Japanese maps

Generally speaking, traditional Japanese maps were quite diverse in style, depiction, and purpose, and were often oriented towards pragmatic use. It was less common for maps to serve literary or decorative purposes as they might in the West, instead being used for purposes such as the differentiation of rice fields on a feudal manor, or orientation within a temple complex.

An example might be an Edo era pilgrimage map depicting the route and location of lodges on the road between Kyoto and Edo, including images of people on the road, with distances between stops differentiated not by relative distance, but by numerical markings, as scale as it is recognized in the West today was not generally used.

This compression and expansion of space as necessary to emphasize certain qualities of the depicted area is an important characteristic of traditional Japanese maps, as is the regular inclusion of text, as text and image were not separated in Japan nearly to the same degree as in the West. Perspective on traditional Japanese maps can also be confusing to the modern Western viewer, as maps were often designed to be viewed from multiple points of view simultaneously, since maps were often viewed on the floor while the viewers sat around the map in a circle.

Accordingly, many maps do not have a unified orientation scheme (such as North as up), with labels sometimes appearing skewed to each other.

The oldest known map in Japan is a topographical drawing discovered on a stone wall inside a tomb in the city of Kurayoshi, in Tottori Prefecture, dated to the 6th century AD. Depicting a landscape of houses, bridges, and roads, it is thought to have been made not for practical navigational purposes, but rather as a kind of celestial cartography given to the dead to maintain a connection with the world of the living and allow them to orient themselves when moving on to the other world. Similar maps have been found in other kofun burial tombs as well.

There is also evidence that at least rudimentary surveying tools were already in use in this era. One of the oldest written references to maps in a Japanese source is found in the Kojiki, the oldest (albeit largely mythological) history of Japan, in which land records are mentioned. The other major ancient history, the Nihon Shoki of 720 AD, describes a map of the ancient city of Naniwa (modern Osaka.

The first map of provincial surveys is thought to be in 738, as described in the Shoku Nihongi. The earliest extant maps in Japan date to the 8th century, and depict the ownership of square rice field plots, oriented to the four cardinal directions. Shinto shrines held maps that they used for agrarian reform, differentiation of property, and land holdings. The system by which these maps were measured was called jōri, measured in units called tan and tsubo.

During the latter half of the 16th century and beyond, traditional Japanese mapmaking became influenced by Western techniques for the first time with the arrival of Dutch and Portuguese knowledge through the trade port of Nagasaki.

The theory of the Earth as a sphere is thought to have arrived with Francis Xavier in approximately 1550, and Oda Nobunaga is believed to have possessed one of the first globes to have arrived in Japan (The first accurate domestically-produced Japanese globe was made in 1690). Japan thus saw full world maps for the first time, changing notions of a Buddhist cosmology matched with physical geography. The first known printed European-style map was made in Nagasaki in 1645, however, the name of the map's creator is unknown. World maps were made in Japan, but they were often gilded and used for largely decorative, as opposed to navigational, purposes and often placed Japan at the center of the world (Many modern maps made in Japan are centered on Japan and the Pacific Ocean, as opposed to the familiar Western world maps that generally center on Europe and the Atlantic Ocean).

Marine charts, used for navigation, made in Japan in the 1600s were quite accurate in depictions of East and Southeast Asia, but became distorted in other parts of the map. Development also continued in traditional styles such as the Gyōki-zu, the improved and more accurate versions of which are know as Jōtoku type maps. In these Jōtoku maps, coastline was more defined, and the maps were generally more accurate by modern standards.

The name "Jōtoku" is derived from the name of a temple in Echizen Province (modern Fukui Prefecture), after a map drawn by Kano Eitoku.