Overview

Enormous amounts of documentation survive from Japan’s Tokugawa period, yet large-scale, multi-year territorial maps have eluded researchers. With few exceptions, the problem is not that this information is unavailable, but rather that the volume and diversity of possible sources is overwhelming. Although comprehensive shogunal surveys of feudal ownership exist for two moments in time—1664 and ca. 1868—maps drawing on this data have not fully rendered Tokugawa Japan’s complex territorial ownership structures. Historians and social scientists thus lack accurate cartographic information about the ways villages appeared, disappeared, merged, and split throughout this period, divided among a changing cast of forty different bannermen and daimyo.

The Digital Atlas of Tokugawa Japan aims to supply precise, reliable information about these shifts. Developed by the Digital Tokugawa Lab, a Yale-based team of researchers led by Professor Fabian Drixler, this collaborative, interdisciplinary project reassembles early modern Japan’s territorial structure from its basic units: the villages. In total, it maps 60,000 villages in Japan’s feudal territories over a span of 270 years.

A neural net recognizes village boundaries on a topographical survey map.

Village centers color-coded by district, 1868.

The Digital Tokugawa Lab’s methods combine close evaluation of archival maps and historical texts with digital techniques such as text mining, natural language processing, neural networks, and geodatabases. Drawing on extensive archives from Tokugawa Japan, the researchers identify each village in space, then track its history through the period. By grouping these individual villages together, the Digital Atlas of Tokugawa Japan recreates the changing shapes of individual domains, bannerman possessions, and religious territories.

The Digital Atlas of Tokugawa Japan is supported by Yale’s Council on East Asian Studies and by an endowment created by the Japan Foundation. For more information about the project, please visit the Digital Tokugawa Lab’s website.