Andrea J. Horbinski (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ahorbinski) wrote2011-05-03 10:36 pm
ahorbinski) wrote2011-05-03 10:36 pm
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Book review: Mapping Early Modern Japan
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).
Historiographical Engagement: Yonemoto examines administrative and commercial maps, travel writing over two centuries, and then moves into satire, both fictional explorations of other lands, and the more inward-looking satire involved in the genre of geographical satire, in which the Yoshiwara district of Edo was converted into an exotic country in its own right.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Yonemoto argues that "in the early modern period the plural practices of mapping functioned as a means of discerning, categorizing, and preserving difference" and that in the early modern period "rulers not only tolerated difference, they emphasized it as a marker of the subordinate status of marginal people on the geographic peripheries" (3). In Yonemoto's view, "mapping allowed for and even encouraged the endless arrangement and rearrangement of multiple spatial, cultural, and political identities whose protean nature reflected the possibilities as well as the limitations of being Japanese in the early modern period" (7).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples In this chapter, Yonemoto notes that despite the visual expression of the shogunate's overarching claims to hegemonic authority in Japan, official maps revealed the fractured nature of authority and intractable geographic disputes that were endemic to early modern politics. At the same time, the dissemination of these maps through commercial publishing "engendered a cultural and spatial sensibility" (43) that became common knowledge, and common sense.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Yonemoto argues that in the first phase of the popularization of travel writing, in the mid-17thC, writers such as Kaibara Ekiken, Kumazawa Banzan and Miyazaki Antei developed a vision of travel writing as annotating the "already-present narrative inherent in the natural order of things, arguing that only through the careful and direct examination of the natural and human worlds could one comprehensively account for and analyze the organic order of things" (48). Kaibara Ekiken in particular was instrumental in articulating a new idea of travel writing, not as self-expression as in the classical and medieval eras (world as expression of self), but as a critical act of emendation (world as other-than-self).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Travel writers after Ekiken developed the neat conceit of mapping "civilizational" hierarchies in terms of place, place being plotted in terms of difference from the cultural and political centers of Kyoto and Edo, respectively. Nagakubo Sekisui's diary of an official journey to Nagasaki, and his encounters with various foreigners (Dutch merchants, black slaves of Dutch merchants, and Chinese merchants) and foreign bric-a-brac there (much of which, incidentally, remains and persists in contemporary Nagasaki) presents a resolutely apolitical, multi-perspective narrative. A decade later, however, Furukawa Koshôken's narratives of journeys "to the east and west" presented a much less literary, much more politically inflected and opinionated travel account that allowed Koshôken to "establish his 'expert' status as a writer, and it provided a rationale for shogunal authority in the northern borderlands" (89). Tachibana Nankei's "lyrical" journeys, on the other hand, were resolutely exoticizing and experimental in their organization, construing distance from the center in terms of cultural time. Taken together, early modern travel writing in the 18thC documented and constructed the determination of "Japan"'s external boundaries, as well as persistent divisions along internal lines of place, power, and status.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples In this chapter Yonemoto explores "geographic fictions" of the late 18th and early 19thC, which in the manner of Gulliver's Travels sought to make the familiar (native, domestic) strange (foreign, extra-national) by crafting fictional narratives of the outside world to satirize Japan. Such texts such as Hiraga Gennai's The Tale of Dashing Shidôken depended on a developed, common spatial understanding of Japan and its general place in the world, as well as on familiarity with the genre of travel writing, to make its larger points about (things that were wrong with) Tokugawa society.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples As the 19thC burgeoned and socioeconomic changes began to destabilize Tokugawa certainties, "geographical satires" which mapped the hierarchies of rank and taste in the Yoshiwara (the traditional, and by this point economically declining, pleasure quarters of Edo) onto such fictional geographies as the land of Geppon (= rising moon, Nippon = rising sun). Yonemoto describes these satirical geographies as demonstrating an "anti-politics of pleasure" and finds their significance in the reuse of a form originally intended for weighty matters to document such "light" matters as courtesans and their patrons; "the critical edge of sharebon on geographic themes was in their strategic deployment of form as meaning" (171).
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Yonemoto concludes by insisting that "famous places are not national spaces," because "although mapping distributed a kind of power, its power did not and could not effect widespread political and social change: it could not be 'national'" (177). This seems to me an excessively narrow understanding of the potential of mapping and of the 'national', and when she concludes that early modern mapping "did not possess ideology's inclination to deceive" (178), thereby differentiating it from cartography and geography (!), I confess myself frankly skeptical on multiple levels.
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).
Historiographical Engagement: Yonemoto examines administrative and commercial maps, travel writing over two centuries, and then moves into satire, both fictional explorations of other lands, and the more inward-looking satire involved in the genre of geographical satire, in which the Yoshiwara district of Edo was converted into an exotic country in its own right.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Yonemoto argues that "in the early modern period the plural practices of mapping functioned as a means of discerning, categorizing, and preserving difference" and that in the early modern period "rulers not only tolerated difference, they emphasized it as a marker of the subordinate status of marginal people on the geographic peripheries" (3). In Yonemoto's view, "mapping allowed for and even encouraged the endless arrangement and rearrangement of multiple spatial, cultural, and political identities whose protean nature reflected the possibilities as well as the limitations of being Japanese in the early modern period" (7).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples In this chapter, Yonemoto notes that despite the visual expression of the shogunate's overarching claims to hegemonic authority in Japan, official maps revealed the fractured nature of authority and intractable geographic disputes that were endemic to early modern politics. At the same time, the dissemination of these maps through commercial publishing "engendered a cultural and spatial sensibility" (43) that became common knowledge, and common sense.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Yonemoto argues that in the first phase of the popularization of travel writing, in the mid-17thC, writers such as Kaibara Ekiken, Kumazawa Banzan and Miyazaki Antei developed a vision of travel writing as annotating the "already-present narrative inherent in the natural order of things, arguing that only through the careful and direct examination of the natural and human worlds could one comprehensively account for and analyze the organic order of things" (48). Kaibara Ekiken in particular was instrumental in articulating a new idea of travel writing, not as self-expression as in the classical and medieval eras (world as expression of self), but as a critical act of emendation (world as other-than-self).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Travel writers after Ekiken developed the neat conceit of mapping "civilizational" hierarchies in terms of place, place being plotted in terms of difference from the cultural and political centers of Kyoto and Edo, respectively. Nagakubo Sekisui's diary of an official journey to Nagasaki, and his encounters with various foreigners (Dutch merchants, black slaves of Dutch merchants, and Chinese merchants) and foreign bric-a-brac there (much of which, incidentally, remains and persists in contemporary Nagasaki) presents a resolutely apolitical, multi-perspective narrative. A decade later, however, Furukawa Koshôken's narratives of journeys "to the east and west" presented a much less literary, much more politically inflected and opinionated travel account that allowed Koshôken to "establish his 'expert' status as a writer, and it provided a rationale for shogunal authority in the northern borderlands" (89). Tachibana Nankei's "lyrical" journeys, on the other hand, were resolutely exoticizing and experimental in their organization, construing distance from the center in terms of cultural time. Taken together, early modern travel writing in the 18thC documented and constructed the determination of "Japan"'s external boundaries, as well as persistent divisions along internal lines of place, power, and status.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples In this chapter Yonemoto explores "geographic fictions" of the late 18th and early 19thC, which in the manner of Gulliver's Travels sought to make the familiar (native, domestic) strange (foreign, extra-national) by crafting fictional narratives of the outside world to satirize Japan. Such texts such as Hiraga Gennai's The Tale of Dashing Shidôken depended on a developed, common spatial understanding of Japan and its general place in the world, as well as on familiarity with the genre of travel writing, to make its larger points about (things that were wrong with) Tokugawa society.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples As the 19thC burgeoned and socioeconomic changes began to destabilize Tokugawa certainties, "geographical satires" which mapped the hierarchies of rank and taste in the Yoshiwara (the traditional, and by this point economically declining, pleasure quarters of Edo) onto such fictional geographies as the land of Geppon (= rising moon, Nippon = rising sun). Yonemoto describes these satirical geographies as demonstrating an "anti-politics of pleasure" and finds their significance in the reuse of a form originally intended for weighty matters to document such "light" matters as courtesans and their patrons; "the critical edge of sharebon on geographic themes was in their strategic deployment of form as meaning" (171).
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Yonemoto concludes by insisting that "famous places are not national spaces," because "although mapping distributed a kind of power, its power did not and could not effect widespread political and social change: it could not be 'national'" (177). This seems to me an excessively narrow understanding of the potential of mapping and of the 'national', and when she concludes that early modern mapping "did not possess ideology's inclination to deceive" (178), thereby differentiating it from cartography and geography (!), I confess myself frankly skeptical on multiple levels.
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.
no subject
---L.
no subject
no subject
Tho' one wonders if some discussion would be warranted, as imitators continued through to Meiji.
---L.