Abstract
The Rapid Survey Maps, or Jinsoku-sokuzu, were surveyed in the 1880s just as Japan was about to move from the early-modern to modern period, at a critical moment in history for the study of rural land use. The Rapid Survey Maps can be analyzed by GIS, but these maps require much more attention to georeferencing than normal topographic maps because they do not show latitude or latitude and have irregular distortions. This paper describes methods to input and georeference Rapid Surveys Maps in a GIS, and reports results of GIS analysis on land use change in southern Ibaraki Prefecture based on the Rapid Survey Maps. Rural land use in southern Ibaraki Prefecture of the early Meiji period consisted of about 60% woodland and grassland. When compared to a vegetation map of the 1980s, rice paddy had persisted more than other land uses, and grassland had disappeared as a land use depicted on the vegetation map.
