Mapping the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo
This video employs a map of Edo City (modern-day Tokyo) published in 1843 to indicate the geographic location of prints in Hiroshige’s series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1856–59). As was the tradition in early modern and pre-modern Japanese cartography, this map is oriented to the west, so it would need to rotate 90 degrees counterclockwise to correspond to contemporary maps of the area. Major landmarks evident here include Edo Castle (at the center of the map), Edo Bay (in the lower left quadrant), and Sumida River (which winds from the center of the right margin down into Edo Bay).