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Bibliographic Data: Yonemoto, Marcia. Mapping Early Modern Japan: Space, Place, and Culture in the Tokugawa Period (1603-1868). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003.
Main Argument: Yonemoto argues that "spatial and geographic discourses inhered in the political practices and cultural forms of the early modern period" (2), and that by examining the texts that "shaped and spread geographic consciousness," it is possible to examine "the elusive processes by which people came to name, to know, and to interpret the natural and human worlds in which they lived" (1-2).
( Mapping as a cognitive & cartographic process )
Critical assessment: Overall, this is a strong, well thought-out book. I don't love it as much as Prof. Berry does, but given that she supervised Yonemoto's original dissertation, that seems understandable. In particular, I found Yonemoto's analysis in the last chapter to be somewhat questionable--I don't fully buy her characterization of geographical satires of the pleasure quarters as "anti-politics of pleasure." (Also, maybe I've spent too much time reading scabrous Roman writers, but she misses some really obvious innuendoes in those satires.) Satire is, as far as I'm concerned, inherently (socio)political (this, actually, would be its salient difference from parody). If these writers were writing satires that weren't directly political, maybe they weren't writing satire. Or, I could just be way too overexposed to Horace, Juvenal, and Swift, and be completely wrong here. But, that is my interpretation and understanding.
The other thing about Yonemoto is that she is maniacal about insisting that early modern Japan was not a nation in the modern sense, which I think is at this point pretty well agreed upon, to the point where all of her denials go too far in the other direction and ring hollow--if imagined places are not national spaces, as she subtitles her conclusion, then how do all the mapping schema she documents make sense as such? How can you have an image of "Japan" created in maps and in travel writing without "Japan" to depict? I'm with David Howell and Beth Berry on this one--if there hadn't been an early modern nation, the Meiji state would've had a much harder time creating a modern nation. Heterogeneous as early modern nations worldwide were, nations they still remained.
Further reading: Mary Elizabeth Berry, Japan in Print; Laura Nenzi, Excursions in Identity; David Howell, Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan
Meta notes: Ideology doesn't necessarily equal deception.
Main Argument: Yonemoto argues that "spatial and geographic discourses inhered in the political practices and cultural forms of the early modern period" (2), and that by examining the texts that "shaped and spread geographic consciousness," it is possible to examine "the elusive processes by which people came to name, to know, and to interpret the natural and human worlds in which they lived" (1-2).
( Mapping as a cognitive & cartographic process )
Critical assessment: Overall, this is a strong, well thought-out book. I don't love it as much as Prof. Berry does, but given that she supervised Yonemoto's original dissertation, that seems understandable. In particular, I found Yonemoto's analysis in the last chapter to be somewhat questionable--I don't fully buy her characterization of geographical satires of the pleasure quarters as "anti-politics of pleasure." (Also, maybe I've spent too much time reading scabrous Roman writers, but she misses some really obvious innuendoes in those satires.) Satire is, as far as I'm concerned, inherently (socio)political (this, actually, would be its salient difference from parody). If these writers were writing satires that weren't directly political, maybe they weren't writing satire. Or, I could just be way too overexposed to Horace, Juvenal, and Swift, and be completely wrong here. But, that is my interpretation and understanding.
The other thing about Yonemoto is that she is maniacal about insisting that early modern Japan was not a nation in the modern sense, which I think is at this point pretty well agreed upon, to the point where all of her denials go too far in the other direction and ring hollow--if imagined places are not national spaces, as she subtitles her conclusion, then how do all the mapping schema she documents make sense as such? How can you have an image of "Japan" created in maps and in travel writing without "Japan" to depict? I'm with David Howell and Beth Berry on this one--if there hadn't been an early modern nation, the Meiji state would've had a much harder time creating a modern nation. Heterogeneous as early modern nations worldwide were, nations they still remained.
Further reading: Mary Elizabeth Berry, Japan in Print; Laura Nenzi, Excursions in Identity; David Howell, Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan
Meta notes: Ideology doesn't necessarily equal deception.