Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019, disease maps have attracted a lot of public attention. Nevertheless, thematic maps have been rather neglected in the history of cartography as pointed by Robinson (1982). Koch (2011, 2017) has traced the history of disease maps in Western countries, but little is known about their history in Japan. This study addressed this gap by tracing the development of disease mapping in modern Japan in comparison to its history in Western countries. Documents pertaining to an outbreak of cholera in Meiji era indicated that the first disease map of Japan was published in 1879, after the development of Japanese health statistics.
However, since the topographic map of the country was incomplete at that time, the base map was not accurate. In 1885, a disease map of Japan was published using choropleth map based on a surveymap. Concerning large-scale map within the city, a dot map of cholera cases of central Tokyo was developed in 1896. The Taisho era saw an uprise in the publication of a wide range of disease maps that presented distributions of infectious agents or prevention measures for epidemics. Thus, disease maps in modern Japan were developed a little later than those in Western countries, paralleling the development of health statistics and survey maps.
