This paper investigates the geographical thoughts and practices of Takeshi Kawada, a figure almost unknown among present Japanese geographers, by situating them in the various spaces of knowledge in which he lived and worked. The author, while approving "critical history", which examines the relationships between nationalism and geography, would rather present a chain of "small stories" associated with the particularities of the spaces of knowledge than conform to the "grand narrative" of modern nationalism.
Takeshi Kawada was born in 1842 as the fourth son of Tekisai Kawada, a Confucian scholar. Takeshi developed his own Confucian scholarship in such spaces of knowledge as
Rinkejuku, the private Confucian academy of the Hayashi family, and
Shoheizaka Gakumonjo, the official academy of the Tokugawa Shogunate. His career as a functionary of
Gaikokugata, the foreign department of the later Tokugawa Shogunate, urged him to reconsider the Japanese governance system, which potentially led him to recognize the urgent necessity to collect detailed data about the whole of the Japanese territory. It was, however, Kawada's contingent encounter with Akikata Tsukamoto at Shizuoka Academy, which had been established by the Tokugawa family and at which Kawada taught Chinese learning, that determined his involvement in the Meiji Government's project to compile regional geographies. At that time, Tsukamoto held the position of the head of the Numazu Military Academy that the Tokugawa family had also established.
Kawada engaged himself in compiling regional geographies and mapmaking at the Department of Topography of the Council of State and later at the Geographical Bureau of the Home Ministry. At the same time, he elaborated his own views on regional geography through re-search presentations and publications at the Tokyo Geographical Society, founded in 1879, and through contact at the Ministry of Education with Bunjiro Koto, a geology professor at the College of Science of the Imperial University. Kawada applied the word
tairei, a concept meaning the chorographic framework itself, and originating from the Ching school of topography, to his own framework presumably resulting from the German concept "länderkundliches Schema". On the other hand, he had been influenced by
kosho shigaku, or an empirical historiography, advocated by Yasutsugu Shigeno, one of the pioneers of modern Japanese historiography. Kawada's short-term affiliation with the Historiographical and Topographical Institute of the College of Humanities of the Imperial University, of which Shigeno was the head, allowed him to join
Shigakukai, the first Japanese academic society for historical studies. A certain kind of geographical imagination pervaded
Shigakukai under the supervision of Ludwig Riess, a German historian employed by the Meiji Government. The sudden discontinuation of the governmental project for compiling regional geographies prompted Kawada's inclination towards empirical research on historical geography. The geographical imagination of
Shigakukai brought about the establishment of a new academic society devoted to historical geography in 1899 (
Nihon Rekishi Chiri Kenkyukai, later Nihon Rekishi Chiri Gakkai), to which Kawada gradually shifted his academic allegiance. Although Kawada insisted on the importance of geography as the setting for historical events, he also had a form of probabilistic thinking in which environmental factors were not to be exaggerated. However, his former commitment to state interests and his concern with contemporary issues led him to practice historico-geographical research sympathetic to the Tennoist ideology of the day.
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