Space Scan

Want to find out what Japan was exactly like at the end of the Edo period (1603-1868)? You will find it in the country’s capital. Yes, a copy of an old British map used as a model to produce Japan’s first modern world map during the period has been found in Tokyo. The copy was made by British cartographer Aaron Arrowsmith in 1800. It is a copperplate print about 1.3 meters by 2 meters. The map is believed to have been involved in an incident in 1828, in which German physician Philip Franz von Siebold (1796-1866) tried to smuggle Japanese maps out of Japan, which was forbidden at the time. Though, it has not been proved until now, the map was said to have been based on Arrowsmith’s map and named the Revised Chart of the World. the first modern world map in Japan was completed in 1810 by Takahashi Kageyasu, the Edo shogunate government’s director general of astronomy and the government’s library.



Via: Yomiuri