Japanese Maps : Tōkaidō bunken ezu

Japanese Maps

<p style='text-align: justify;'> Volume 4 of the 5-volume map of the Tōkaidō highway by the cartographer Ochikochi Dōin and by the painter Hishikawa Moronobu. Volumes 1-3 and 5 are missing. In Japanese. The Tōkaidō connected Edo (Tokyo), Kyoto and Osaka. The map is a woodblock-printed dōchūzu, or "on-the-road-map", and reproduces its 486 kilometres in roughly 36 metres, on a scale of 1:12,000. It is accordion folded, hand-coloured, with 27 openings, and with cover attached. It is one of the most popular representations of the Tōkaidō of its time. It was based on an official, administrative map by Hōjō Ujinaga, made in 1651, but was, itself, probably intended as a tool for virtual travel, rather than for practical purposes. It's heavily pictorial, with some elements of a guidebook. It follows the 52 post-stations of the Tōkaidō, shows distance markers, stone guideposts and checkpoints, and richly depicts life on the road, reproducing a number of famous landscapes. </p><p style='text-align: justify;'> The map was first drawn in Genroku 3 (1690), but this copy is a later reprint. The colophon would normally be in the fifth volume, and therefore this copy lacks one. The mounted cover label reports the title "Tōkaidō bunken ezu". The alternative title "Tōkaidō bunken no zu" would normally appear in the first volume, at the beginning of the map. Cover description: dark blue paper, flexible cover board; in the front, mounted cover title, in Japanese, text black on white labels (one with Library's call no.: Japanese 211); in the back, mounted bookplate of Biblioteca Lindesiana (at the base of the bookplate in pencil is the notation: "17/D"). </p>


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