Portraits of the West: Representations of California in Nineteenth-Century Japan
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Japan saw many changes in the 1800s, one of which was an increase of knowledge about the West. After more than two hundred years of restricting the information that came into Japan from foreign lands, the Japanese state began to actively study Western countries in order to learn from them; the goal was for Japan to become a modern nation like those in the West, which were the most powerful in the world at the time. This thesis will look into the types and amount of knowledge available in Japan during the nineteenth century regarding one specific region of the West – California. It will study maps, travelers’ accounts, and geography textbooks that were available to Japanese during the 1800s in order to examine the development of knowledge regarding California in Japan. This thesis will address the following questions: What sort of image of California did Japanese people hold during the 1800s? How did perceptions change as the nineteenth century progressed and more accurate information about California and the West entered Japan? Depictions of California found in late Edo and early Meiji maps, travelers’ accounts, and geography textbooks ultimately portrayed a land of wealth and success by the end of the nineteenth century.
Description
Type of resource | text |
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Date created | August 2018 |
Creators/Contributors
Author | Hioki, Tami | |
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Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Stanford Global Studies, Center for East Asian Studies | |
Primary advisor | Wigen, Kären |
Subjects
Subject | Stanford Global Studies |
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Subject | East Asian Studies |
Subject | Japan |
Subject | California |
Subject | San Francisco |
Subject | Japanese maps |
Subject | Castaways |
Subject | Iwakura Mission |
Subject | Japanese geography textbooks |
Subject | Japanese perceptions of the West |
Subject | Interactions between Japan and the West |
Subject | Japanese travelers to America |
Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Hioki, Tami. (2018). Portraits of the West: Representations of California in Nineteenth-Century Japan. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/yk207hc7556
Collection
Stanford Center for East Asian Studies Thesis Collection
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- Contact
- tami.hioki@aya.yale.edu
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