Post by washi on Aug 19, 2016 7:56:15 GMT
1912 was the first year of the mercifully short reign of the Emperor Taishō. It was the year Japan presented the U.S. with the cherry trees that adorn the national mall. And it was also the year the Tsutenkaku ("Reaching to Heaven Tower"), one of Osaka's most famous landmarks, was constructed.
The tower is pictured in the print above, along with an outsized rendering of the pagoda at Shitennōji temple. I don't know the date of the image, only that it is sometime after 1912 and before 1943, when the first version of the tower was destroyed. (It was rebuilt in 1956, and remains a popular attraction, with long lines of people waiting to go to the top, although in my mind there are much better ways to get a view of the city, and the tower itself is rather ugly, as befits a city that is in many ways the Chicago of Japan.)
But all of this is beside the point. This post is not about the Tsutenkaku, but rather it is a series of 6 maps made in the same year (or about the same time). I selected this old print merely because I wanted to suggest a feel for the age of these maps, but the tower, in fact, isn't shown.
These maps were given to me by Toshiaki Kaya, a teacher at Seiyū High School, where I worked for several years. He also gave me a copy of a paper he had published on Naka Jimbei and the Rerouting of the Yamato River in 1704 (which was the beginning of my interest in the topic I eventually posted on the GEC). I don't know where he got the maps, and much as I'd like to contact him and ask where I could get more, the school closed the year after I left. (You probably think they couldn't make a go of it without me, but it was really because of the drop in the high school age population.)
I've recently discovered some obviously old roads, which caused me to dig out the maps to see if I could tell were these roads were going from and to. I could understand a lot, but knew they would make more sense if I could overlay them in Google Earth. The fact that my copies were on A3 (297 x 420 mm) was still a frustration, because I'd previously been unable to locate a business where I could use an oversized scanner bed. I eventually located 3 Kinkos shops in downtown Osaka, but fortunately also discovered that most convenience markets (including those in my neighborhood) now have machines that will do the job for just 30 yen a scan and deliver it right to my USB thumb drive.
There are 6 maps overlaid in this folder. They are very high resolution images (because there would be no point if they were too blurry to read). Remember, if you're reading, that horizontally written Japanese at the time goes from right to left. Because the image files are so big, I recommend that you enable them one at a time, to avoid a long wait while the whole folder loads. Even if you don't try to read the labels, I think you may be impressed, as I am, with just how much of this now densely populated urban area was open countryside a scant century before. Perhaps you will also share my assumption that most of the roads and villages shown on the map had been at that location many centuries before 1912.
Remember that you will need to disable (click off) 3D Buildings in the Layers to view the overlaid maps.
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