Book review: A Malleable Map
Apr. 20th, 2011 12:56![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Wigen, Kären. A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Main Argument: "…the rehabilitation of ancient Japanese administrative spaces, while formalized in high-level negotiations in Tokyo, also entailed breathing life back into a once-dormant imperial geography, animating what (after John Gillis) we might term 'provinces of the mind'" (2). At the same time as it studies the ancient province of Shinano's transformation into the prefecture of Nagano, Wigen offers a nuanced portrait of how the Meiji state transformed Japan at the regional level--the book is an exercise first and foremost in chorography, the study of regions, and not of the typical chora in Japan from a historian's perspective, the domain or han, but that of an ultimately more enduring form, the kuni or province.
Historiographical Engagement: Wigen engages primarily with what she, one suspects by way of Beth Berry, terms the 'chorographic archive,' the subset of the library of public information that deals specifically with regions, in this case that of Shinano/Nagano. The chorographic archive embraces maps, atlases, and geographical primers as well as more conventional texts.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Noting that today "Nagano has a vivid and distinctive identity throughout Japan" (2), Wigen also notes that the process of creating the prefecture was unusually fraught and unusually long-contested, being a matter of live debate (and sometimes violence and arson) from the start of the Meiji period until the middle of the Occupation in 1948--more than 70 years in total. Geographical modernization took place through neoclassical forms cloaked in restorationist rhetoric, but Meiji developments had to contend with nearly a thousand years of classical legacy surrounding the provincial divisions inaugurated in the seventh century, which were supplemented but never truly supplanted. Looking at this transitional history from the perspective of provinces rather than domains and across traditional disciplinary divisions reveals important continuities, as well as the integral role regional institutions and identities played in the creation of modern Japan.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Like all provinces prior to the Meiji restoration, Shinano province was portrayed in one of three ways in national maps--from the perspective of the imperial court in Kyoto, as a hinterland; from the perspective of the new shogunal capital in Edo, as an important strategic core; from the perspective of the roadmaps that were readily available to Edo travelers, as a highly distorted geographical space in which several important national roads joined and converged. None of these perspectives, however, was any more "right" than the others, and none of them evinced much interest in or detail concerning the actual contents of Shinano itself.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Wigen offers a close and lavishly illustrated reading of the kuniezu--provincial maps--of Shinano that were published from 1600 to 1871. Despite the fact that the maps embrace no standard perspective and are highly idiosyncratic in their depiction of the province's geography, all manage to present a topographically divided region as a flexible unity by virtue of mapping the province as a province.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples The lull in the expansion of cartography that was the middle Tokugawa period was decisively broken in 1800, when the amateur astronomer Inô Tadataka convinced the shogunate to allow him to map first Japan's northeastern and then all of the country's coastline. Despite his numerous advances in scientific cartography, however, Inô's innovations were not incorporated into standard mapmaking practice until the Meiji period, when state cartographers replotted the whole nation according to international mathematical principles. Military cartographers in fact divided the nation without regard for provincial or prefectural boundaries, an oversight that was left to commercial publishers to remedy. These commercial publishers, as in the case of Nagano, transposed older ideas of what constituted the province onto the state-defined shape of the prefecture, blending the old and the new. Wigen evaluates early modern Japanese cartography in light of Thongchai Winichakul's claims about premodern cartography in Thailand in Siam Mapped and finds that the details of his conclusions do not apply readily to Japan, despite their brilliant insight: the predominant conception of space in early modern Japan was secular, and though the boundaries of "Japan" were up for negotiation to some extent, the boundaries of provinces such as Shinano were not.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter examines the gazetteers of Japan and particularly of Shinano, both past and present. Gazetteers (fudoki) were a prominent governmental form in the classical period, and modern gazetteers, i.e. the statistical yearbooks compiled for each prefecture and for Japan as a whole, were in many ways a transformation of this older from rather than a wholesale adoption of an entirely new conceptual framework. At the same time, provincial yearbooks found ways to adapt government-mandated formulae to retain important features of the gazetteers, namely their emphasis on local distinctiveness.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples The classical counterpart to the fudoki was the chishi ("earth records") and this genre too was revived in the early Meiji period to serve the state in the guise of "Imperial Topography." Although the imperial topography project was swiftly abandoned and chishi discarded in favor of chiri ("earth science"), at the regional level chishi endured in the retooled form of geography textbooks for elementary schoolers, perhaps the most ubiquitous form of geographical knowledge globally in the age and considered the foundation of education. These textbooks, like the statistical yearbooks, set the province of Nagano in motion along the axis of time, calling on future subjects to build the province at the same time as they would build the nation.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This is probably the most innovative chapter in an imaginative book; Wigen argues that newspapers play a pivotal role in the chorographic archive and played a pivotal role in the construction of regional identities at the beginning of the modern period--particularly in Nagano, which had some of the first newspapers in Japan and which remained bitterly divided along the old Nagano/Chikuma boundary after the latter's forced dissolution. Wigen surveys the leading newspapers' fumblings towards pan-prefectural appeal and concludes that newspapers had a crucial but polyvocal role to play in revivifying an ancient province into a living prefecture--newspapers articulated multiple visions of their prefecture within Japan, but that very articulation worked to cement a regional identity.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Wigen argues that Shinano's importance lies in its potential to serve as a pivot around which to dramatize the dynamism of Japanese history; that it can reveal the strategic role of culture in the production of scale; and that it can serve as a useful information in the transdisciplinary debate about "scale," which has so far been limited primarily to Western, urban contexts. Studying Shinano shows how successful regimes are able to unite different conceptions of scale at different spatial levels under one roof, and that the production of scale is no less artificial in rural areas than in urban cores.
Critical assessment: I really liked this book. I think Wigen does a great job of demonstrating something that political scientists know well and that historians really ought to know better: i.e. that regions are artificial constructs. She also makes convincing arguments about the Meiji regime's strategic usage of regional identities sited around the classical geography of kuni (provinces) which had been overlaid but never fully erased by successors to the ritsuryo state. She uses the word 'neoclassical' a lot, which I've seen rarely or never in books on comparable time periods in Japanese history, and I think her insistence that the Meiji regime was deploying neoclassical spatial understandings, and that this accounted for the relative ease with which the Meiji state cemented its control, is quite important. I also enjoyed her focused discussion of maps of Shinano province with an eye to what they demonstrated about the construction of Shinano, and I particularly appreciated her willingness to dig around in the 'chorographic archive' for nontraditional sources, such as statistical yearbooks, geography primers and newspapers. If anything, I think her one notable slip comes in the conclusion, when she introduces the problems with the notion of "scale" as it is currently understood virtually ex nihilo. A great book would be even better had this notion--and the flaws in it, as well as Shinanology's potential corrections of those flaws--been integrated throughout.
Further reading: Kären Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920.
Meta notes: I particularly appreciated Wigen's usage of a vastly alternate locale and source base to illuminate a history whose outlines we already knew. I also found her integration of geographic and spatial theory into her arguments to be really interesting.
Main Argument: "…the rehabilitation of ancient Japanese administrative spaces, while formalized in high-level negotiations in Tokyo, also entailed breathing life back into a once-dormant imperial geography, animating what (after John Gillis) we might term 'provinces of the mind'" (2). At the same time as it studies the ancient province of Shinano's transformation into the prefecture of Nagano, Wigen offers a nuanced portrait of how the Meiji state transformed Japan at the regional level--the book is an exercise first and foremost in chorography, the study of regions, and not of the typical chora in Japan from a historian's perspective, the domain or han, but that of an ultimately more enduring form, the kuni or province.
Historiographical Engagement: Wigen engages primarily with what she, one suspects by way of Beth Berry, terms the 'chorographic archive,' the subset of the library of public information that deals specifically with regions, in this case that of Shinano/Nagano. The chorographic archive embraces maps, atlases, and geographical primers as well as more conventional texts.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Noting that today "Nagano has a vivid and distinctive identity throughout Japan" (2), Wigen also notes that the process of creating the prefecture was unusually fraught and unusually long-contested, being a matter of live debate (and sometimes violence and arson) from the start of the Meiji period until the middle of the Occupation in 1948--more than 70 years in total. Geographical modernization took place through neoclassical forms cloaked in restorationist rhetoric, but Meiji developments had to contend with nearly a thousand years of classical legacy surrounding the provincial divisions inaugurated in the seventh century, which were supplemented but never truly supplanted. Looking at this transitional history from the perspective of provinces rather than domains and across traditional disciplinary divisions reveals important continuities, as well as the integral role regional institutions and identities played in the creation of modern Japan.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Like all provinces prior to the Meiji restoration, Shinano province was portrayed in one of three ways in national maps--from the perspective of the imperial court in Kyoto, as a hinterland; from the perspective of the new shogunal capital in Edo, as an important strategic core; from the perspective of the roadmaps that were readily available to Edo travelers, as a highly distorted geographical space in which several important national roads joined and converged. None of these perspectives, however, was any more "right" than the others, and none of them evinced much interest in or detail concerning the actual contents of Shinano itself.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Wigen offers a close and lavishly illustrated reading of the kuniezu--provincial maps--of Shinano that were published from 1600 to 1871. Despite the fact that the maps embrace no standard perspective and are highly idiosyncratic in their depiction of the province's geography, all manage to present a topographically divided region as a flexible unity by virtue of mapping the province as a province.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples The lull in the expansion of cartography that was the middle Tokugawa period was decisively broken in 1800, when the amateur astronomer Inô Tadataka convinced the shogunate to allow him to map first Japan's northeastern and then all of the country's coastline. Despite his numerous advances in scientific cartography, however, Inô's innovations were not incorporated into standard mapmaking practice until the Meiji period, when state cartographers replotted the whole nation according to international mathematical principles. Military cartographers in fact divided the nation without regard for provincial or prefectural boundaries, an oversight that was left to commercial publishers to remedy. These commercial publishers, as in the case of Nagano, transposed older ideas of what constituted the province onto the state-defined shape of the prefecture, blending the old and the new. Wigen evaluates early modern Japanese cartography in light of Thongchai Winichakul's claims about premodern cartography in Thailand in Siam Mapped and finds that the details of his conclusions do not apply readily to Japan, despite their brilliant insight: the predominant conception of space in early modern Japan was secular, and though the boundaries of "Japan" were up for negotiation to some extent, the boundaries of provinces such as Shinano were not.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter examines the gazetteers of Japan and particularly of Shinano, both past and present. Gazetteers (fudoki) were a prominent governmental form in the classical period, and modern gazetteers, i.e. the statistical yearbooks compiled for each prefecture and for Japan as a whole, were in many ways a transformation of this older from rather than a wholesale adoption of an entirely new conceptual framework. At the same time, provincial yearbooks found ways to adapt government-mandated formulae to retain important features of the gazetteers, namely their emphasis on local distinctiveness.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples The classical counterpart to the fudoki was the chishi ("earth records") and this genre too was revived in the early Meiji period to serve the state in the guise of "Imperial Topography." Although the imperial topography project was swiftly abandoned and chishi discarded in favor of chiri ("earth science"), at the regional level chishi endured in the retooled form of geography textbooks for elementary schoolers, perhaps the most ubiquitous form of geographical knowledge globally in the age and considered the foundation of education. These textbooks, like the statistical yearbooks, set the province of Nagano in motion along the axis of time, calling on future subjects to build the province at the same time as they would build the nation.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This is probably the most innovative chapter in an imaginative book; Wigen argues that newspapers play a pivotal role in the chorographic archive and played a pivotal role in the construction of regional identities at the beginning of the modern period--particularly in Nagano, which had some of the first newspapers in Japan and which remained bitterly divided along the old Nagano/Chikuma boundary after the latter's forced dissolution. Wigen surveys the leading newspapers' fumblings towards pan-prefectural appeal and concludes that newspapers had a crucial but polyvocal role to play in revivifying an ancient province into a living prefecture--newspapers articulated multiple visions of their prefecture within Japan, but that very articulation worked to cement a regional identity.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Wigen argues that Shinano's importance lies in its potential to serve as a pivot around which to dramatize the dynamism of Japanese history; that it can reveal the strategic role of culture in the production of scale; and that it can serve as a useful information in the transdisciplinary debate about "scale," which has so far been limited primarily to Western, urban contexts. Studying Shinano shows how successful regimes are able to unite different conceptions of scale at different spatial levels under one roof, and that the production of scale is no less artificial in rural areas than in urban cores.
Critical assessment: I really liked this book. I think Wigen does a great job of demonstrating something that political scientists know well and that historians really ought to know better: i.e. that regions are artificial constructs. She also makes convincing arguments about the Meiji regime's strategic usage of regional identities sited around the classical geography of kuni (provinces) which had been overlaid but never fully erased by successors to the ritsuryo state. She uses the word 'neoclassical' a lot, which I've seen rarely or never in books on comparable time periods in Japanese history, and I think her insistence that the Meiji regime was deploying neoclassical spatial understandings, and that this accounted for the relative ease with which the Meiji state cemented its control, is quite important. I also enjoyed her focused discussion of maps of Shinano province with an eye to what they demonstrated about the construction of Shinano, and I particularly appreciated her willingness to dig around in the 'chorographic archive' for nontraditional sources, such as statistical yearbooks, geography primers and newspapers. If anything, I think her one notable slip comes in the conclusion, when she introduces the problems with the notion of "scale" as it is currently understood virtually ex nihilo. A great book would be even better had this notion--and the flaws in it, as well as Shinanology's potential corrections of those flaws--been integrated throughout.
Further reading: Kären Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920.
Meta notes: I particularly appreciated Wigen's usage of a vastly alternate locale and source base to illuminate a history whose outlines we already knew. I also found her integration of geographic and spatial theory into her arguments to be really interesting.