Cartographic Distortion as Propaganda? Decoding a Japanese Woodblock Print from 1868

In the very year of the Meiji Restoration, an oddly shaped woodblock print purporting to represent Northern Honshu was published under the innocent title, "A complete itinerary map of northeastern Japan."  As its title indicated, roadways were prominently featured. But military and cultural information was equally prominent, and the overall contours of the region were surprisingly distorted.  A handful of sites along the Pacific coast--Mt. Fuji, Kamakura, Edo Bay, and Yokohama--were greatly enlarged, while the far north was collapsed to a fraction of its objective size and crammed into a small, stylized square. As a result, while this curious image masqueraded as a common travel map, close inspection suggests that something rather different drove its design. Taking a cue from Sugimoto Fumiko's insight that innocent-seeming panoramas and maps published in the Bakumatsu era were often responding directly to the tumult of current events, I will argue that this image might have been better entitled "Marshaling the Northeast for the Nation's Defense." Its incongruous jumble of scale, perspective, and conventions makes sense if it was deliberately designed to highlight the key resources--both sacred and secular--that could be called upon for the defense of Japan's eastern coastline in the event of a maritime invasion.