Nobuko Toyosawa: Kaibara Ekiken and the Fudoki: Traveling the Native Land

USC Meiji University Exchange

The Records of the Meiji University-USC Exchange

Since 2008, scholars and graduate students from Meiji University and throughout Southern California have met annually to share research on Premodern Japanese History at the University of Southern California . This is an archive of abstracts, papers, and materials presented at the exchanges.

Kaibara Ekiken and the Fudoki: Traveling the Native Land

by Nobuko Toyosawa
Talk given at the Dec. 8-9, 2010 Conference

This presentation focuses on the scholar and traveler Kaibara Ekiken (1630-1714), who developed a new mode of writing about space and topography, movement across the landscape, and the relationship of places and spaces in the present to moments in the past. I will argue here that Ekiken’s spatial writings reflect his attempt to quantify space while investigating topographic features of the locale, and that his primary concern was to represent Japan in the tradition of regional gazetteer (fudoki) writing rather than introducing famous places (meisho; nadokoro). By writing about the locale based on a variety of official historical texts, Ekiken tapped into a sense of historical continuity rooted in the ancient past while visualizing the spatiality of the realm where he lived.