Beyond Japan Transcript
Series 2, Episode 27: Maps & Imagined Travel with Sonia Favi
Edited by Oliver Moxham, Host and Producer (25/5/2022)

OM: Oliver Moxham
SF: Sonia Favi
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OM: Hello and welcome to Beyond Japan, an interdisciplinary podcast that looks at thebroad reach of Japanese Studies from within and beyond Japan. This podcast isbrought to you by the Centre for Japanese Studies at the Sainsbury Institute for the
Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures in collaboration with the University of East Anglia.
I’m your host, Oliver Moxham, Research Project Coordinator at the Sainsbury Instituteand researcher of language and Japanese war heritage.
This week we were joined by Dr Sonia Favi, researcher at the University of Turin, todiscuss the history of imagined travel. Sonia's digital exhibition, 'Travels in Tokugawa
Japan (1603-1868): A Virtual Journey', explores how late Edo-period maps indulged theimagination of those unable to journey across the country due to restrictive travelling
conditions, something we are all too familiar with in the wake of the COVID-19
pandemic.
We hope you enjoy the show.
***
OM: Okay, good morning, Sonia, welcome to the podcast.
SF: Thank you, good morning.
OM: So, first of all, we'd like to know a bit more about you. Can you tell us about yourarea of expertise and how your interests that brought you there?
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SF: Yeah. Thank you very much. First of all, many thanks again for your invitation to bea part of this podcast. I'm really glad to be here.
So, my name is Sonia Favi. I'd say my main areas of expertise are Japanese history
and book history, with a special focus on travel studies. For most of my career, I've
been working on travel related sources and on travel encounters within Japan andbetween Japan and Europe. When I applied for my PhD, which I completed at Ca'
Foscari University in Venice in 2013, I was at first mainly interested in doing research on
book history, and I received funding for that by the European Social Fund. One
condition for obtaining the PhD scholarship was for my research to involve a
collaboration with an Italian cultural institution for the announcement of their Japan
related holdings.
So, this is how I started a partnership with the Marciana National Library in Venice,which has an extensive collection of Japan related materials dated from the 16th and17th centuries, mainly commercially published travel records connected to the activities
of Jesuit missionaries in Japan. I mapped this collection, creating an online database
now hosted on the Ca' Foscari University of Venice website, and that was how I
developed an interest in the travel encounters that led to the production and circulationof this sort of material in Italy.
This became the main focus of my thesis, which analysed the cultural and intellectual
exchanges and the editorial processes that led to the popularity of Japan as a subject intravel literature in 16th century Italy. This later also became the subject of a monograph
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which was published in 2018. In the meantime, my newfound interest in the history of
the cultural exchanges between Japan and Italy led me to be involved in a couple ofother projects related to both book history and travel history.
I participated in a project led by the National Institute of Japanese Literature of Tokyo,
which involved the cataloguing of a collection of Japanese manuscripts put together by
the Italian missionary Mario Marega, who was in Japan from the 1930s to the late1970s. The manuscripts, which are mostly legal documents related to the prosecution
cases of Christians in Japan in the 17th century, are now preserved in the Vatican
Library in Rome. I was also part of the project, led by Professor Akamuro of the Art
Research Center of Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, for the mapping, digitization,
cataloguing and study of Japanese collections reserved in European libraries andmuseums. I worked in particular on a second collection put together by Mario Mareda
and preserved at the Pontifica Salesiana University in Rome, which includes woodblock
prints and printed books and maps.
It was through this collection that I developed a passion for maps, and then in 2016, I
learned of the existence of the Japanese collection at the John Rylands Library of the
University of Manchester, which had been previously catalogued by Professor Peter
Kornicki in 1993. The collection included a wide and still mostly unstudied group ofmaps dated from the Tokugawa or Edo period (1603-1868) and from the Meiji period(1868-1912), and this piqued my interest and led me to apply for a visiting fellowship at
the library [which] I got.
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From the weeks I spent at the Rylands Library, I gained enough material to work on a
research proposal for a longer project related to the collection. The proposal was titled'Travel in Tokugawa Period Japan', and it ended up winning a [Marie Sklodowska-Curie]
Fellowship in the context of the EU-founded Horizon 2020 European Research Frame,
and the project started in 2019, and it ended actually a few months ago, in 2021. It wasmeant to investigate the cultural and social meaning of travel as both a physical and avirtual and intellectual practice in 18th and 19th century Japan, and it also led to a twoyear partnership with the John Rylands Library, which I am very grateful for because it
opened many opportunities for me and also helped in opening new directions for myresearch. I'd say that's about it.
OM: It's fascinating. So, your recent publications have looked at the circulation ofpeople and literature between Japan and Italy in the 16th century. Could you give us an
idea of who would be able to travel such great distances then, and to what end were
they travelling?
SF: Yeah, it was mainly European merchants, Christian missionaries, and at least in
two occasions before the mid-17th century, also Japanese dignitaries travelling toEurope. So, I'd say that the exchanges and travel encounters that happened between
Europe and Japan in the 16th century can be understood mainly in light of commercial
drive and of religious order. Commercial drive was one of the engines of the so-called
European age of exploration, a period of time usually located by historians between the
15th and the 17th centuries, when several European countries engaged in naval
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explorations of areas of the world that were either unknown to them or only very partiallyexplored. Japan was one of those areas before the 15th century. No European travelthat we know of ever set foot in the archipelago and only vague references to thecountry had appeared in European literature.
A key event for the arrival of the first European travellers in Japan was the voyage to
India by the Portuguese explorer Vasco Da Gama between 1497 and 1499. Thisvoyage for the first time rounded the Cape of Good Hope on the Southern tip of Africa,
and it was a milestone for the creation of a Portuguese commercial Empire in Asia as it
opened a new sea route which made it much easier for merchants to reach the region.
After the Gama's voyage, the Portuguese proceeded to create the so-called Estado daÍndia, or "State of India", which is perhaps better understood as a structured group of
trade posts rather than as a state in the proper sense of the term, and they launched avery profitable exchange with several Asian countries, including China.
Initially, they didn't show any particular interest in Japan, perhaps because, as I
mentioned, very little was known in Europe about the country at the time, but then in1543, a small group of Portuguese travellers who had joined the crew of a Chinese ship
were driven by a storm to the shores of Tanegashima, a small island to the south ofJapan. The local lord, Tanegashima Tokitaka, welcomed the travellers and showedinterest in the goods that they were carrying and especially in their guns, so much sothat he bought two of them. A Portuguese blacksmith was then called to the island the

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following year in order to help local blacksmiths in reproducing them. This initialexchange sparked a mutual interest in commerce, and by 1555 the first ships officiallysent by the Estado da Índia reached the Japanese port of Hirado. By the end of the 16th
century, Spanish settlers in the Philippines also began to trade with Japan, and at the
beginning of the 17th century trade posts were created on the archipelago by the Dutch
and British East India Companies.
This kept on until the late 1630s, when a change in political circumstances in Japan led
to the expulsion of all European merchants, with the exception of members of the Dutch
East India Company. As for religious drive, it was another key motivation for thePortuguese expansion and more generally for travel between Europe and Japan. In the
16th century, under the protection of the Portuguese Crown, the Franciscan Order andthe Dominican Order carried out their earliest missions to convert the local population ofIndia in 1500 and 1503 respectively, and then in 1538, a fiscal policy was established in
Goa, giving official sanction to their efforts.
As far as Japan was concerned, however, the missionary effort was mainly undertakenby the Society of Jesus, which was founded right when the first Portuguese travellers
were about to land in Japan in 1540 by Ignatius of Loyola and nine other core fathers.
These founding fathers identified the purpose of the order in the defence andpropagation of the faith and strongly emphasized the role of education, a trait thatdefines the Jesuits in relation to other orders. Their initial agreement also required a
subscription to a specific vow which bound members of the Society to travel anywhere
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in the world to perform their ministry, and this gave birth to what was in all respects anorder of itinerant missionaries. In this sense, travel was part of the Society ever since its
foundation, and members of the Society, mainly of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italianorigins, came to exert a big role in the diffusion of Christianity, both in the Pacific area
and in the Atlantic area.
The first Jesuit father to set foot in Asia was one of the members of the original group of
the Society's founders, Francis Xavier, who was sent by Ignatius on a mission to India inthe very year of the creation of the order and was then followed by 40 or so
missionaries in a matter of less than ten years. Xavier himself sailed from India to Japanin 1549, motivated by a very promising encounter with a Japanese native named Yajiro,
or 'Angelo', and in Japan a group of missionaries was able to establish connections witha number of local lords, particularly in the Kyushu area, and to give birth to a flourishing
local mission.
Unfortunately for them, at the end of the 16th century began the persecution of
Christians in Japan, which became systematic by 1614, again in light of changing
political circumstances. So, all in all, the Jesuits didn't accomplish much in terms of
conversions, but they were still instrumental in bringing elements of the so-called nanba
bunka, or 'culture of the Southern barbarians', as the Europeans were called in Japan,
and this included commercial products, but also linguistic, cultural, and artistic
influences of various kinds. It was also through the Jesuits that Japan as a geographic
reality became familiar to a growing section of the European public. Members of the
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Society sent regular records to their superiors in Rome meant not only to relay
information but also to spread the defined news, also as a way to gain patronage for theSociety, and this was why the letters, in edited form, were often commercially distributedand became vehicles through which the European public collected information about thecountries in which the missionaries were stationed, including Japan.
It was also through the mediation of missionaries that the Japanese travellers reached
Europe. The first group travelled there as part of the so-called 'Tensho Shisetsu', or'embassy of the Tensho era', which is the time period going from 1573 to 1592. The
embassy was nominally sent by a group of local lords from Southern Japan, but inreality it was carefully orchestrated by the Jesuit Alessandro Valignano, who wanted toshowcase the success of the Japanese mission in Europe. It was composed of four very
young boys who left Japan in 1582 and travelled through India to Portugal, Spain, andItaly, and returned in 1519 after a very long, memorable journey where they werereceived by many representatives of the European nobility.
Then in 1613, a second embassy, this time promoted by the Franciscan Luis Sotelo andby the dignitary and explorer of Hasekura Tsunenaga in the name of the local lord ofNorthern Japan, reached Europe again, but this time travelling through the Pacific and
Mexico.
OM: I see. It's fascinating to hear about those young boys being sent to Europe fromJapan. A lot of the history around this period tends to emphasize Europeans going to

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Japan and writing back home about it. Is there any Japanese literature from the timeabout travels in Europe?
SF: Not much Japanese literature, but there's a lot of literature published in Europe
about that because the embassy made a great impression in Spanish, Portuguese, andItalian cities. So, we have both archival documents recording the passing of the boys
who travel to the different members of the Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish nobility, and
we also have the gazetteers and other published materials announcing their passing.
OM: So, while you've looked at the Jesuits travelling to and from Japan, you've also
looked at recreational travel in the late Edo period. After the country had closed its
borders to foreigners, how did this differ from religiously motivated travel?
SF: I actually argue that there is a level of overlap between the two, at least as far aslate Edo period travellers were concerned. So, the Tokugawa family imposed a numberof travel restrictions, not only on journeys abroad but also on travel within Japan. These
measures were devised as a way to preserve the power of the Tokugawa as the selfdeclared peacekeepers of Japan after a long period of internal war. However, a numberof people were still allowed or even required to travel for a variety of reasons.
There were, for example, the officials and messengers serving the Tokugawa, thescholars who embarked on journeys for their studies and sometimes conducted service
for the authorities, and the local lords who had formed loyalty to the Tokugawa wererequired to build residences called yashiki in the Tokugawa capital in order to comply to
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a complex hostage system called sankin-kōtai, or 'alternate attendance'. In accordancewith this system, parts of their families had to live in Edo permanently, and the lords
themselves had to periodically travel there with their retinue of warriors, alternating
between living in the capital and in their domains.
There were also, of course, people shipping goods or moving around to provide
services. The Tokugawa themselves were actually frequent buyers of some productsthat came from far away locations. For example, the tea they consumed was especially
imported from Uji near Kyoto. So, it happened that even if initially the Tokugawa did notintend to allow massive movements of travellers, the very nature of the politicalstructure they controlled made it basically inevitable.
It also happened by the end of the 17th century, as the country remained politicallystable, that the Tokugawa became more lenient in granting travel permits for otherreasons, particularly health and religious reasons, in a way that sometimes allowed alittle bending of the rules, and that's where recreational trouble came into play.
Authorities were particularly keen on granting permits for religious travel, and in somecases, pilgrimage was even considered a desirable or necessary step in the life of ayoung adult. The diffusion of pilgrimages was also helped by political stability, whichmeant that the country was relatively at peace and that roads were well controlled andsafer by improvements made in the road system, which made it quicker to movearound. [Also], a general rise in living standards meant that more people could afford totravel.
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Another factor was the flourishing of religious confraternities called kō, which organizedjourneys to temples, shrines, and to the sacred mountains of Japan. As a result of thesemany factors, by the beginning of the 19th century, a real pilgrimage boom was taking
place in Japan. In the context of this boom, religious travel ended up encompassing
also a recreational dimension. As the authorities tended not to endorse travel motivatedsolely by recreation, pilgrimages became an occasion for what was called yusan tabi, or'pleasure-seeking travel', or monomi yusan, 'sightseeing'.
A way to escape from the everyday, pilgrims tended to travel to faraway destinations
with an unprecedented rate and frequency, and they also tended to follow different
routes in the outbound and return legs of the trip to touch as many landmarks as
possible along the road. They tended to specifically aim for meisho, a term that can betranslated as 'famous places', and a term that encompassed a large variety of sites
such as historical sites, or kyūseki, famous literal landmarks of utamakura (famous
poetry), sightseeing spots, but also commercial activities of various kinds. For example,
inns, restaurants, and shops provide huge sections within travel guides. Trips wereconsequently often several weeks and even months long, above all for members ofconfraternities and for wealthy travellers. Religious sites such as temples and shrines
were, of course, considered meisho in their own right, and they were visited for reasonsthat often went beyond their sacred nature.
Some pilgrims even lost sight of the religious meaning of what they were doing. We
have reports, for example, of pilgrimage travelling to the Ise Shrine, which was one of
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12the most popular pilgrimage destinations, and then barely visiting it, and rushing to thecommercial activities and entertainment of the monzen-machi, the 'temple-front town',
and major temples and shrines from their side capitalized on the influx of travellers,
offering lodging, food, and even souvenirs to pilgrims.
In this sense, even if the Tokugawa government never officially recognized pleasureseeking as an acceptable reason for travel, the Edo period marked in all respects thebirth of a tourist industry in which religious travel played a central role.
OM: So, let's turn to your virtual exhibition, 'Travels in Tokagawa Japan, 1603-1868: A
Virtual Journey'. What themes does the exhibit cover and what inspired you in its
curation?
SF: So, the virtual exhibition was created in partnership with the John Ryland's Libraryas part of my Marie Curie project. One of the objectives of the project was to announce
the Japanese collection at the Rylands, making its travel-related material, particularly its
maps, more widely accessible both to a public of specialists and to a more generalpublic. A project that was more specifically addressed to specialists was the Japanese
Maps Portal that we created with the Manchester Digital Collections, a metadata-richand high-resolution image repository specific for research collections as ways to engage
with visitors.
Instead, we opted for collection encounters and for exhibitions. A physical exhibition
was launched within the Rylands Gallery in November 2021, and it closed at the end of
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this past March, and the virtual exhibition was launched in October 2021 as apermanent feature of the Manchester Digital Exhibition's website. In this sense, theexhibition's original aim was to showcase the Japanese maps collection permanently
and in a way that might be engaging for a public of non-specialists. We linked every
item in the exhibition to the detailed descriptions included in Manchester Digital
Collections, but I also created an exhibition-specific, shorter description, which would
give viewers an immediate sense of the item, and I also developed a narrative which put
every item in context.
My inspiration in creating the narrative was the idea to at least partly recreate for visitors
the experience of using the items in the ways they were originally envisioned for. In
other words, considering this is a travel-related collection, I wanted to offer our visitors
the opportunity to experience a sort of virtual journey in pre-modern Japan. The landing
page of the exhibition briefly illustrates how in Edo Japan, or Tokugawa Japan, theruling Tokugawa family banned travel with the exception of travel connected to anumber of essential reasons, and it also describes how well some people found ways tocircumvent the restrictions. Many also had the opportunity to travel virtually thanks to
cartographic and topographic materials.
Then the exhibition is structured into three main sections, each one focused on a central
theme. The first section, 'Japan and the Outside World', illustrates how, even if travel
abroad was banned, cartography made it possible for the public to put Japan in relation
with the wider world and far away travel destinations, and also to learn about foreign
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Sciences, particularly European surveying and cartographic techniques imported fromthe Dutch.
The second section, titled 'An Interconnected Country', then presents images and mapsthat reflect the nature of premodern Japan as a partially centralized state with acomplex web of internal communication networks. A subsection, titled 'The Countries
Within the Countries', focuses on the Japanese state internal structure of provinces andregions, and another subsection, titled 'Spider Web Routes', focuses on items mapping
sea and land routes within Japan.
Finally, the third section, titled 'The Worlds Within Japan', illustrates the logistics oftravel within the country and focuses on key travel destinations and how they wererepresented in cartography and topography. In this section, there are three subsections
which focus respectively on Japan's national or famous places, which were populartravel destinations that had some sort of artistic sacred landscape of commercial
relevance.
On Japanese cities and the way they were represented in maps in a rolling urban
society and on ports in Japan that, at different stages of Japanese early modern history,
allowed the supervised presence of and commerce, with foreigners becoming bridges tothe outside world, we decided to enrich this section of the exhibition with the GIS Map ofJapan Digital Map of Japan, where all the items included are linked in correspondencewith their actual geographical locations. Through the map, visitors can better envision

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the geographical distribution of the travel destinations, and they can also choose tonavigate them more freely in a way that is independent from my narrative.
My hope is that by exploring the exhibition, visitors will allow themselves tometaphorically get lost and will get to virtually experience the geographical reality that isboth physically and temporally remote.
OM: Fascinating, and any listeners who would like to follow up on this will find a link tothe exhibition in the episode description afterwards. So, as we mentioned earlier, where
you have travellers, you also have the distribution of literature and knowledge,
something at the heart of your exhibition. Through its displays of beautifully illustrated
maps, it's easy to find yourself longing to have walked the scenic roads of Edo Japanlooking over these, but you make the case that many living in Japan at the time would
have done the exact same thing due to obstacles to travel. Could you unpack that for usa bit?
SF: Yeah. So, I've already mentioned that the Tokugawa family put travel restrictions inplace as a way to preserve political stability in the country and how a number of people
were still allowed or even compelled to travel. However, not everyone had the same
access to travel. For a start, some local authorities were stricter than others in granting
travel permits. Moreover, class, status, and gender were two factors that had an impact
on the possibility to move and also to access specific spaces. For example, even if – ormaybe precisely because – they were at the top of the social hierarchy, men andwomen from the samurai class, the warrior class, had usually less chances than
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commoners to engage in pilgrimages and in recreational travel. Women belonging to
the higher ranks of the samurai class were expected to move only for strictly official
business, such as when they got married and moved into their husband's home. In
particular, samurai women residing in Edo were usually hostages in the context of thesankin-kōtai system, the 'alternate attendance' system that I described earlier. So, they
were legally bound to stay in the Tokugawa capital.
For men too, social obligations made it difficult to leave their stations even at times ofthe year such as winter where peasants were more at liberty to temporarily neglect theirjobs. Even taking detours from official journeys to embark on pilgrimages required
explicit permission from the authorities. Moreover, lower-ranking samurai often didn't
have the financial means to travel, so the vast majority of travellers tended to consist of
male commoners, above all, merchants.
Women commoners did travel in far greater numbers than before and, while we know of
only a few confraternities who had women as their members, it was not so uncommon
for them to join their assets in pilgrimage even if some sacred spaces were restricted tothem. Women, on the other hand, were still bound to their role into the economy of theirhouseholds and to their husbands who, in theory, had to give them permission to leave.
We do have testimonies of women flaunting the rules, above all in the context of wellaccepted pilgrimage practices, such as the pilgrimage to Ise Shrine, but generally
speaking, it was above all women who could not claim a direct relation to a man, such

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as nuns, widows, and unmarried women, or those who were at the fringes of societythat had greater freedom to travel.
So, for those who couldn't embark on a journey, either because they couldn't get
permits for it or because they couldn't afford it, literature was one effective way to travelwith the mind. Just as today we travel with the world using books, television, and theInternet, with tools such as the virtual exhibition, people from the Edo period could andwould embark on virtual journeys thanks to travel-related objects, literature, and art, andthey were helped in this by the commercial print revolution that happened in Japan in
the Edo period, a revolution that was connected on the one hand to innovations inprinting techniques and on the other hand to a growing literacy rate, also favoured by
the general rise in living standards that I have already mentioned.
Commercial publishing houses grew and increasingly turned to producing literatureaddressed to consumers of all social standings, and with the growing popularity of travel
and the development of a tourist industry, travel literature, and other travel-related
printed media came to play a major role in the editorial policies of many of them.
Woodblock printed maps such as those included in the virtual exhibition were part ofthat editorial culture and, as the exhibition shows, they included many different kinds ofmaterial road maps, regional maps of famous places, city maps, or maps of specificsites, above all religious sites. Many of these maps were not drawn to scale or withexactness in mind and, in many cases, they were too big to be even brought on theroad. What inspired them was the idea of captivating users and to guide them virtually
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within the location, hence also the frequent use of a hybrid cartographical and pictorialstyle.
Moreover, travel was a dominant theme also in other media. For example, the board
games called dōchū sugoroku, which were a sort of snake and ladders game, were very
popular for both children and adults. The paper board of the games often featured major
highways such as the very well-known Tōkaidō highway. Travel-related visuals included
a wide range of landscape prints and also travel guidebooks, some clearly meant for
imaginary travel rather than an actual guide to be taken on the road. This is, forexample, the case of the illustrated guides called Meisho Zue or 'Illustrated Guides toFamous Places', which were very large multi-volume books with detailed pictures anddescriptions of famous places, complete with historical and legendary narrations. Ample
geographical and topographical sections were also included in many encyclopaedias,sometimes also depicting real and invented foreign countries.
Last but not least, there were fictional works, in particular, ever since the 17th century,
many picaresque stories were published featuring two main characters on a journey,
Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige, translated as 'Shank's Mare' by the author, Jippensha Ikku, waspublished in 1802 as one late example of this literary trend, and after its release it
became a true best seller. So, works like this served to stimulate and guide travel, butthey were also a way to explore Edo Japan with the mind without leaving one's home.
The popularity of topographic media, even in peripheral areas, contributed to thedevelopment for the first time in Japanese history of a shared geographical and also
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social lexicon among people belonging to different local cultures and to different social
classes.
OM: As a slight aside, it's remarkable, looking at these maps now, how accurately theycaptured enormous tracts of land. I've always been curious how are panoramic bird's
eye view maps created in Tokugawa Japan?
SF: So, it depends on the map, but in many cases the route was some type of land
survey, either conducted by the author of the map or by some previous surveyor. For
example, one of the items in the Rylands Collection displayed in the virtual exhibition isa beautiful aerial map of Mount Fuji called Fuji Sanshikedenzu, or 'A Complete Map of
the True Form of Mount Fuji'. This is by an artist named Hashimoto Sadahide who was
active in the mid-19th century and was famous for his very accurate and bird's eye
views, both in landscape prints and maps, and those in some cases were based on
previous sources, but mostly they were based on actual journeys to the place by theartist, who would walk around it and reconstruct it by assembling a collection of partial
views.
In other cases, the landscape was represented in a perspective that was pictorial rather
than cartographical from a specific point of view, and this was the case, of course, ofmany landscape prints, but also of some hybrid cartographic and pictorial materials. For
example, the virtual exhibition includes a 19th century illustration of the famous places ofEdo, where the city is represented as a whole in a way that clearly draws on city maps,

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but in single point perspective as seen from the direction of the present-day Sumida
ward.
Other types of maps were based on the use of Dutch surveying techniques, that is, onland measurements supported by the use of a sextant, and that type of knowledge wasstrictly reserved for Shogunate officials, at least until the mid-18th century, and it was notvery widespread even after that. However, commercial maps of larger areas, such asprovincial and regional maps, road maps, and city maps where in many cases based on
administrative maps drawn through official Shogunate service. For example, the map of
the Tōkaidō highway titled Tōkaidō Bunken Ezu, or 'Sectional Map of the Tōkaidō,
included in the virtual exhibition, was based on a mid-17th century map drawn on thebasis of a survey conducted by two cartographers in the service of the Tokugawa.
Of course, even with an administrative map as a model, the commercial version tended
to be different from the original. There was a matter of censorship of classified
geographical information, but there was also the fact that commercial maps tended toalter the original model in order to cater to the interests of the public. A very clear
example of this are maps of the old imperial capital of Kyoto. Maps of Kyoto produced in
Edo period, mostly at their origin were a group of administrative maps commissioned in
the first half of the 17th century by the Tokugawa to the Nakai, a family of mastercartographers appointed to manage public works in Kyoto. Their maps were black andwhite, highly detailed, and very functional, and they only represented the central area ofthe city, the section called rakuchū, which literally means 'within the capital'.
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Later commercial maps took their model, but they expanded on it. For example, they
started to represent the area called rakugai, which literally means 'outside of the capital',
and which basically included the hills in the outskirts of Kyoto, where many of the travel
attractions of the city, such as temples and shrines, were actually located. Including
rakugai meant that for the majority of the commercial maps the scale actually tended tobe very inaccurate, as the area around Kyoto had to be compressed in order to include
all the attractions, but objectivity wasn't necessarily a preoccupation. On the contrary,
the scale of certain buildings in the outskirts, for example, the Kiyomizu Temple was
exaggerated on purpose and made even more conspicuous by the addition of colours
and of pictorial elements, and this is actually a point worth making: richness in details
didn't necessarily mean accurateness. What really mattered for most commercial map
creators was capturing the imagination of viewers.
OM: Amazing. I must admit, the ban on foreign travel, strict checkpoints, and 'essential
travel only' rules sounded eerily familiar to our most recent circumstances in the COVID19 pandemic. I'm sure many of our listeners are looking at travel adverts to Japan withthe same longing as many Tokugawa Japanese poring over maps. Following thisexhibition, what do you think drives this common desire to travel?
SF: I think I'll borrow the words of Jippensha Ikku, the author of the fictional work I
mentioned earlier, Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige. I will quote a small passage from thetranslation by Thomas Sachel, titled 'Shank's Mare'. This is on page 237:

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"Naturally, one is curious about the people who are travelling the same roads, and those
whose fates are linked together at the public inns are not tired by convention as when
they live in the same row of houses, but can open their hearts to each other and talk 'tilthey are tired. On the road, also, one has no trouble from bill collectors at the end of themonth, nor is there any rice box on their shoulder for the rats to get at. Truly, travellingmeans cleaning the life of care. With your straw sandals and your leggings, you canwander wherever you like and enjoy the indescribable pleasures of sea and sky."
I love how universally this applies and how modern it sounds, and I think it is a very
effective description of the joys of travel. In travel there's, first of all, an element of
discovery of new things, which I think appeals to a very core characteristic of humanbeings, curiosity, which translates in a thirst for knowledge and for new encounters.
Then there is another element which is the escape from the everyday. Travelencompasses a destruction and temporary respite from common worries, be it physicaltravel or be it being lost in a book or in a piece of art. In the COVID-19 pandemic, I think
we truly realized just how enriching and relieving travel can be as an experience. With
the exhibition, the staff at the Rylands and I actually hoped to offer a small opportunity
for escape from confinement. So, the project was in a sense also a child of thepandemic.
OM: Beautiful. Well, thank you for answering all my questions, Sonia. Before we finish
the episode, could you share with us what other projects are currently working on?

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SF: First of all, many thanks to you too for having me here today, it was very fun. So, as
for my current projects, aside from wrapping up a few residual ideas for publications
connected to my Marie Curie [project], I'm actually settling into a new job right now as atenure-track researcher at the Department of Humanities at the University of Turin in
Italy. We started a nice partnership with the Oriental Arts Museum of Turin, where an
exhibition on Japanese kakimono, that is paintings displayed on wall hangings, justclosed this week, and some of those were landscape paintings. We had the occasion to
do a few public engagement events together, and I hope this will lead to futurecollaborations, maybe also for digital projects.
In terms of research, I have moved on a little bit from the Tokugawa period to the Meiji
period. At the Rylands, I also had the occasion to work on a late-19th century tourist
map of Japan by a society called the Kihin Kai, or 'Welcome Society', which was one of
the earliest associations for the promotion of tourism in the world, and this led me tointerrogate the ways in which tourism and travel maps and guidebooks were used as
tools of soft power at an early stage of Japan's history as a nation state, which has
translated in an article recently published for Japan Forum. I'd love to work further on
this.
I've been recently involved in a research group at the University of Geneva for a projecton globetrotters at the end of the 19th century, and I'm very excited to work on it.
Moreover, as a little side project, I'm also working with Dr Rebecca Widely, a former
colleague from the Rylands, on a project on a Meiji period traveller of a different kind, a
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purposes.
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gynaecologist named Shibata Koichi, who travelled to Germany at the end of the 19th
century and published a booklet on obstetrics in German, which was then translated in
English and in Japanese. We recently presented our findings at the Association for
Health History annual conference, and we hope to publish a paper in the near future.
So, I guess you might say that travel remains at the core of my research, and perhaps
precisely because of that, I'm very willing to explore new avenues, so to say. Thank you.
OM: That's definitely a diverse research approach. Thank you for joining once again,
Sonia, it's been a real pleasure.
SF: Thank you, thank you very much.
***
OM: Don't forget to subscribe on https://JapanInNorwich.org or on your preferred
podcast provider for updates on new episodes. You can also get in touch to recommend
topics for the podcast at cjs@uea.ac.uk.
Join us for our next episode with Adam Hunt, PhD candidate at the University of
Sheffield, to compare crime and safety between Japan and the UK.
We hope you will join us then. Thank you for listening.

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