The longest and most methodologically inventive chapter, 'Maps are Strange,' describes a shift in 'spatial ideology' and 'cartographic imagination' that occurred in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. to have been enabled by a prior public consciousness that had already overridden the status order with presumptions of a collective stake in Nihon ' (251).Ī model of clarity, wit, and readability, Berry's book is also exemplary for its masterly readings of a wide variety of materials. Berry provides a cautionary corrective-if not an outright refutation-of this view, arguing that the prodigious 'information texts' available during the Edo period (1600–1868) indicate a 'quiet revolution' in spatial and social imagination, linking people across status and geographical boundaries with a shared 'cultural literacy' and a 'common social lexicon.' 'The profound change across the Meiji divide seems. Recent scholarship in modern Japanese history, intent to discredit essentialist notions of a timeless national cultural identity, has depicted 'Japaneseness' itself as a modern 'invented tradition,' dating back to the late nineteenth-century Meiji project of nation-building. The prolific print culture of early modern Japan has been the object of repeated scrutiny from historians and aesthetes, but Berry's virtuosic investigation (based primarily on the rich Mitsui Bunko Collection of published maps and illustrated books) recasts these materials as a 'library of public information' that both reflected and nurtured a burgeoning national consciousness among seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japanese.

Japan in Print by Mary Elizabeth Berry