It was made up of Neo-Confucian intellectuals, Dutch Studies scholars, and Buddhist monks. What that conclusion did not consider was the parallel system of knowledge that was evolving inside Japan. That conclusion was based on a teleological concept of scientific knowledge spreading from Europe outwards. In 1983, for example, Jacobs concluded her thesis on world maps in the UBC collections with the bleak conclusion that Dutch world maps did not have as large an influence in Japan as would be expected. This is true also in the study of the history of Japanese maps. This is because the study of maps in history has often been undertaken by historians of science or by geographers concerned with advances in topographic accuracy. But they are often dismissed as unimportant. Maps of the past also constitute rich sources for understanding the history of thinking about space. They are however accurate in their portrayal of thought patterns. Such maps are not concerned with accuracy in the sense of corresponding to scientific data about the earth’s surface. The sheer variety of the world maps included in that study reveal that our perception of the earth’s surface is at the same time subjective and shaped by the historical and cultural context. This is due to historical and cultural factors that include the adoption of the Greenwich-centred world map as standard in 1884 at the height of the British Empire. However, when in the 1980s the Parochial Views of the World study analysed thousands of maps of the world drawn by first-year geography students in universities across the world, it found that 79% of the maps were Eurocentric. Given the propensity of humans to centre their spatial knowledge on their immediate surroundings, this should result in an equal distribution of world maps centred on the place of origin of their authors. Click here to visit UBC’s digital collection of Japanese maps of the Tokugawa era.Ī bi-dimensional map is necessarily an imperfect approximation of the three-dimensional shape of the globe, and so a world map centred on Europe is equally ‘valid’ as one centred on Asia.
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