Contending that Japan's industrial and imperial revolutions were also geographical revolutions, Karen Wigen's interdisciplinary study analyzes the changing spatial order of the countryside in early modern Japan. Her focus, the Ina Valley, served as a gateway to the mountainous interior of central Ja[...]

Karen Wigen probes regional cartography, choerography, and statecraft to redefine restoration (ishin) in modern Japanese history. As developed here, that term designates not the quick coup d'etat of 1868 but a three-centuries-long project of rehabilitating an ancient map for modern purposes. Drawing[...]