1
Geography in history and history
in geography
Fujita Hirotsugu, translated by David Eason
Historical geography is an area of study likely to be unfamiliar to many readers. As the name
suggests, this field focuses on the relationship between geographic and historical phenomena.
While it scarcely seems necessary to elaborate at length upon the simple correspondence of either
geography with space or history with time, switching those pairings—pondering the relation-
ship of geography to time or history to space—significantly changes our perspective.
The march of time is an inherently dispassionate process, whereas history is formed from the
particular impressions of individuals. It is, for example, an immutable law of nature that, in
the span of a single minute, a given object will free- fall a fixed distance, regardless of its mass. On
the other hand, in the course of these same sixty seconds, events of major import may occur or,
depending on the people and places involved, the interval may flit by without anyone taking
notice. It is this latter passage of time inexorably tied to the idiosyncrasies of human experience
and perception that is expressed as “history.”
Furthermore, in the same way that history stands in stark relief to the disinterested march of
time, so too do the terms “geography,” “region,” and “landscape” each emphasize the particu-
larities of place in opposition to that otherwise amorphous conceptual container known as
“space.” Indeed, it can be said that the academic study of geography serves to problematize pre-
cisely this point—in truth geography is a rather odd character among the academic disciplines.
At the same time, however, historical geography serves as the field of inquiry in which historical
phenomena are subjected to geographic scrutiny.
In the field of historical geography, the flow of time receives top billing, while space is rele-
gated to an ancillary development. Perhaps the most fitting concepts in geography with which to
represent space are either “region” or “landscape,” although in historical geography “landscape”
is by far the more important term. Nevertheless, historical geography is, in the final analysis, a
branch of the larger field of geography. And as a key term in geographical studies, “landscape” is
defined as “any portion of a larger surface that, as a unit of space bearing distinctive properties
borne from its relative position, can be distinguished and separated out from the unshared char-
acteristics of its surroundings.”^1
Landscapes of this sort, or rather composed of these features, are diverse and range from land-
forms and other natural phenomena to quintessentially human elements like buildings. In the
field of geography, the distribution of such objects is represented on maps, from which further