In A Malleable Map Kären Wigen sets out to answer the question: “[H]ow did modern Japan acquire its regional architecture?” (p. 1). This uncomplicated, straightforward query begins a complex and fascinating exploration of the dynamic relationship of cartography, central political powers, and local institutions. According to Wigen, the modern prefectures emerged at the end of a long process that she traces across three centuries. As it developed, it “… entailed not the abolition of prior geographies so much as their absorption into standardized territories over which central rule could be exercised” (p. 107). As the word “absorption” suggests, Wigen contends that the process was more cooperative than confrontational, less a conquest by the center than gradual fitting in of an internally parcellized, peripheral region.
The region in question is modern day Nagano Prefecture, or as it known by older but still used regional names, Shinshū and Shinano. Wigen traces the absorption of this upland, land-locked area on the Japanese main island of Honshu into the modern state system by considering the meanings of it shape-shifting cartographic depictions. She uses these artifacts to illuminate the purposeful human actions that eventually created an internally unified, prefecturally denominated homeland. The process is all the more remarkable because Shinshū province (or kuni) originally was “…at once a central region and centrifugal one; a prominent province without a clear core” (p. 2). After the early modern period, important actors in this process are not only grid-casting centralizers intent on capturing the region from the outside, but also local literati moved to create both a native place and a place within the Tokugawa state and, later, the modern Meiji national order.
The central place of maps in this study demonstrates Wigen's aim of pursuing her primary question geographically as well as historically. Indeed, she is convincingly emphatic about the need to bridge disciplines to accurately understand the complex process that culminated in modern national integration. She uses maps in two ways. The first is as objects of study in their own right that she “unpacks” to reveal what they meant to their original makers and users. Secondly, she relies on maps that morphed into different sizes and shapes and encoded information to explain how the Japan of today emerged. As her reliance on these beautiful artifacts suggests, she sees the process as one that was not simply political and economic, but essentially cultural as well. (The maps are indeed works of art. Unfortunately, the book's standard monographic format size makes it difficult to appreciate them fully without visiting websites for a second, magnified look.)
Wigen's cartographical exploration, her meditation on maps, relies on “chorography,” a mid-level approach focusing on the study of regions. In Part One the Shinshū region is considered generally chronologically, first at the Kyoto-centered level of the “nation,” then during the Tokugawa period, in the context of the Edo-centered world of the Tokugawa shogunate. The change in perspective reflects a transformation in major centers of political power in Japan and the shift in the dominance, never absolute, from court to samurai rule. As becomes visually evident from Wigen's presentation and explication of provincial maps, particularly the kuiniezu, Shinano changed from Kyoto's “outback” region to Kantō's important “backdoor” province, a place not only physically close to the seat of samurai rule but also valued as a supplier of silk and other commodities. What was Kyoto's periphery at an earlier time became Tokugawa's “inner chamber” during the early modern period (p. 44). According to Wigen, by the mid-nineteenth century Meiji centralizers had much of their work done for them. Shinano's shape on various maps might have changed over the centuries, but its borders had become definite and easy to place beneath a controllable grid work of longitude and latitude.
In Part Two, “A Province Restored,” Wigen focuses on the combination of central and local efforts that created a unity within newly created Nagano Prefecture to match the desired unity expressed in new maps of a renamed province. The collection and publication of statistics, a new educational system that made awareness of local geography essential, and the spread of local newspapers together worked to create a greater sense of pan-Shinshū native place than had had ever existed before. Wigen also contends that this new local identity was paralleled by a new identification with the modern nation state and the proud role of Nagano people in it.
Simply listing these causative factors does not do justice to the way Wigen elegantly weaves them together to explain how social and cartographic reality came together in Nagano by the early twentieth century. This interaction is an essential part of the book that helps defuse criticism that maps are ambiguous artifacts open to interpretation and created out of motives that may not be completely knowable. One of those least knowable areas is how this process of absorption was appreciated by those below the level of local literati, which of course was most of the population before the late nineteenth century. Wigen provides only slender evidence for their views about being mapped in, the nature of their local and regional identification (evinced by an awareness of “pan-Shinano conditions” p. 224), before the modern period.
Wigen also wavers about whether her historical geography and geographical history of this singular region is representative. She acknowledges that in its particulars, mountainous and land-locked, Shinano is an “anomalous” case (p. 69). Nevertheless, the overall thrust of the book suggests that something similar to the process that created Nagano probably happened throughout Japan where provinces (kuni) were restored for modern centralizing political purposes. Paradoxically, the success of the national project stimulated the origins of a strong Nagano-centered identity, one marked by a distinctive pride in local place that grew in the reflected glory of greater Japan's standing in the world beyond its borders. A consideration of other regions and prefectures reveals that this sense of local identity was not as strong or perhaps was expressed differently among people in other centrally restored provinces. Outside of Nagano, daily life in more peripheral prefectures created greater ambivalence and opposition to central efforts to remake the native place. Both became evident in popular attempts to resist or mediate the terms of being absorbed or by relocating, simply abandoning the native place either willingly or out of economic necessity. Despite this reservation about Nagano's typicality, Wigen's study makes a compelling case for using a fresh methodology that is undoubtedly valuable for understanding the dynamics of nation building in Japan.
