A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912
By Kären Wigen
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Kären Wigen
Kären Wigen is Professor of History at Stanford University. She is the author of The Making of a Japanese Periphery and co-author of The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography, both from UC Press.
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A Malleable Map - Kären Wigen
A
BOOK
The Philip E. Lilienthal imprint
honors special books
in commemoration of a man whose work
at the University of California Press
from 1954 to 1979
was marked by dedication to young authors
and to high standards in the field of Asian Studies.
Friends, family, authors, and foundations have together
endowed the Lilienthal Fund, which enables the press
to publish under this imprint selected books
in a way that reflects the taste and judgment
of a great and beloved editor.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the
generous support of the Philip E. Lilienthal
Asian Studies Endowment Fund of the University
of California Press Foundation, which was
established by a major gift from Sally Lilienthal.
A Malleable Map
ASIA: LOCAL STUDIES/GLOBAL THEMES
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Kären Wigen, and Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Editors
1. Bicycle Citizens: The Political World of the Japanese Housewife, by Robin M. LeBlanc
2. The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, edited by Joshua A. Fogel
3. The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, by Hue-Tam Ho Tai
4. Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader, edited by Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
5. Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915–1953, by Susan L. Glosser
6. An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai (1898–1975), by Geremie R. Barmé
7. Mapping Early Modern Japan: Space, Place, and Culture in the Tokugawa Period, 1603–1868, by Marcia Yonemoto
8. Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories, by Madeleine Yue Dong
9. Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China, by Ruth Rogaski
10. Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China, by Andrew D. Morris
11. Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan, by Miyako Inoue
12. Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period, by Mary Elizabeth Berry
13. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination, by Anne Allison
14. After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai, by Heonik Kwon
15. Tears from Iron: Cultural Responses to Famine in Nineteenth-Century China, by Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley
16. Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth-Century China, by Paul A. Cohen
17. A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600–1912, by Kären Wigen
18. Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China, by Thomas S. Mullaney
A Malleable Map
GEOGRAPHIES OF RESTORATION IN CENTRAL JAPAN,
1600–1912
Kären Wigen
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2010 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wigen, Kären, 1958–
A malleable map : geographies of restoration in central
Japan, 1600-1912 / Kären Wigen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-25918-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Nagano-ken (Japan)—Historical geography.
2. Nagano-ken (Japan)—History. 3. Japan—
Administrative and political divisions—History.
4. Japan—Maps—History. 5. Cartography—Japan—
History. 6. Japan—Historical geography. I. Title.
DS894.59.N3319W54 2010
911'.520903—dc22 2009042967
Manufactured in the United States of America
19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.
OUR LAND SHINANO (SHINANO NO KUNI)
1. The land of Shinano borders on ten provinces.
How high its towering mountains!
How long its flowing rivers!
Its four plains—Matsumoto, Ina, Saku, Zenkōji—are rich in fertile soils.
Although it has no seacoast, it is rich in resources;
Blessed with abundance, it lacks for nothing.
2. Mountains tower in all directions: Ontake, Norikura, Komagatake.
Asama is an active volcano that cannot be controlled, yet it too defends the land.
As for the pure waters that flow through the province,
In the north are the Sai and Chikuma rivers,
In the south, the Kiso and the Tenryū.
These are Shinano’s sinews, nourishing the land.
3. In the Kiso Valley, cedar and cypress stand rank on rank;
In the lake of Suwa, fish are bountiful.
Thus the people’s livelihood flourishes.
Is a single village lacking in the five grains?
Not only can they catch deer, they gather mulberry as well;
Feeding it to the silkworms, they start an enterprise.
Although its thread is slender, the cocoon is hardly slight;
The lifeline of the province is carried by this thread.
4. The curious seek out Sonohara; the weary rest at Nezame-no-Toko.
But watch your step when you visit Kumeji-bashi,
Dangerous since the day when the road jutted out over the ravine of Kiso.
Travelers swarm to the spa at Tsukama; famed for its moonlight is Obasuteyama.
Thus do Shinano’s famous places, sung by poets from of old, enjoy eternal fame.
5. Her great men are peerless, soldier and scholar alike:
The Asahi shogun [Kiso] Yoshinaka, [the warlord] Nishina no Gorō Nobumori,
And the great masters Dazai Shundai and Sakuma Shōzan.
Standing tall alongside her mountains, they are admired by all;
Mighty like her rivers, endless is their renown.
6. In the age of the gods, Yamato Takeru climbed the forbidding Usui Pass,
Homesick for his wife. Today, the pass is pierced by Tunnel 26;
A railroad runs beneath it. Is it not like a dream?
Following in their footsteps, as the train rolls on its track,
Might we not equal those great men of the past?
Have not the towering mountains and rivers of Shinshū nurtured giants from of old?
ASAI KIYOSHI, 1899
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
CONVENTIONS FOLLOWED IN THE TEXT
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction
PART ONE
A PROVINCE DEFINED
1 / Shinano in the Nation
2 / Shinano Up Close
3 / Shinano in the World
PART TWO
A PROVINCE RESTORED
4 / The Poetry of Statistics
5 / Pedagogies of Place
6 / A Pan-Provincial Press
Conclusion
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
GLOSSARY-INDEX
ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATES (FOLLOWING PAGE 88)
1. Detail from Dai Nihon koku no zu (Map of Great Japan), 1548
2. Nakabayashi Kichibei, Fusōkoku no zu (Map of the Land of the Rising Sun), 1666
3. Muhitsu chōhō kuni-zukushi annai (Convenient Pictorial Guide to the Provinces), mid-nineteenth century
4. Takebe Takahiro, Kyōhō nendo bakufu sen Takebe Takahiro Nihon zu (Map of Japan by Takebe Takahiro), 1719
5. Detail from Torigai Dōsai, Dai Nihon dōchū kōtei saiken ki (Handy Guide to the Roadways of Great Japan), 1770
6. Detail from Mabuchi Jikōan, Kaisei Dai Nihon zenzu (Revised Map of Great Japan), ca. 1800
7. Nagakubo Sekisui, Kaisei Nihon yochi rotei zenzu (Revised Complete Road Map of All Japan), 1779
8. Kisai Risshō, Dai Nihon meisho ichiran (Panoramic View of Famous Places in Great Japan), mid-nineteenth century
9. Shōhō Shinano kuniezu (Shōhō map of Shinano), 1647
10. Shinano no kuni zenzu (Complete Map of Shinano Province), ca. 1871
11. Tempō kaisei shōchū Kyō ezu (Revised Pocket Map of Kyoto in the Tempō era), 1841
12. Shinano no kuni zenzu (Complete Map of Shinano Province), 1850s
13. Hibata Shōtarō, Kaisei Shinano no kuni zenzu (Revised Complete Map of Shinano Province), 1878
14. Takahashi Kageyasu, Nihon zu: Higashi Nihon (Map of Eastern Japan), n.d. (detail)
15. Shinshū saigai no zu (Map of the Great Earthquake and Flood in Shinano Province), 1847
16. Shin’etsu kokkyō zu (Map of the Boundary between Shinano and Echigo Provinces), n.d.
MAPS
1. Early modern Japan
2. Chikuma and Nagano prefectures, 1871–1876
3. Current prefectures superimposed on old provinces
4. Untitled Gyōki-style map of Japan from the Nichūreki, early Kamakura era
5. Dai Nihon koku no zu (Map of Great Japan) from the Shūgaishō, Keichō edition (detail)
6. Nihon kairiku kandan koku no zu (Map of the Cold and Warm Provinces of Coastal and Inland Japan), 1690
7. Dai Nihon koku no zu (Map of Great Japan), late Edo era woodblock
8. Map of Japan on Imari plate, late Edo era
9. Origins of the Tokugawa house
10. Reference map for Torigai Dōsai’s Dai Nihon dōchū kōtei saiken ki (Handy Guide to the Roadways of Great Japan), 1770
11. Shinano Province
12. Early modern district divisions (gun) in Shinano
13. Jinkokki (Biographical Notes and Sketches of the Provinces), 1701 (detail)
14. Inō Tadataka, Chizu sessei binran (Index Map), 1821 (detail)
15. Inō Tadataka, Dai Nihon enkai yochi zu (Complete Survey of the Japanese Coast), late Edo (detail)
16. Gifu Nagano Ishikawa Fukui yonken zu (Map of Four Prefectures), from Dai Nihon fuken bunkatsu zu (Separate Maps of the Municipalities and Prefectures of Great Japan), 1881
17. Andō Rikinosuke, Saishin chōsa Nagano-ken zenzu: kaisei shichōson (Complete Map of Nagano Prefecture, Based on the Latest Surveys and Showing Reformed Cities, Towns, and Villages), 1907
18. Detail from Map 17
19. Detail from Shūsei nijūman bun no ichi zu fukkoku ban: Nagano-ken zenzu (Composite Map of Nagano Prefecture Based on Reproductions of the 1:200,000 Topographic Quadrants)
20. Yoshizawa Takaaki, Shinano no kuni jūgun no zu (Map of the Ten Districts of Shinano), 1744
FIGURES
1. Diagram of Map 4
2. Diagram of Map 5
3. Diagram of Plate 5
4. Legend for Map 16, Gifu Nagano Ishikawa Fukui yonken zu (Map of Four Prefectures), 1881
5. Legend for Map 17, Saishin chōsa Nagano-ken zenzu (Complete Map of Nagano Prefecture), 1907
TABLES
1. Sites in Shinano most commonly featured on printed maps of Japan issued during the Edo era
2. Features identified in the legend accompanying the Dai Nihon fuken bunkatsu zu (Separate Maps of the Municipalities and Prefectures of Great Japan), Tokyo, 1881
3. Features identified on the formal key of the mid-Meiji topographical quadrants
4. Contents of the 1882 Japanese statistical yearbook
5. Contents of the 1884 Nagano statistical yearbook
6. Subheadings under Land
in the 1884 Nagano statistical yearbook
7. Traditional manufactures, 1884
8. Licensed practitioners of regulated trades, 1884
9. National titles reprinted in Nagano in 1878
10. Contents of Shinano no kuni chishiryaku (Abridged Topography of Shinano Province), 1883
11. Contents of Shōgaku Shinano chishiryaku (Elementary Shinano Topography: Abridged Edition), 1888
12. Contents of Shinano shin chishi (A New Topography of Shinano), 1899
13. Contents of Shōgaku Shinano rekishidan (Elementary Shinano Historical Tales), 1894
14. Contents of Shōgaku sōsho Shinano no kuni: Nōgyō hen (The Land of Shinano—Agricultural Edition: An Elementary Reader), vol. 2, 1907
CONVENTIONS FOLLOWED IN THE TEXT
Macrons are used in the text to indicate long vowels in Japanese, except in the case of very frequently used names and terms (daimyo, shogun, Tokyo, Kyoto, and the like).
Japanese personal names are indicated in the Japanese fashion: surname first and given name following. The names of Japanese and Japanese-American authors writing in English are given in the reverse order, typical of English.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The path to this book was not a straight one, and I have incurred many debts along the way. The idea of looking at Nagano regionalism as a modern artifact was first floated at the Mirror of Modernity
workshop led by Stephen Vlastos at the University of Iowa. I want to belatedly thank Stephen for including me in that conference, whose participants posed the probing questions that set this project in motion. It was also at Iowa that I met Hashimoto Mitsuru, who generously served as my sponsor for a six-month research trip to Shinshū Daigaku on a Japan Foundation grant. While in Matsumoto I was assisted by Professor Murayama Ken’ichi and his generous wife Takako, as well as by a group of supportive Shindai faculty including Oki Hiroko, Nitta Reiko, and Funatsu Emiko. For their friendship during a difficult period in my family’s life, I remain deeply grateful.
A residential fellowship at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina provided leave time to begin writing. I much appreciated the cheer and resourcefulness of the center’s staff, especially librarian Eliza Robertson; her help made possible the broader reading that gradually led me to recast a history of regionalism as separate studies of alpinism and chorography. Subsequent research trips to Nagano and Tokyo were underwritten by the Japan Fund at Stanford University. A sabbatical at the Stanford Humanities Center—generously supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford—provided the time and space to draft the manuscript. It is a joyful duty indeed to acknowledge the help of my indomitable research assistant, Sakakibara Sayoko. Her knowledge, acumen, and companionship enriched both the manuscript and the research experience immeasurably.
This book would not exist without great research libraries and the public-minded intellectuals who run them. Like colleagues across the country, I have benefited greatly over the years from the skills and friendship of Kristina Kade Troost at Duke, Naomi Kotake and Julie Sweetkind-Singer at Stanford, and Hisayuki Ishimatsu at U.C. Berkeley. In Shinano, thanks are due to the accommodating staff of the Nagano Prefectural Museum of History in Chikuma City, the Nagano Prefectural Library in Nagano City, the Shinshū University library in Matsumoto, and the delightful Nakasendō Rokujūkyūtsugi Shiryōkan in Karuizawa. In Tokyo, research was facilitated by knowledgeable professionals at the National Diet Library, Japanese National Archives, Japan Textbook Research Center, and the Historiographical Institute at the University of Tokyo, and by the generosity of collector Kazumasa Yamashita. Particular thanks are due to Kodama Takubumi, Ishigami Eiichi, and Kishimoto Yutaka for sharing their expertise and enthusiasm about Japanese documents and landscapes, and to map aficionado David Rumsey, who has joined forces with Hisayuki Ishimatsu to make the University of California’s marvelous Mitsui collection of Japanese maps available to the public at large.
Working with the talented team at the University of California Press has been a privilege. Reviewers Anne Walthall and Raymond Craib gave the manuscript thorough and critical readings, and each came up with many ideas for improving it. I am very grateful to both of them for sharing their time and expertise and only regret that I could not act on every suggestion. I am also indebted to Kalicia Piviroto, who handled a large volume of correspondence and kept a keen eye on the details; to Lia Tjandra for combining professionalism with flexibility in the book design; to Sharron Wood for meticulous copy-editing; to Jacqueline Volin for masterfully choreographing the production schedule; and above all to Reed Malcolm, editor and diplomat par excellence, who found a way for this design-intensive book to see the light of day. Special thanks as well to Don Pirius, the creative mind behind dpmaps.com, who did a consummate job on the maps.
While formal institutions provide irreplaceable support for a study of this kind, informal networks are also crucial to intellectual work. Friends from across the Japan field, fellows at the humanities centers where I was privileged to work, audiences at various venues where I have tried out ideas, and treasured colleagues and students in the Triangle and the Bay Area offered support and stimulation at every step. Three people in particular made important interventions: Beth Berry forced me to fundamentally rethink the architecture of the book; Henry Smith pushed for a stronger political story, as well as more and better maps; and Fabian Drixler engaged at every level with the penultimate draft. While none will be wholly satisfied with the final version, I thank each for caring enough about the project to offer honest feedback at crucial moments in its evolution. It is also a pleasure to acknowledge Mitani Hiroshi for generously sharing his expertise on the Meiji Renovation, Raja Adal for his knowledge of the Meiji curriculum, Hilde de Weerdt for musings on maps, Nirvana Tanoukhi for sharp thinking on scale, Yosuke Nirei and Peter Duus for insight on Meiji politics, and Caroline Winterer for savvy reflections on classicism. More generally, this book bears the mark of long-running exchanges with Andrew Barshay, Bruce Batten, Lauren Benton, Prasenjit Duara, Sabine Früstück, Takashi Fujitani, John Gillis, Andrew Gordon, Ann Jannetta, William Kelly, James Ketelaar, Seonmin Kim, Angus Lockyer, Mark Metzler, Peter Nosco, Catherine Phipps, Brian Platt, Marie Price, Ravi Rajan, Mark Ravina, Linda Rupert, Irwin Scheiner, Franziska Seraphim, Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Melinda Takeuchi, Stefan Tanaka, Thongchai Winichakul, Susan Thorne, Ronald Toby, Conrad Totman, Umezawa Fumiko, Brett Walker, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Peter Wood, Wen-Hsin Yeh, and Marcia Yonemoto.
My family has waited a long time to see this book in print. It is gladdening to know that their mother’s obsessions have not kept Evan and Eleanor from developing a passion of their own for books, maps, and travel; it was wonderful to be able to introduce them to Japan as the writing was coming to a close. Deepest thanks to their grandmother Nell for all her help on the home front these past few years. Finally, Martin Lewis has been the best coach, colleague, and companion I could have hoped for. To him, and the prospect of collaborations to come, this book is dedicated.
Introduction
Once a landscape has been established, its origins are repressed
from memory. It takes on the appearance of an object
which
has been there, outside us, from the start.
KŌJIN KARATANI
THE MAP OF JAPAN AS IT APPEARS TODAY—a collection of forty-three prefectures, forming a smooth arc from Hokkaidō in the north to Okinawa in the south—is so familiar as to seem timeless. Yet that apparently stable configuration is the product of a contentious history, one whose contours, especially in the premodern era, are only now becoming clear. Its best-known episodes took place along the state’s borders. Through a millennium of warfare and diplomacy, conquest and compromise, the Yamato chiefdom fitfully expanded from its original home in western Honshū until its descendants had claimed most of the archipelago. The story of that expansion has been compellingly told in recent years, reconstructed from material artifacts as well as maps and texts.¹ Much murkier is its internal counterpart: the process by which the domestic armature of the state came into being. How did the prefectures of the modern map take shape? When did they take hold as the commonsense framework of everyday life? And what prior geographies were displaced or deployed in the process? In other words, how did modern Japan acquire its regional architecture?
One way to tackle those questions would be to write a fine-grained political account, centered in Tokyo and set in the year 1871. For it was there and then, in the compressed space of a few months, that the modern political map was essentially put in place, sweeping away a complex patchwork of fiefs in favor of a nested administrative hierarchy with classical roots. The political wrangling that went into the details of that map makes for a fascinating story, one whose highlights will be recounted in what follows. But my chief interest lies elsewhere. Viewing the modern map from the perspective of a premodern province, I see 1871 as but one moment in a drawn-out drama of geographical restoration: a drama as much cultural as political, and one that took hundreds of years to unfold. For 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 That diffuse and protracted process is my subject here. Since it took place in the countryside as well as in the capital, the actors who populate this book are primarily local literati; and since it transpired largely through regional maps and geographical writings, those genres form my core archive.
The present study traces the restoration of one bounded region in central Honshū. Its terrain—the sprawling district known officially as Nagano Prefecture, or more colloquially by its older labels, Shinshū and Shinano—is in many ways a singular place (Map 1). Like the ancient province whose territory it inherited, Nagano straddles the rugged mountain ridge that runs the length of Honshū. As a result, it is at once a central region and a centrifugal one: a prominent province without a clear core. Likewise, it occupies a distinctive niche in the Japanese imagination. The ur-landscape of a mountainous archipelago, Shinano is known to schoolchildren across the country as the home of Japan’s highest ranges, longest rivers, and biggest ski resorts. Its proximity to Tokyo (less than two hours away by bullet train) tempts millions of urban Japanese every year to take in its alpine vistas and secluded villas, its hot springs and historic landmarks. And even for those who cannot visit, Shinano’s scenic attractions are never far from view. In 1996 the Nagano Olympics filled the airwaves for weeks with images of its regal temples and towering volcanoes, its fire festivals and sulfur springs. A decade later, a yearlong television drama centered on its sparring medieval warlords once again put Shinano squarely in the public eye.³ Thanks to these recurring promotional opportunities, Nagano has a vivid and distinctive identity throughout Japan.
Nor is a strong sense of the region limited to outsiders. Within the region as well, the word Shinshū
conjures a consistent set of associations. Besides taking obvious pleasure in their celebrated landscapes, residents make much of their social reputation: as determined debaters, diligent workers, ready innovators, and excellent students. All know that their homeland was the core of Japan’s silk industry a century ago, and many have made a hobby of studying the region’s rich historical lore. Such interest feeds a robust market for local research. In 1991 an authoritative bibliography listed more than sixty-four thousand articles, books, and documents on the region;⁴ by the turn of the twenty-first century, nearly a hundred new books were being added to that total every year.⁵ This disproportionate interest in the homeland has itself become fodder for prefectural pride. The fact that more than half of all adults who grew up in the prefecture can sing at least one stanza of its poetic anthem, Our Land Shinano,
is cited again and again in regional tracts.⁶ What goes unsaid is that this was not always the case. If Nagano’s identity today is unusually vivid, its production was also unusually fraught.
Map 1. Early modern Japan, highlighting Shinano Province (later Nagano Prefecture)
In fact, for the first five decades of Japan’s modern era, Nagano was a problem. That problem exploded into public view in late 1890, when a group of disgruntled assemblymen from the southern part of the prefecture protested their placement on Japan’s political map. These politicians were deeply unhappy with an arrangement that required them to trudge over high mountain passes to reach the prefecture’s administrative offices and its newly opened assembly hall, both of which were located in the far northern town of Nagano. In the interest of equity, they insisted, it was time to move the prefecture’s headquarters to a more central location. The obvious choice was Matsumoto. A former castle town, Matsumoto had been the largest settlement in premodern Shinano, as well as the major marketing center in the mountains. In 1890 it remained an educational and commercial powerhouse, and the city fathers were anxious for Matsumoto to take on a political role commensurate with its size and status.
The stakes could hardly have been higher. Embarking on its third decade of modernization under the reform-minded Meiji regime (1868–1912), central Japan at the time was being rapidly refashioned by a state-led industrialization push. Before the decade was over, the country’s modern military machine—built in part on profits from Nagano silk—would defeat China in Japan’s first imperial war. Local leaders were caught up in a headlong race for resources, jockeying to position their hometowns at the head of the lucrative sericulture industry. In such a context, competition between localities for railways, road improvements, and riparian works was relentless, and access to state officials was paramount. It was in this feverish environment that a bill was submitted to the newly created prefectural assembly calling for the prefectural capital to move from Nagano to Matsumoto.
For a brief moment it appeared that the southern faction might win the day. Before the assembly could consider the bill, however, the debate spilled into the streets. An angry Nagano crowd, determined to keep the prefectural headquarters in their hometown, began attacking the houses of the bill’s supporters. Thugs sought out and beat Koyama Tetsuji (dates unknown), one of two northern assemblymen who had betrayed their faction by speaking in favor of the move. Koyama had to be rushed to a hospital; he remained in critical condition the next day. Anxious to press their temporary advantage, the northern representatives now took an extraordinary step. Bodily carrying the unconscious Koyama out of the hospital and into the assembly hall, they declared a quorum and forced a vote. With Koyama technically present but unable to voice his support, the relocation bill went down in defeat. An appeal protesting these strong-arm tactics was swiftly lodged, and then just as swiftly killed; then-governor Narasaki Hironao (1841–1895) sanctioned the vote, and the prefectural offices stayed in the town of Nagano. By spring, Matsumoto residents were in open revolt. Hundreds of property holders in the southern city refused to pay their local taxes, and on May 23, 1891, a relocation rally turned out fifteen thousand supporters. The mood turned ugly as the day wore on; by nightfall, rioters had thrown rocks at the Matsumoto police station, assaulted police officers, and attacked the house of the local district chief.⁷
This was not the first time that residents of northern and southern Nagano had publicly clashed over the configuration of their prefecture. Nor would it be the last. For more than half a century, Nagano was a cauldron of conflict. In the long view, that conflict was rooted in the geography of a rugged region, one that straddled the major cultural and physical divides of Honshū. In the eyes of would-be secessionists, however, the issue was the high-handedness of powerful men. For a brief period, starting in 1871, Nagano’s southwestern counties had enjoyed a separate administration under the short-lived Chikuma Prefecture (Map 2).⁸ That arrangement literally went up in smoke in 1876 when a suspicious fire destroyed the prefectural offices in Matsumoto. Rather than rebuild, the Japanese leaders simplified their political map by eliminating Chikuma altogether. Western Chikuma (the area formerly known as Hida Province) was ceded to a neighboring prefecture; the remainder was put under the jurisdiction of Nagano. This decision caused jubilation in the north, for it meant that Nagano Prefecture now encompassed the entire terrain of ancient Shinano Province. But many in the southwestern counties were bitterly unhappy. A petition to restore autonomy to Chikuma Prefecture was submitted to Tokyo within weeks. Four years later, a bid to move Nagano’s administrative offices to the more centrally located town of Matsumoto was put forward. Both efforts failed.
Map 2. Chikuma and Nagano prefectures, 1871–1876
Yet the conflict did not fade away. Despite copious ink spilled in the cause of pan-Shinano unity over ensuing decades, southerners’ resentments continued to simmer, roaring into the open eleven times over seventy years.⁹ The last major clash coincided with a wave of political activism across the country during the early years of the Allied Occupation, when divide-the-prefecture associations cropped up across southern Nagano while towns-people in the north marched in the thousands to defend the status quo. When the issue came to a vote in 1948, more than half of Nagano’s assemblymen went on record in favor of splitting the prefecture. But the majority fell short of the two-thirds required, and the movement again came to naught.¹⁰
None of this contention is apparent in the twenty-first century. If anything, Nagano residents are known for the intensity of their prefectural sentiment.¹¹ When the past is put on display in regional museums and guide-books today, it is Shinano’s samurai, schools, and silk that steal the show, not its intramural quarrels. Even prefectural historians routinely gloss over the long-simmering feud. Tsukada Masatomo, author of a standard work in the field, treats the move-the-capital, divide-the-prefecture storm
(ichō bunken no arashi) as a passing spasm associated with Nagano’s birth in the Meiji era.¹² Kodama Kōta, author of another popular Nagano history, discusses only the 1948 episode, reducing a seventy-year struggle to a sidebar on postwar democracy.¹³ Official publications often erase the region’s north-south tension altogether. A time line on the prefectural web site, for instance, touts the formation of Shinano Province in 704 and the Chikuma-Nagano merger of 1876, but it passes over regional infighting. Running the gamut from prehistoric fossils to the Nagano Olympics, its twenty-seven entries cast modern Nagano as the natural heir to an ancient land.¹⁴ Presiding over all is the ubiquitous regional logo: a simple outline map that stamps all Nagano publications and products with Shinano’s unassailable ancient shape. The gap between the smoothness of that map and the messiness of its making provides the starting point for this book.
GEOGRAPHIES OF RESTORATION
If the slippage between present rhetoric and past politics points to a historical problem, it does not tell us how to define or frame that problem. One promising place to look is the local landscape. Nagano inherited more than its share of fractures, fissures, and petty fiefdoms; in the absence of a single dominant center, it is little wonder that Matsumoto and Nagano residents locked horns for political supremacy for nearly a century. The assemblage of physical features that constituted the crucible for this long-running conflict will accordingly form a vital part of our story. Yet local landforms cannot bear the full burden of historical explanation, for Nagano’s conflicts—while unusually intense and protracted—were hardly unique. Similar struggles beset other prefectures as well; residents of at least half a dozen regions, including nearby Toyama, protested their assigned addresses under the initial Meiji dispensation so vehemently that they were allowed to form prefectures of their own.¹⁵ And even where secessionist movements did not arise, governors everywhere had to contend with older loyalties.¹⁶ Corralling people into imposed regional units meant redirecting their social networks and identities in ways that routinely provoked resentment and sometimes prompted open resistance.
Cast against this broader backdrop, Nagano’s stormy history can illuminate a central geographical problem in Meiji history: the contentious rescaling of the country’s social and political life. In nineteenth-century Japan, that process was both pervasive and profound. At the top of the hierarchy the watchword was centralization. Powers that had been divided between an imperial court in the west, a shogunate in the east, and some 260 castle towns across the archipelago were now to be consolidated in Tokyo, the newly named Eastern Capital. At the other end of the spectrum, meanwhile, individual villages had to be shaken free from a maze of local rules (and variable tax rates) and subjected to a uniform system of administration. And between village and metropole, a new infrastructure of mediating units was required. What was called for was nothing less than a comprehensive remapping of the Japanese countryside, an enormous multiyear effort.
While pervasive rescaling of this kind was integral to modernizers’ agendas everywhere, Japan was unusual in the extent to which geographical modernization played out as restoration. This trope was invoked from the start with the liquidation of the warlords’ domains. As early as 1869 the daimyo of Satsuma, Chōshū, and Tosa—whose armies had toppled the shogunate the previous year—offered up their domainal registers to the national treasury in exchange for appointments as regional executives. Other daimyo followed in swift succession. By 1871 Tokyo abolished hereditary domains altogether, reclaiming all lordly lands for the imperial fisc. This was indisputably a revolutionary act, dispossessing a landed aristocracy and over-throwing a territorial regime that had dominated the Japanese countryside for half a millennium. Yet it was presented to the public not as revolution but as restoration (ishin): a return to an eighth-century tradition of direct rule by the emperor.
Ancient precedent similarly inspired the local and regional reforms of the early Meiji years. In 1868 Japanese farmers inhabited some seventy thousand legally recognized settlements; within a decade and a half, that number had been slashed to twelve thousand. These newly merged villages and towns were herded into a spate of special-purpose districts, hastily concocted to carry out schooling, oversee road improvements, manage water, conduct censuses, collect taxes, regulate commerce, deliver mail, train soldiers, and police a restive populace. The resulting geography was in some ways more byzantine than the one it replaced, with overlapping jurisdictions that were subject to rapid and repeated readjustments. But presiding over all of these specialized districts on behalf of Tokyo was a much more stable set of top-down administrative units: the regional entities known in Japanese as ken (prefectures) and their constituent gun (districts or counties). Both terms had classical referents. As a prefecture was a unit of Roman rule, so ken and gun were units of Tang administration. Both classical empires conceived the countryside as a tributary dominion of the capital, to be controlled through governors (the Latin praefecti) appointed from the center. In resurrecting the nomenclature of gun and ken as the foundational taxonomy of their new state, the Meiji leaders were deliberately gesturing toward a centralized imperial model.
The problem lay in deciding what, exactly, to restore. As it happened, ancient Japan’s incarnation of the Tang administrative model was somewhat deviant; it was also stubbornly persistent. In the Japanese archipelago, a Chinese-style legal and administrative apparatus had been instituted at the turn of the eighth century, creating a regime known as the Ritsuryō system.¹⁷ Geographically, the Ritsuryō system found expression in a map of sixty-six provinces, established by a rescript attributed to Emperor Mommu (r. 697–707 C.E.).¹⁸ These provinces could be referred to alternately as kuni or shū; the former was a vernacular term loosely meaning country,
the latter a more narrowly defined Sinic term for a high-order administrative division.¹⁹ In Japanese the two were used interchangeably; Shinano kuni was the functional equivalent of the Sinic compound Shinshū. Each province in turn was divided into districts known as gun or kōri and townships called gō.²⁰ Devised at the height of Yamato power at the turn of the eighth century, this administrative map was only ruled by court-appointed governors for a few hundred years. Yet despite later encroachments on imperial power, the kuni and gun endured as geographical referents for a millennium. Their governors might be deposed, their territories carved up by armed bands, but the provinces and districts never faded entirely from view. Even as they lost most political functions, the kuni in particular persisted on maps and documents right down to the nineteenth century. Owing partly to their classical pedigree and partly to the organic logic of their boundaries (which generally followed watershed contours), provinces long outlived the Ritsuryō state, acquiring over time a life of their own. To the extent that the Meiji pioneers sought to restore an imperial regime, that geographical legacy had to be reckoned with one way or another.
But what precisely did a kuni connote at the end of that millennium? In political terms, the answer would have to be not much.
By the sixteenth century civil governors had lost the power to raise revenue; under the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868), a kuni had no administrative staff at all. To be appointed lord of such-and-such a province
was purely a formality; these once powerful posts had devolved into symbolic titles, signifying membership in the military elite but carrying no attachment to the territory in question.²¹ And yet to dismiss the early modern kuni as politically moribund would be misleading. On the one hand, there were striking correspondences between feudal and classical geography; the largest fiefs often took their borders partly if not wholly from the ancient kuni.²² On the other hand, while the shoguns might deal cavalierly with the Ritsuryō template in establishing the geography of rule, they deployed it very