Geography in history and history in geographyand the only example of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s countrywide cadastral surveys for which the
results from an entire province survive. Building on this, Kobayashi next moved backward in
time to examine the fourteenth century and the marketplace at Niimi Estate in Bitchū province
(modern Okayama prefecture), calling attention to the division of the land into plots resembling
strips of paper, and reconstructing the landscape of the estate’s commercial center.^25
Yamamura Aki took up this tradition of emphasizing land allotment patterns revealed in
cadastral maps produced at the start of the modern period. Her central methodology consists of
creating distribution maps for each of multiple successive periods, and then comparing them. In
this manner she has taken up such topics as the location of the Kamakura shogunate’s offices, the
evolution of the provincial capital of Bungo from provincial capital to castle town under the
Ōtomo sengoku daimyo house, and the provincial capital of Nagatō, a minor early modern castle
town under the Mōri house. She has also enthusiastically researched the distribution of temples
and shrines, although some of this work has been criticized by mainstream historians for its inev-
itable inclusion of folkloric traditions in the mix.^26
It is, I think, essential to scrutinize the discussions of maps constructed in the modern era in a
positive fashion, but also to bear in mind that these maps express the perceptions of the era in
which they were produced—and in particular of the political leaders who produced them. We
must continue to develop new methodologies for reading and interpreting them. The application
of the new movement centering on historical geographic study of shōen maps discussed above to
the study of cities is a product of just such an effort.
The study of temple towns (jinai machi) constitutes another important area of research in
historical geography. The principal players here are Mizuta Yoshikazu, Kanai Toshi, and Amano
Tarō.^27 My own work takes up Kobayashi’s topic of cities and towns and, following in the tradi-
tion of reconstructing landscapes from cadastral maps, examines circulation, distribution, and the
market system that formed the backdrop to the landscape of medieval urban centers. I have also
added to the studies by sounding a warning concerning the problematic nature of using early
modern cadastral maps to research the landscapes of medieval cities and towns.^28
To wrap up my survey of scholarship on cities, I would like to raise two additional points
concerning the influence of related disciplines on historical geography. The first is the historian
Amino Yoshihiko’s work on medieval cities, which centers on the keyword muen (“unconnect-
edness” or “non- connectedness”).^29 In Amino’s view, medieval cities, and the marketplaces from
which they arose, represented “unconnected spaces,” independent of proprietorial overlords.
Residents of these spaces, he maintained, embraced their “unconnectedness”; enjoyed special
rights to travel freely between domains, free of tax impositions by local powers; and engaged in
trade, representing one manifestation of what Amino called “non- agricultural peoples”
(hinōgyōmin), in what he referred to as “urban areas” (toshiteki na ba).^30
The second work from related disciplines that I want to highlight is architectural historian Itō
Takeshi’s “temple grounds and towns” (kedai to machi) theory, which calls attention to the special
character of these kinds of spaces. The grounds and compounds of shrines and temples, Itō con-
tends, were planar amalgamations, extending outward in spirals from a single nucleus. Towns,
by contrast, were linear amalgamations organized along roads and other axes.^31
Finally, I would like to make two points concerning recent trends in the historical geography
of the medieval era. First, interdisciplinary cooperation with neighboring fields like document-
based historical studies and archeology has advanced tremendously in recent years. Second, and
closely related to this first point, analysis of cadastral maps is by no means a methodology exclu-
sive to historical geography. Quite the contrary, medieval historians and archeologists are also
developing this sort of study. Indeed, returning to the topic I raised in the first section of this
chapter, I would argue that the special feature of historical geography is its place in the current of