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1/ Herewith a short Fabian Drixler appreciation thread:
There's no need to here recycle praise for Mabiki. It's a great book that everyone should read.
Instead, I want to showcase the incredible work he's doing to map early modern Japan. I mean, just look at these things.
There's no need to here recycle praise for Mabiki. It's a great book that everyone should read.
Instead, I want to showcase the incredible work he's doing to map early modern Japan. I mean, just look at these things.
2/ At some point in our teaching, many of us prob. use some version of the below map, demarcating fudai/tozama/ shinpan/fudai holdings.
Though functional in conveying the distribution of power, these maps can obfuscate the compound nature of Tokugawa territoriality.
Though functional in conveying the distribution of power, these maps can obfuscate the compound nature of Tokugawa territoriality.
3/ Now, thanks to some painstaking research by Drixler and his team, we have a much more granular sense of the contours of the 200+ states and statelets of 1644.
(In this, they're carrying on important work started by Nishioka Toranosuke and Hattori Shisō in the 1950s.)
(In this, they're carrying on important work started by Nishioka Toranosuke and Hattori Shisō in the 1950s.)
4/ Cartographically, what Drixler has done is "sacrifice the larger aggregations" to instead "use separate colors to denote each domain in order to invite viewers to think of Tokugawa Japan as a multi-state system." https://www.geocurrents.info/geopolitics/mapping-early-modern-japan-as-a-multi-state-system
5/ It's difficult to overstate how challenging this must've been. Setting aside the lang. skills involved, this entails reconstructing borders of each domain using village documents.
In a sense, this is a project of counter-mapping, tracing political power from the hamlet up.
In a sense, this is a project of counter-mapping, tracing political power from the hamlet up.
6/ Separately, Drixler has mapped Tokugawa political territory using these categories, but also taking care to delineate shrine, temple, and court/emperor landholdings.
7/ One clear takeaway from Drixler's map is the territorial fracturing in the core. Large domains prevail on the edges of the archipelago, but the Kansai/Kanto heartland is a veritable "shatter zone," in the words of Martin Lewis.
The detail of the mapping is simply incredible
The detail of the mapping is simply incredible
8/ For those interested, Drixler and his team have recently inaugurated the Digital Atlas of Tokugawa Japan, where these and other resources will be housed.
https://dtl.macmillan.yale.edu/digital-atlas-tokugawa-japan
https://dtl.macmillan.yale.edu/digital-atlas-tokugawa-japan
9/ Which is all to say that -- sorry modern Japan folks -- the best work in the field is, and has always been, on EMJ. 
Much of the above is cribbed from Martin Lewis' excellent write up on these maps: https://www.geocurrents.info/geopolitics/mapping-early-modern-japan-as-a-multi-state-system
Much of the above is cribbed from Martin Lewis' excellent write up on these maps: https://www.geocurrents.info/geopolitics/mapping-early-modern-japan-as-a-multi-state-system
