sfhelper: Repair Functions for 'sf' Package Objects

2025-01-15

A group of functions that support the 'sf' package, focused primarily on repairing polygons that break when re-projected.

Who Was Sovereign in Early Modern Japan?

2024-09-11

Preface

Columbia University Press eBooks · 2023

• Computer Science
• Computer Science

Algorithmic Maps and the Political Geography of Early-modern Japan

Journal of Cultural Analytics · 2023 · 2 citations

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Computer Science

Many of our conventional mapping practices are ill-suited to the complexities and nuances of pre-modern politics, especially in the non-Western world. Choropleth maps suggest that political borders are clear and uniform, but early modern politics was characterized by ill-defined and overlapping political spheres. This study uses interactive maps to explore the case of composite state borders in early modern Japan. Using points, rather than polygons, to represent villages, we reproduce how Tokugawa-era officials understood political space primarily as population nodes, not as clearly defined polygons. In lieu of conventional borders, we calculate Voronoi polygons to show where political authority was spatially fragmented. Using logit analysis we show that increased spatial contiguity allowed lords (daimyo) to establish monopolies and tax their holdings more intensively. Other factors, such as the lord’s rank, figure prominently in the historiography, but can not be substantiated in our analysis.

The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age, written by Hoyt Long

East Asian Publishing and Society · 2023

• Linguistics
• Philosophy

Replication Data for: Algorithmic Maps and the Political Geography of Early-modern Japan

Harvard Dataverse · 2023-08-17

File descriptions: Village_level_calculations.R — calculates village-level metrics Parcels_sample.txt — random sample of 37,295 parcels from 25,000 unique locations, a random sample of a complete data set of 65,201 unique locations Shikoku_Voronoi_map.R — code to generate Voronoi map “Figure_11_Interactive_map_of_Iyo.html” Shikoku_Voronoi_data.txt — data for Shikoku_Voronoi_map.R gadm40_JPN_shp — folder os shapefiles for Shikoku_Voronoi_map.R Domain_Simpson_complete.txt — complete domain-level data for logit calculations, based on all 65,201 locations and 97,553 parcels.

The Meiji Restoration

Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-11-23

Considered in a global context, the Meiji Restoration was a nationalist, bourgeoise revolution. At the heart of many Meiji reforms was the creation of a new national identity. The Meiji government abolished hereditary status distinctions, replaced regional institutions with a powerful central administration, and promoted the cultural and political unity of the Japanese people. The government also advanced the core institutions and mechanisms of capitalism: the alienation and partibility of land, tax collection in cash rather than kind, stock markets, bond markets, and public banking. The Meiji Restoration also needs to be considered in the context of imperialism. The Meiji leadership confronted an international order bifurcated between an elite tier of nation-states with colonial holdings and a subordinate class of subjugated colonial possessions. That context made imperialism a logical component of the Meiji state-building project. As a nascent world power, Japan required its own colonial empire.

The Meiji Restoration and The Long Nineteenth Century

2021-11-10

This chapter provides a slightly contrarian fashion, not with a thesis statement, but with a brief point-of-fact outline of key Meiji Restoration reforms. The Restoration dissolved the hereditary power of regional lords to create a powerful, centralized state. The scattered, regional institutions of the old nobility were replaced by a single national army, navy, and treasury. Benedict Anderson famously captured the essential similarities between rival nationalist movements with his phrase “modular” nationalism. The transnational aspect of nationalism helps explain one of the stranger aspects of the Meiji Restoration. The Restoration was part of a process wherein new nation-states smashed old empires and built new ones. The creation of a new Meiji Japan was part of that global process.

IHS Talk – “Rethinking Borders in a Digital Age” by Mark Ravina, University of Texas at Austin

2021-02-19

Imaginative Mapping: Landscape and Japanese Identity in the Tokugawa and Meiji Eras by Nobuko Toyosawa

Journal of Japanese Studies · 2021-01-01

Reviewed by: Imaginative Mapping: Landscape and Japanese Identity in the Tokugawa and Meiji Eras by Nobuko Toyosawa Mark Ravina (bio) Imaginative Mapping: Landscape and Japanese Identity in the Tokugawa and Meiji Eras. By Nobuko Toyosawa. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge MA, 2019. xvi, 305 pages. $60.00. This ambitious study is, by turns, intriguing, enlightening, and frustrating. The overall topic is diffuse. While the title suggests a focus on maps, only some of the chapters confront maps in the conventional sense. Rather, the unifying thread is the importance of landscape to a diverse range of Japanese authors, most notably Kaibara Ekiken (1630–1714), Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843), Miyake Setsurei (1860–1945), and Shiga Shigetaka (1863–1927). All of these authors invoked the Japanese landscape to naturalize Japanese cultural or national identity. Toyosawa's insight lies in finding that common thread in a diverse group of thinkers, none of whom is associated primarily with landscape, maps, or topography. Kaibara, for example, is commonly described as a Neo-Confucian (ZhuXi) popularizer and Hirata as a nativist (kokugakusha). Miyake and Shiga, by contrast, were modern nationalists with a cosmopolitan bent, perhaps best known as contributors to the influential journal Nihonjin. Toyosawa skillfully shows how all four celebrated the distinctiveness of the Japanese land, albeit in radically different contexts. For Kaibara and Hirata, the primary "other" was China, and the task was to situate Japan as a "land of the gods" within classical Chinese and Japanese scholarly discourse. For Miyake and Shiga, by contrast, the "other" was Western imperialism and the question was whether Japanese empire building was a distinct project or merely an improved variant of Western imperialism. Was Japan the "Britain of the East" or a unique empire? In her reading of Tokugawa intellectual history, Toyosawa shows how the idea of Japan as shinkoku ("divine land" or "land of the gods") was endorsed by a range of philosophical schools. Kaibara, for example, explored how the gods inhabited key sites and how their presence could be felt by an attuned traveler. In the gazetteer Zoku fudoki he wrote that mountains inhabited by "guardian gods" were "essentially different from other mountains." The presence of the gods could be felt in the majesty of the view and glories of nature: "Truly this place makes one feel absolutely amazed … this place presents other beautiful sights throughout the four seasons, and the striking changes that the mountain experiences seasonally are beyond description" (pp. 78–79). The beauty of the landscape was thus aesthetic and sensory evidence of the shinkoku. In his travel guide Keijo shoran (Excellent views of Kyoto), Ekiken fused Confucian metaphysics with local [End Page 511] history to guide readers through a landscape full of deities and spiritual forces. The area around Shimogamo Shrine, for example, was "an extraordinarily spiritual land, where truly divine ki energies gather" (pp. 140–41). Toyosawa convincingly shows how the circuitous route through Kyoto prescribed by Ekiken was informed by the need to combat dangerous spirits and omens. The "land of the gods" trope was more than an aesthetic conceit, but rather a principle guiding the practice of travel. Toyosawa's chapter on Hirata Atsutane enhances our understanding of how Hirata radically transformed Motoori Norinaga's interpretations of Japanese kami. There is a rich English-language bibliography on Hirata's wild eclecticism, including his surreptitious borrowing from Christian sources. To this research Toyosawa adds an exploration of Hirata's Kishin shinron, a relatively neglected text in the Hirata corpus but key to understanding his fascination with the afterlife and the supernatural. As the title suggests, Hirata's Kishin shinron built on the Confucian understanding of kishin (spirits), in particular Arai Hakuseki's Kishinron. Hirata interpreted classical Chinese texts as garbled accounts of Japanese creation deities (musubi no kami) and asserted that Japanese kami and kishin were the same—but that the greater clarity of Japanese records revealed that Japanese learning was superior to Chinese learning. Hirata continued this eclecticism in Tama no mihashira, where he explicitly challenged Motoori's bleak assertation that all beings are condemned to an afterlife in yomi, a polluted underworld. Instead, Hirata asserted a tripartite universe comprised of earth, heaven, and a netherworld. Toyosawa provides a...