On My Research
YOSHIDA, Toshihiro
My research activity in Historical Geography, focusing to rural landscape and community in Medieval Japan, consists of the following three themes.
1, the changing process and
its mechanism of rural landscape in Medieval Japan
The traditional rural landscape in Japan have been pointed out to be formed through the political or social change in Medieval period (13th~16th century), but the process and the mechanism of those landscape change have not been cleared out enough. Our knowledge in the landscape of medieval village are so fragmented, in spite of the presentation of some ideal types, for example, (a) the “hamlet=farmstead settlement” theory (by Keiji Nagahara, 1962) or, (b) the “Verdorfung” theory (transforming process from the scattered settlement pattern to the agglomerated settlement pattern) in central Japan (by Akihiro Kinda, 1972).
I have made some case studies, and have pointed out the following notions:
(a) In the case of Iriki-in, Satsuma-no-kuni, the proto-type of the medieval settlement (or village community) in the peripheral or mountainous region, is “hamlet=farmstead settlement”, which was scattered in the river terrace or the high land, and each of those small settlement was combined, not to paddy fields, but to wide dry fields, which was the most important means of agricultural reproduction.
(b) It can be inferred that the agriculture of Medieval Japan had some element derived from the tradition of shifting agriculture in East Asia, and was on the stage of succession from shifting to fixed paddy field, from millet to rice agriculture. And on the earlier stage of agricultural society, the rural community was formed by the moment of utilizing right of the common, where the temporal field was held.
(c) In reconstructing the mechanism of agrarian change in medieval Japan, the factor of population growth must be taken into consideration, not only as the cause of the expansion of settlement, but also as the moment promoting the improvement of agricultural technology, which was suggested by Ester Boserup (1962). Japanese “Verdorfung” was the phenomenon that was realized only where the population density and the intensity of agriculture had both reached the highest level.
2, methodology of Cartology
from the viewpoint of reading picture maps
From 1980’s, the study of imagined world of the past (H. Prince, 1970), or the spatial cognition in the context of humanistic geography (YI-FU TUAN, 1977), has been developed in Anglo-Saxon historical geography.
Picture maps in pre-modern society, with many sort of distortion in figure or the other geographical information, are also the typical objects for the analysis of spatial cognition in the society, which made and accepted the maps, but former studies in picture maps were likely to remove those distortions as noises, and overlook the presentation of spatial cognition of the mapmaker or the society within those distortion.
First, we must construct the methodology for the reading picture maps, as a whole, before starting to analyze spatial cognition.
In 1986 we, historical geographers, historian, and antholopologists, organized the Katsuragawa Ezu Kenkyukai (Research Group of reading the Katsuragawa Picture Maps), and have discussed several methodological problems through the case study of Katsuragawa picture maps. The results of these research group activities were published in two volumes of “Cosmology of Picture Maps” in 1988/89. Methodology presented in this book, is based on the theory of semantics, iconology, and hermeneutics, and my contribution mainly focused to the representation system of space, especially in reference to non-perspective system of spatial representation in pre-modern iconography in Eastern Europe (B. Uspenski), and discussed the “projection” of picture maps (viewpoint and the direction of eye line of the mapmaker).
3, imagined landscape of
medieval manor
There remain about 40 pieces of medieval manor map in Japan, and these are the masterpieces by professional painter of Japanese picture (Yamato-e). These are important evidences of the landscape of medieval manor, but the landscape described in the picture map, is not always real, which contains no small distortion, emphasis, abbreviation, and transfiguration, etc. For the reconstruction of landscape of the manor, that distortion may be the noise, which are to be deleted, but some model of imagined landscape of the manor can be cleared out through analysis of these distortions.
I have presented some introductive essays in classification, methodology, and the topics of manor maps, and also some case studies. In 1997 we published “Collection of the Pictorial Maps of Japanese Medieval Manor” (4 volumes including CD-ROM, and large facsimiles of those maps), of which I participated as one of the editors/authors, contributing to popularization of manor maps as historico-geographical evidence.
The most important result of manor maps
studies of mine is in Siisi-Bouji-ezu and the imagined boundary of the
ancient/medieval regions including manors. The summary is in another file.