Shinkoku fukui butoku anmin, Okatame taihei kagami : Izu, Sagami, Musashi, Awa, Kazusa, Shimōsa
Japanese Map of Tokyo Bay in 1852 |
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| Date: | 1852 |
| Author: | Unknown |
| Dwnld: | Full Size (15.71mb) |
| Source: | Library of Congress |
| Print Availability: | |
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| See our Prints Page for more details | |
This map isn't part of any series, but we have other maps of Tokyo that you might want to check out.
Got no context for this one. I'm sorry. The language barrier is only one of my hinderances.
If anybody wants to chime in, I'd be thankful for any info you can provide.
No definites here, but I’ll give this a go anyway.
From the placement of 伊豆国 (Izukuni), it looks like this is probably a map of what is considered both modern-day Tokyo and Shizuoka — near the bottom of the map is where the city known as 伊豆の国 (Izu-no-kuni) is located today. The handful of small islands now belong to Tokyo prefecture, which gives you a rough idea of where the dividing line is.
1852 marked the tail end of the Japanese isolation period (鎖国) so this is probably a map that was designed to show how the Japanese ships were keeping the foreigners (the big ship in the upper right-hand corner) out of Japan. You can see 駿河 (Suruga) at the very bottom, which was also part of the Izu peninsula.
The characters inside the little red ovals most likely indicate family clans that lived in the area, with the bigger residences indicating where the protector/leader of the area lived — you’ll see that the family crests on each of the larger buildings is listed at the bottom as well. The lines of characters that often end in 守 indicate what the greater area was called, think something like a city. The page affixed at the bottom indicates which samurai were responsible for defending each of those citylike areas.
神國 (Shinkoku) was not a name as Ingrid pointed out above — it translates roughly as “country of the gods” and is an old name for Japan, indicating that this is indeed, a map of a part of Japan that was drawn to show how exactly they were protecting this region.
Hope this sheds a bit of light!
Inside the blue circle you just have 北 kita = north / 東 higashi = east / 南 minami = south / 西 nishi = west. The next four characters indicate northwest, inui or ken = 乾 / southwest, hitsujisaru or kon = 坤 / southeast, tatsumi or son = 巽 / northeast, ushitora or gon = 艮 … though they don’t seem to be common (anymore?) or are perhaps specific to mapmaking. And then I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the next circle is south-southwest, etc. So as for the creator…
Top right on the red we’ve got what could be names of something. 神國 is Kamikuni. This could be a surname. I can only figure out the first character of what might be the first name 伏. And then if I’ve got these right they are 武徳安月… dunno what they mean.
The big characters in the red could be 御固泰王鑑 or maybe 御固泰年鑑 … not sure.
Good luck!