Imaginative Mapping: Landscape and Japanese Identity in the Tokugawa and Meiji Eras. By Nobuko Toyosawa. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019. 305 pp. ISBN: 9780674241121 (cloth)

The recent Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps (2016) was indeed a celebration of maps (and space) as one of the most compelling areas of research for Japan specialists.2 Maps are cartographic representations that are taken to mirror spatial imaginations and territorial communities within discrete alluvial plains or in the vibrant cityscapes of Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo; frontiers in the extreme Northeast and the Southern islands; social possibilities, gender roles, and sexual desires; a “quiet revolution in knowledge” that prefigured the emergence of beliefs in national unity; the reaches of the nascent empire; and the empowerment of the modern Japanese individual to find his or her path in the thick forest of everyday life in modern cities. Through precise exegesis of a rich variety of archival sources, some of which are newly introduced to Western audiences, and sustained by a sophisticated conceptual apparatus that is refreshing after decades of anti-theoretical tendencies, Toyosawa reconstructs the emergence of national identitarianism in Japan not simply as discourse or ideology, but as emotion, as naturalized conception, and, most importantly, as practice—that is, as a way of seeing that “allow[ed] social groups to create a sense of belonging by bonding themselves to the land and other human groups that inhabit that land” (p. 2). [...]Toyosawa analyzes maps and discourses on landscape in scholarly and aesthetic texts conceived as social hieroglyphics, the meaning of which she associates with the idea of shinkoku (Japan as “a country created and ruled by the deities,” p. 3).