipal boundaries. As in the older tradition, settlements were designated as dots. Not until the sweeping mergers of 1889, which consolidated the 1,600 traditional villages of Shinano into fewer than four hundred modern municipalities, would official maps delineate the boundaries between them.” In addition to stratified codes that distinguished major thoroughfares from minor roads, prefectures from counties, and small settlements from large, the first-generation topographical sheets also included thirty-nine separate symbols for specialized facilities—a fourfold increase over the comparable list in the 1881 atlas (Table 3). This diverse inventory invokes the promiscuous mix of objects that mattered to Tokyo's cartographers in the second decade of Meiji. Some of the symbols (those for hospitals, factories, traffic signals, and street lamps) denote facilities too small to represent at a scale of 1:200,000; these properly belong to the legend of urban rather than regional maps. Others (for anchorages, cannonades, shipyards, rice warehouses, and salt-making sites) denote economic activities that were simply

not to be found in this landlocked province. While the presence of such categories evokes the mindset of military cartographers in an industrializing state, little can be done with them here, for the items they index are absent from the Nagano quadrants. But four symbol clusters bear more directly

BE A PROVINCE DEFINED

TABLE 3

Features identified on the formal key of the mid-Meiji topographical quadrants, following symbols for roads, boundaries, and settlements

Shinshi Shinto shrine

Butsu'u Buddhist temple

Seikyodo Christian church Rikugun kaoku Army barracks

Kaigun kaoku Navy barracks

Yabinkyoku Post office

Byoin Hospital Denshinkyoku Telegraph office Seizdsho Factory Komegura Rice warehouse

Zasensho Shipyard Sanryo Imperial tomb

Koseki Old ruin Kosenjo Ancient battlefield

To Pagoda [shibumi Stone monument

Jokyo Castle remains

Bochi Gravesite Onsen Hot springs

Sankakuten Triangulation point

Ketido sokuten Longitude and latitude reckoning point

Suijunten Water level point Rihyo kaihyo Mileage marker, boundary post Shingohyo Traffic signal

Joto Lamppost Kozan kochi Mine Kazan Volcano Sesseki-ba Quarry

Shioba Salt-making site

Shidan shireibu Regimental headquarters

Ryodan Brigade headquarters Daitaiku Battalion headquarters

Hodai Cannon stand Chinjudai Anchorage

Kenpei tonsho Military police station (continued)

TABLE 3 (continued)

Keisatsusho Police station Saibansho Law court

Fukencho Prefectural headquarters

Gunku yakusho District office, county seat

sOURCE: Shiiset nijiman bun no ichi zu fukkoku ban: Nagano-ken zenzu (Composite Map of Nagano Prefecture Based on Reproductions of the 1:200,000 ‘Topographic Quadrants). Copyright © 1979 by Heibonsha. Published as an insert to Isshi Shigeki, ed., Nagano-ken no chimei, vol. 20 of Nihon rekishi chimei taikei (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1979).

on this landlocked region. It is worth considering those clusters in some detail, in order of their appearance in the key. The first denotes the geography of religion. Although they were nowhere to be found in the stripped-down, businesslike atlas of 1881, Shinto halls of worship are given primacy of place on the later topographic sheets; the icon that tops the list is a torzz gate, denoting a dwelling of the native gods. Buddha halls come next, followed by “western churches.” In practice, however, only five sites of worship appear on the map: one temple (the famous

Zenkoji) and four shrines. The army surveyors hired by Tokyo evidently did not consider the rest of Nagano’s hundreds of religious establishments to be map-worthy. Combined with the primacy of position by which the governments mapmakers exalted kami worship over other faiths, this rigorous filtering bespeaks the growing power of state Shinto, which selected a handful of shrines for national veneration.”’ Like other legacies of the premodern past, Nagano’ religious institutions were being viewed through a centralizing lens, and only those that scored high in the national rankings made it onto the modern map. A second, more diffuse group of symbols points to the many-headed hydra of state power. In addition to jurisdictional boundaries, discrete icons locate army bases and navy bases; postal and telegraph offices; regimental, brigade, and battalion headquarters; command centers of the military and civilian police; and (conspicuously in last place) the apparatus of civil rule: law courts, prefectural headquarters, and district offices. It may not be surprising, given its provenance, that the map key should privilege military installations, but it is the more mundane apparatus of local government that dominates the Nagano quadrants. Courthouses can be found in ten settlements, post offices in twenty, and police stations in more than thirty. Ti2 A PROVINCE DEFINED

These fixtures of communications and control cast an increasingly powerful web across the prefecture, representing by far the most ubiquitous face of government in the region. A third symbol cluster denotes historical and cultural sites: imperial mausoleums, classical ruins, ancient battlefields, castle sites, pagodas, stone monuments, and graves. Here the local landscape comes across as basically bereft.

Only one battlefield (Kawanakajima) and eight castle sites make it onto the Nagano map. This raises an important question: why did the army surveyors find so few of Naganos historical features worth mapping? The evident bias toward imperial history, combined with a privileging of tangible remains, goes far toward providing an answer. For more than a century the regions own historians had been busy identifying scores of sites associating Shinano with the court, but most had little to show for that connection beyond a toponym cited in an ancient text. Naganos physical ruins, meanwhile—from its prehistoric sites and medieval fortresses to Tokugawa-

era relics and stone monuments—could claim little in the way of an imperial connection, tending to figure in more local narratives. All were accordingly bypassed here. To the military bureaucrats who came up with this key, what determined the value of a cultural landmark was its physical wit-

ness to the imperial past. Nagano might have impressive natural features (Asama Volcano and a dozen hot springs were noted on these sheets), but its cultural legacy was more elusive. The last category of symbols is also the most novel, denoting sites of significance to the mapping process itself. In a sign of the self-referential nature of scientific cartography, the Meiji surveyors emblazoned their maps

with special marks to show where they based their triangulations, where they reckoned latitude, and where they gauged sea level. These are in some ways the most interesting symbols in the key. On the one hand, like the use of Arabic numerals and degree and minute markings, they testify to Japan’s ongoing modernization—a process that entailed the adoption and display of international conventions in geography as much as in other domains. Such conventions governed the style of government maps even before they dictated their content; after all, these first quadrants were produced before comprehensive triangulation. At the same time, they reflect a notion that to mark territory is to make history. Underscoring the bureaucracy s expanding reach over the national domain, such coordinates were

marked on the ground as well as on the map, leaving literal traces of the surveyors passage through the country—and upholding the emperor's status as master of all his men surveyed.™4 SHINANO IN THE WORLD II 3

NAGANO EMERGES INTO VIEW

As noted above, the national geological survey laid uniform rectangles over

the whole archipelago, without reference to administrative boundaries. Viewing its quadrants may well have been disconcerting for those who had grown up on traditional maps, most of which had been organized around the kuni. Now, to compile an overview of Nagano required combining eight separate quadrangles. Finished at different dates between Meiji 19 and Meiji 22 (1886-89), these were never printed in a consolidated form until nearly a hundred years later, when the publishing house of Heibonsha produced composite prefectural maps for each volume of its gazetteer series as a tool for historical reference.”? But even when reassembled around older territories, the topographical sheets simply did not yield a familiar view. Dissolving Shinano/Nagano ina mass of black hachure lines, they turned a familiar place alien. The new picture had its uses, of course. The government's quadrants were soon in demand for exercises like railroad siting, dam building, and mountaineering—although engineers and climbers were soon clamoring for a more accurate picture of the highland terrain.*° Topo sheets also proved useful for counties and towns, enhancing residents’ grasp of the social and cultural relations of particular valleys, watersheds, or settlement clusters. But the new maps were virtually useless for chorological work at the prefectural level. Pasting these sheets together failed to create the aesthetically and psychologically satisfying sense of containment afforded by the old worms-eye view. The biggest problem, as the Heibonsha collages reveal, was the radical sublimation in these maps of political boundaries to topography. To be sure, the edges of Nagano Prefecture are marked on the Meiji quadrants, but prefectural boundary lines can only be seen up close, at a range from which it is impossible to see the prefecture as a whole. When a viewer steps back two or three paces to take in the composite map at a glance, political borders disappear in the swarm of hachure lines that cover its surface. No matter from what perspective one views this document, it is impossible to take

in the shape of the prefecture without altering the map. What springs to view instead is the region’s topography: its three main ridges (which were just beginning at this time to be known as the northern, central, and southern Japanese Alps) and its agricultural cores (especially the Ina Valley, the Matsumoto basin, and the Zenkoji Plain, each of which shows up clearly

as a white patch in a sea of gray). In the visual iconography of the GeoII 4 A PROVINCE DEFINED

graphical Bureau map, these subunits trumped the larger one; the prefecture per se was oddly unseeable. Yet while the conventions of topographical mapping may have presented problems for the prefecture, the information contained on these quadrangles was indispensable if an up-to-date vision of Nagano were to be produced. The challenge was to craft a stereoscopic product, one that captured the new survey data but framed it in familiar terms. The solution was more than a decade in the making, and in the end it was not the work of the state. By the turn of the century, however, commercial publishers in both Nagano and Tokyo began transposing data from the government’s topographical quadrants onto smaller single-sheet maps of the prefectures. It was in this altered form, repackaged so as to light up the ken while fading out its context, that modern mapping reconnected with a regional sense of place. Of the half-dozen commercial maps of Nagano produced during the Meiji era, the most successful in this sense was Hakuaikan’s “Complete Map of Nagano Prefecture” (Vagano-ken zenzu) of 1907 (Map 17). That the top-

ographical quadrants produced in the 1880s formed the basis for this early twentieth-century published map is evident from its formal title: “Complete Map of Nagano Prefecture, Based on the Latest Surveys and Showing Reformed Cities, Towns, and Villages” (Saishin chosa Nagano-ken zenzu:

kaisei shichoson). Attributed to Ando Rikinosuke, this handy folding map formed one in a series of fifty sheets depicting every major jurisdiction in what was, by then, the Japanese empire: forty-three prefectures, three metropolises, and three newly acquired territories (Hokkaido, Karafuto, and Taiwan). The sequence concluded with a map of the empire as a whole. All but the last were produced at a scale of 1:450,000 and sold separately for the modest price of seven sen. The faithfulness of the 1907 map to its official predecessor is easily demon-

strated by zooming in on any subregion and comparing the two formats. Maps 18 and 19 show the region centered on the prefectural capital on And6’s map and the 1887 Nagano quadrant, respectively. As can be seen at a glance,

the outlines of the capital are identical on the two maps; instead of being marked by generic squares, towns on both maps are represented by mintature outlines showing their actual shapes. Nearby features of both the natural and the built environment confirm that And6’s conventions are basically borrowed. Hatching marks topography; the Kawanakajima battle site is indicated with crossed swords; hot springs with an icon for steam; Zenkoji with the reverse swastika indicating a Buddhist temple; and Togakushi shrine

with a miniature sori gate. All of these symbols derive directly from the SHINANO IN THE WORLD PDs

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government-issued 1:200,000 series of the 1880s. Similar patterns prevail at the prefecture’s perimeter. Virtually every mountain labeled on the earlier quadrangles is also labeled here, and 98 percent of the names are duplicated. The most notable divergences in alpine toponyms are two cases in the Northern Alps, where Ando rejected Tokyo's terminology in favor of older local names.?’ Where elevations are given (for half a dozen mountain peaks), all but one are drawn directly from the army surveys.’® Yet while

this map is clearly based on the topographical sheets of the 1880s, important alterations have been made. Some of those alterations were due to new developments in the landscape. For instance, the postal network had doubled in density over the previous twenty years. By 1907 Ando could plot post offices in every corner of Shinano; I have counted no fewer than sixty-eight postal icons on his map, far more than on the mid-Meiji topo sheets. Equally dramatic was the expansion of the railroad network. In 1887 only two segments of the Shin’etsu Line had been built, leaving a conspicuous gap from Ueda to the Usui Pass. Twenty years later, however, the whole line had been completed from Tokyo to the Sea of Japan. Meanwhile, the Chuo Line had pushed SHINANO IN THE WORLD LL?

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Map 19. Detail from Shisei nijiiman bun no ichi zu fukkoku ban: Nagano-ken zenzu (Composite Map of Nagano Prefecture Based on Reproductions of the 1:200,000 Topographic Quadrants). Copyright © 1979 by Heibonsha. This map is published as an insert to Isshi Shigeki, ed., Nagano-ken no chimei, vol. 20 of Nihon rekishi chimei taikei (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1979).

westward through Yamanashi Prefecture as far as Lake Suwa, with a spur to Matsumoto and an extension marked as “under construction” through the Kiso Valley. Finally, a short but important regional line, the Shinonoi, now connected Matsumoto to Nagano. Closely following the routes of the Tokugawa turnpikes, these tracks expanded the groundwork for Nagano’s silk-based industrialization, whose profits and perils would determine the framework of regional development for decades to come.”? While the foregoing differences between the army maps of the 1880s and Ando’s map of 1907 were clearly due to empirical transformations on the ground, other differences between the two have more to do with style than substance. In particular, Ando’s representation of topography is considerably streamlined compared to that of the army’s quadrants, with many ridge details and minor passes eliminated. As on the government sheets, there 118 A PROVINCE DEFINED

are no contour lines, and hatchings make it possible only to tell which direction is upslope. But subtle shifts of shading make a major difference in the representation of terrain. On Ando’s map, the Ina Valley shows up clearly

as a flat-bottomed graben, a wide expanse of white indicating level land suitable for agriculture. The neighboring Kiso River to its west, by contrast,

is accurately shown as lacking a comparable valley floor; hemmed in by mountains on both sides, Kiso can be seen for the canyon that it is. Openings in the ubiquitous hachures allow the other agricultural cores to pop into view as well, such that the four largest population pockets in the region— those surrounding Nagano, Ueda, Matsumoto, and lida—are as clearly visible here as they were on the kuniezu. The colorful clusters of village lozenges may be gone, but the sense of riparian communities that they conveyed has been successfully recovered. Equally significant is Ando’s decision to draw important spatial informa-

tion out of the map and present it as metatext in the margins (Figure 5). Two tables join the key in his map’s lower right corner. The first, listing the location of every police and military installation in the region, is cleverly constructed to balance the stature and status of the area's two leading cities. Nagano, as the prefectural capital, is given a column of its own on the right-

hand side of the table; Matsumoto, home to the most important military installation in the area, gets an equally prominent column on the left. The sixteen counties are ranged between these two figurative pillars of the prefecture, with their police headquarters and county seats named. Such a design allows the mapmaker to pay equal homage to the separate claims of Nagano and Matsumoto residents even while drawing both into a single, overarching unity. A second table identifies the location of the Nagano superior court (Nagano city) and the ten district courts (one for each of the original Tokugawa-era gum). It also locates four institutions of higher edu-

cation (an all-male normal school in Nagano, a woman's normal school in Matsumoto, a sericultural school in Ueda, and an agricultural college in Ina). Finally, it lists the prefecture’s seven upper schools (chagakko). These, too, were allocated evenly across the prefecture, from Nagano, Ueda,

Omachi, and Nozawa in the north to Matsumoto, Suwa, and Iida in the south. The deliberate diffusion of all these coveted institutions around the prefecture—a result of hard-fought struggles by local leaders in every corner of the en—betrays the local rivalries engendered by the new political order as much as the government’ care to balance regional development.” Most meaningful, though, is the spatial framing of the whole. In its sharpest contrast to the neutral grid of the government maps, Ando’s presentation SHINANO IN THE WORLD I19

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is prefecture-centric; a dark figure on a white ground, Nagano’s shape becomes the map’s most conspicuous feature. In a visual echo of the kuniezu, the effect is portraitlike, rendering the prefecture as a three-dimensional object in otherwise flat space. Ando’s simplified topography aids the viewer in grasping the contours of this figure; while a handful of individual peaks

rise up from the sea of hachure lines, minor ranges are smoothed and merged. In fact, the only ridgelines that catch our attention are those that coincide with county (gun) boundaries. Those boundaries are further reI20 A PROVINCE DEFINED

inforced with a pale red tinge, while waterways are shown in pale blue. Such subtle touches soften the terrain and reclaim it for chorographic identification, achieving a pictorial effect with minimal recourse to pictorial technique. Through a gentle shift of emphasis, Ando achieves a satisfying

sense of enclosure; Nagano and its constituent counties are made to appear as quasi-natural geological units. The result is a graceful fusion of the

new paradigm with the old. Integrity meets modernity; the province is both reassembled and recast, giving the modern prefecture the familiar feel of home.

In a landmark book of 1994 entitled Szam Mapped, historian Thongchai Winichakul introduced the concept of the geo-body, a term that has since become a touchstone in studies of the national form. The geo-body is a deceptively simple thing: a bounded territory on a map, together with a set of related values and practices. The boundary itself, Thongchai insists, is a product of the imagination, a “man-made territorial definition.” What makes it potent on the ground are the associated social practices of classifying, communicating, and enforcement. Through those practices, an act of categorization becomes an act of control.°! Thongchai came to this formulation after discovering that the spatial verities taken for granted in international relations today did not always and everywhere obtain. In the context he knew best, that of premodern Siam, maps denoted cosmological realms more often than political ones, and polities on the ground met more often at vague buffers than at sharp borders.° This was an effect not merely of practical or technical limitations but of a

fundamentally different way of thinking about territory. Chiding his fellow historians for not taking the absence of linear boundaries on indigenous maps seriously (and for their misguided efforts to “demarcate the boundary of a premodern nation retrospectively”), Thongchai charted a different course: “This study is not simply a record of how mapping has been implemented and boundaries settled by treaty. Rather, it emphasizes how the new geographical discourse displaced the indigenous one, generating conflict, confrontation, and misunderstanding.”°? In the case of Siam, that discursive displacement occurred in the early nineteenth century. In 1820 the kingdom abruptly found itself adjacent to colonial regimes run by governors from London or Paris, men who were determined to fix boundary lines in the mode of modern European states. British and French diplomats then—like most scholars since—presumed that a territorial mindset like their own already existed among the indigeSHINANO IN THE WORLD I21

nous regimes of Burma and Siam. In fact, Thongchai insisted, it did not— not until “a map created the geo-body of a modern nation.”™ This argument has proven provocative for students of the national form. Even before his book appeared in print, Thongchai's insights had stimulated Benedict Anderson to add a meditation on maps to his classic study on the origins and spread of nationalism.°’ In subsequent years, Siam Mapped has inspired inquiries on premodern territorial norms across the globe. Japan is no exception. Historians Bruce Batten, David Howell, Ronald Toby, and Marcia Yonemoto have all taken up the notion of the geo-body in the Japanese context, tracing the transformation of Nihon from a state with deliberately “ragged edges” in the early modern era to one marked by clearly defined borders in the modern age.°° Approaching Thongchai’s work from the standpoint of Shinano, however, raises two intriguing problems. One is a question of context: whether a model developed for Thailand works equally well for Japan. The other is a question of scale: whether a theory devised for the nation works equally well for a province. Because it gets at basic issues of definition, the contextual question needs

to be taken up first. In Siam, Thongchai writes, “the maps of premodern geography” shared a number of premises. Their conception of space was fundamentally religious; their technique was highly pictorial; they illustrated

a narrative (whether of cosmological origins or human travel); and they showed no interest in accurate measurements or empirical methods. Indeed,

“some may not refer to any spatial reality at all.”°’ By contrast, the modern cartography imported by King Mongkut in the nineteenth century defined as mappable only that which was concrete and profane. It configured its objects in plan view, translating three-dimensional elements into a twodimensional idiom by generalizing, scaling, and symbolizing. And it employed universal scientific norms, including procedures for plotting any area

onto a global whole.® Because it contradicted traditional thinking on so many counts, this model of geography had to be aggressively imposed by the state, engendering considerable friction in the process. Spelling out this dichotomy makes it plain that premodern Siam is a poor model for early modern Japan. To be sure, some maps in the Japanese archive

fit Thongchai’s definition of indigenous cartography fairly well. Buddhist world maps, a medieval genre that continued through the Tokugawa era, illustrated a cosmology as well as a journey (that of the Chinese monk Xuan Zang), representing Japan as part of a wider sacred world centered on India.©? But maps of the nation and its provinces made during the same centuries exhibit an essentially secular conception of space. None of the genres I22 A PROVINCE DEFINED

reviewed in preceding chapters treated the Japanese islands as inherently sacred, and none was fundamentally concerned with illustrating a narrative,

cosmological or otherwise. On the contrary, the network maps, itinerary maps, and kuniezu alike took profane places as their object and showed a keen interest in measuring and describing those places in empirical terms. All the same, none of them completely meet Thongchai's definition of modern cartography either. Alchough they sometimes depicted objects in plan view, they did not universally do so; pictorial perspectives were woven into their visual fabric. And while they generalized and symbolized landscape elements in ways that any modern geographer would recognize, they did not deploy a regular scale, nor did they plot the region or the nation onto a gridded globe. All, as we have seen, were topological rather than scalar. In these ways, the cartographic practices of early modern Japan (and the rest of East Asia, for that matter) defy a simple premodern/modern polarity.”° If Siam is a poor model for Japan, however, it is even more problematic

as a model for Shinano. This brings us to the second question: the matter of scale. For during the very centuries when Japan's edges were arguably “ragged,” those of its provinces manifestly were not. The most abstract of itineraries conveyed the conviction that clear boundaries were one of a province’s properties. Io be sure, the outline of a given province could vary from

one image to another. On a plethora of maps at a multitude of scales, the shape of Shinano remained mutable, right through the nineteenth century. But it was never fuzzy; a line was always drawn (or implied) somewhere. A

seeming indifference about specifying exactly where they fell should not cause us to lose sight of an equally prevalent presumption that clear borders existed on the ground. Shapes may have mattered less to Japan's indigenous mapmakers than network relations, but provinces were always notionally bounded.

Specifying those boundaries within the common cartographic conventions of the day was tricky. Many kuni boundaries followed ridgelines, and representing a ridgeline using pictorial techniques was not a precise science. But other visual conventions could be called into service when needed. An

undated manuscript map depicting a twenty-kilometer stretch of the Shinano-Echigo border (Plate 16), with many features shown in plan view,

demonstrates that domestic Japanese borders could be specified with a high degree of precision when desired. It also shows that Shinano and its neighboring kuni were expected to fit together in a clean, continuous, nonoverlapping pattern—precisely the way that nation-states fit together on a modern map of the globe. In other words, for the purposes of comparative SHINANO IN THE WORLD I2 3

analysis, the notion of the linear boundary needs to be separated from the rest of the modern matrix in which that concept was embedded when it first entered Siam. Long before the whole package of scientific geography came into play, this particular property of the geo-body existed in the cartographic repertoire of the Japanese states.’ The key difference is that the shape of the province did not operate as a “logo” in the way that modern geo-bodies do. When the effort was warranted, plotting the province's precise limit was possible; for general purposes, however, a uni was knowable without it. This brings us to a third general point, one where scale and context meet. Because maps of the nation were part of a lively literature that circulated throughout the archipelago, people across early modern Japan were able to develop a more or less robust idea of each province's characteristics even in the absence of consistent mapped images. A vigorous vernacular market in print

sources of all kinds helped to ensure that the name “Shinano” was well known to the Tokugawa reading public, for whom it would have conjured many associations. From the sacred Mount Ontake in the west to the smol-

dering Asama volcano in the east, and from the monumental temple of Zenkoji in the north to the fabled forests of Kiso in the south, Shinano’s highlights were celebrated in poetry, prose, and painting as well as in cartographic form. True, the province that contained these famous scenes was not necessarily a shapely place. If premodern Shinano had a geo-body, it was highly elastic in practice. But elasticity was not a problem. So long as it occupied the right position in the national network, any outline capable of accommodating these culturally resonant sites would do the job. For all these reasons, I believe the Japanese cartographic record fails to ft Thongchat’s overall narrative, in which modern geographical discourse displaces an incompatible indigenous geography, generating “conflict, confrontation, and misunderstanding” in the process.’* In a gross sense, such a displacement may be said to have occurred in Japan; there, too, modern geography, with its associated cartographic conventions, pushed aside prior traditions, relegating a lively landscape of local maps to the archives.’? But compared to Siam, the Japanese version of this process was less imposed than negotiated, and it seems (so far as I can tell) to have engendered relatively little friction. This is not to say that Japan’s modernization process as a whole was friction-free. From the Nakano uprising onward, through repeated clashes over taxes, wages, and rents, Shinano’s own history tells us otherwise. But the coming of modern geography per se cannot accurately be described in the vocabulary of violent displacement. I2 4 A PROVINCE DEFINED

The metaphor that seems more persuasive to me is that of grafting. The fit between scientific cartography and Japanese tradition certainly was not seamless, but neither were the basic conceptions of “map” in these two cultural fields completely incongruous.”* Cartography as a representational modality in premodern Japan had been characterized by a kind of freewheeling plurality; within the indigenous mapping repertoire were genres whose concerns and conventions resonated rather well with those of the modern map. In the case of Shinano in particular, rather than discursive displacement what I see (at least by the time of the And6 map) is a kind of discursive fusion. Shinano had a geo-body all along; it had just been defined in relation to its neighbors rather than a global grid. Through triangulation, that outline was finally fixed; through the adoption of universal norms, its orientation was rendered consistent. Once that happened, modern maps paradoxically served less to displace the uni than to enshrine it, making it available for identification in ways that had never been possible before. Scientific conventions won the day, to be sure, but on some maps, at least, that triumph was made to enhance the charisma of the region rather than kill it off. In its commercial guise, if not at the hands of army surveyors, modern mapping set Shinano up for a new life as Nagano ken.

SHINANO IN THE WORLD I25

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