1999 Volume 51 Issue 6 Pages 555-576
After the latter half of the seventeenth century, the Tokugawa government promoted a policy of land development designed to raise agricultural productivity nation-wide. This resulted in a phenomenal increase in boundary disputes in local areas where various classes of peasants claimed their right to the village commons according to the degree of growing demand for land development. During these disputes over peasants' claims to utilization and the division of boundaries in the village commons, both the rulers and the villagers tried to survey and draw maps of the land in terms of their own territorial interest. To this day, a significant number of official and draft maps made from these territorial claims have survived and have contributed to the investigation of indigenous techniques of local land surveying and subsequent map-making among peasant societies in early modern Japan. In most of the traditional villages at the foot of the northern mountains of Osaka Municipal Prefecture, various kinds and sizes of pictorial and surveyed maps as well as surveying notes and related materials have survived.
The main purpose of this paper is to show the close relationship between map-making and indigenous techniques of land surveys adopted in peasant societies at the middle stage of the Tokugawa feudal regime. This is done via an examination of eighteenth century official and draft maps by villagers as well as surveying notes by which indigenous cartographic devices in early modern Japan can be discerned. First, indigenous surveying methods and tools used to measure distance and direction on the mountain slopes with reference to the surveying notes and other documents are discussed. The cartographic devices which project the distance on the slope onto the horizontal second dimension as map-space with certain geometrical transformational rules are also investigated.
The results can be summarised as follows: 1) The indigenous land surveying system in early modern Japan has been traditionally called "mawari-kenchi", or literally "land survey of the boundaries all around the land concerned". "Mawari-kenchi" was carried out in the following manner. First, the rulers and the peasants would measure visible distance from a certain measuring point to the next with measuring ropes. Next, they would establish the direction between them with a compass. After that, they would correct the residual distance left over from surveying the vertical elevation and horizontal distance. Then they would change the scale of distance and area and make a reduced drawing on the basis of the data, and, finally, they would calculate the area of the reduced map.
2) As far as the degree of precision of distance and area delineated on the official maps is concerned, the maps in question are reasonably accurate compared with modern surveyed maps. This tells us that local villagers possessed sophisticated cartographic devices to project the horizontal elevation to the vertical dimension with quite precise transformational rules. The compass they used in land surveying also had the capability of measuring angles to an accuracy of three degrees.
3) Both official and draft maps were classified into four categories according to the grade of the slope, from 0 to 9, 10 to 19, 20 to 29 and more than 29 degrees.
4) "Mawari-kenchi", which used indigenous cartographic devices of considerable precision both in land surveying and in map-making, was gradually adopted nation-wide to meet the growing demands for territorial claims and boundary disputes from around the mid-eighteenth century.
