1882 Umehara Plan of Sendai, Japan, w/ Illustrated Vignettes

This is Umehara Eizō's rare 1884 (Meiji 17) folding city plan or map of Sendai, Japan, surrounded by lovely vignette illustrations.

A Closer Look

This map is oriented to the west, with north to the lower right, as a compass at bottom-left indicates. Streets, public institutions, and cultivated land are denoted throughout. Hills surrounding the city, especially at right, are demonstrated with hachures. At bottom-right is a legend, which notes streets, temples and shrines (寺社, marked with a torii gate or a circle with an 'x' through it, respectively), public lands (官用地), police stations (警察屯所), and schools (小學校), among topographic features. At bottom are several tables and indexes including two tables of distances (one within the city and one between Sendai and other cities such as Tokyo and Kyoto), a population table, and lists of public lands and institutions, temples and shrines, schools, hospitals, factories, and banks in the city. A note at top-right discusses the origins and flow of the Hirose River (廣瀨川), which abuts the city at top and is closely identified with it. Many of the large, modern institutions of the state are located along the city's periphery, such as the military training grounds and barracks (操練場 and 步兵營) at bottom-left, and the prison at left (with the prison controlling additional lands near the military grounds). That being said, a group of modern buildings sits near the center of the city, with military hospitals, other military facilities, and administrative buildings. The intricate vignette illustrations surrounding the map include a variety of structures, some ancient (temples and shrines especially) but mostly modern (including the city's police headquarters 警察署, municipal and prefectural courts 裁判所, and main prison 集治監).

Meiji Era Sendai

As Japan's northernmost large city at the time of the Meiji Restoration (home to a little over 50,000 people), Sendai, and more specifically, its ruling Date clan, was not inclined to support the southern-led rebellion and aligned with the outgoing Tokugawa regime in the Boshin War (1868 - 1869). As a result, the city was occupied by a sizable garrison, as evidenced by the large number of military facilities. Sendai also saw the population and economic growth common to other Japanese cities at the time, as well as increasing influences from abroad. In 1882, the city built an early tracked mode of transportation, initially pulled by men and then horses (horsecar), to connect with nearby Gamou on the coast, one of the earliest instances of such technology in Japan. Three years after this map's publication, in 1887, the railway would reach Sendai, providing a connection with Tokyo. Afterwards, the city's commercial aspect increased, and in the following decades it became a center for learning, science, and medicine with the establishment of Tohoku University in 1907, only the third imperial university after Tokyo and Kyoto Universities.

Publication History and Census

This map was prepared by Umehara Eizō (梅原榮造) and published in 1884 (Meiji 17) by Takahashi Tōshichi (高橋藤七); both are marked as 'commoners' (平民), a relic of Japan's recent feudal past. It is cataloged among the holdings of the University of California Berkeley, the National Diet Library, and the National Institute of Japanese Literature. A later 1892 (Meiji 25) edition, attributed to Aizawa Eikichi (相澤榮吉) rather than Umehara and changing the layout of the images and information surrounding the map somewhat, is held by Stanford University.