Corporate Land Tenure in Nineteenth-Century Japan: A GIS Assessment

Abstract

Perhaps the oldest undertaken by an American is Loren Seibert’s project on the Tokyo area. Yano Keiji and his colleagues at Ritsumeikan University and other Kyoto institutions are currently at work on a virtual Kyoto GIS project. Other projects are attempting to reconstruct the boundaries of large administrative divisions. Further, Murayama Yuji, Tsukuba University, and his colleagues at several research institutes are developing boundary data bases for formal administrative units. Yet projects on Japan to date have reached something of an impasse when it comes to mapping locations for lower-level administrative units of the late-nineteenth century and earlier, the villages in existence at the start of the period, 1868. This is a function of the history of modern cartography in Japan. The first modern surveys focused on the major metropolitan areas around Tokyo and Kobe-Osaka-Kyoto in the 1880s. More than a decade later Japan undertook a modern, nationwide 1:50,000 topographic survey extending the use of modern cartographic techniques to less densely populated regions. By this time, many areas had witnessed substantial administrative reorganization. That process began with the 1870s abolition of old semifeudal daimyo (baronial) domains and the creation of prefectures that frequently ignored the old administrative boundaries. In addition, cities, towns, and villages were reformed through amalgamation, with many cities and towns growing in size. In this process the new government literally expunged large numbers of villages from the map. For the study of twentieth-century Japan, the preceding limitation is not a problem, but for understanding the earliest years of Japan’s modern era, and for understanding mid-nineteenth-century Japan, this situation presents a considerable barrier. Unlike pre-1911 Imperial China, for which key official data was often assembled at the county level, Japanese social, economic, demographic, and similar data was compiled at the level of the village, whether that be the small villages that existed up to the amalgam-

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