1936 Petruccelli and Harrison Map of Asia and the Japanese Empire

An ominous look at Japan's expansionism during the 1930s.

This is a 1936 Antonio Petruccelli and Richard Edes Harrison map of the world highlighting the advance of the Japanese Empire in the Pacific. Depicting from Calcutta to San Francisco and from Alaska to Australia, Petruccelli and Harrison paint Japan and Korea (then occupied by the Japanese) deep red. Petruccelli and Harrison then use red to indicate areas of land and sea military advance, along with areas of increased economic activity and control. The Japanese established the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932, after invading northeastern China. Within a year of this map's publication, Imperial Japan would launch the Second Sino-Japanese War, which would expand into the Pacific War with the United States after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Red arrows emphasize Japan's advance through Manchukuo into northern China, while designs that look like ship's wakes, spread in every direction from Japan and overtake Formosa, the Marianas Islands, Caroline, Islands, and Marshall Islands, among others. No country in the region is immune from an increase in Japanese economic influence, as is evident by the starburst patterns along their coastlines. Bar graphs in the lower right corner visually present this 'yen imperialism', as it is referred to here. Petruccelli and Harrison make Japan's economic and expansionist ambitions immediately apparent, and it likely created feelings of foreboding in its viewers when it was published.

Publication History and Census

This map was created by Antonio Petruccelli and Richard Edes Harrison in 1936. It is uncatalogued in OCLC.

Cartographers

Antonio Petruccelli (1907-1994) began his career as a textile designer. Petruccelli became a freelance illustrator in 1932 after winning several House Beautiful cover illustration contests. His work eventually appeared on the covers of Fortune, The New Yorker, Collier’s Today and House Beautiful magazines. ‘Tony was Mr. Versatility for Fortune. He could do anything, from charts and diagrams to maps, illustrations, covers, and caricatures,’ said Francis Brennan, the art director for Fortune. Over the course of his career, Petruccelli won several important design awards. Antonio Petruccelli died at age 87 on November 11, 1994.   Further Details...

Richard Edes Harrison (March 11, 1901 - January 5, 1994) was an American cartographer, scientific illustrator, and designer based in New York City, active principally from the 1930s through the 1970s. His journalistic maps combined unconventional viewpoints, expressive relief shading, and carefully controlled graphic design to explain international geography to a broad readership. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, he graduated from Yale College in 1923 with a major in zoology and a minor in chemistry. After working as a scientific illustrator and architectural draftsman, he entered Yale's School of Fine Arts in 1926 and received an architecture degree in 1930. With architectural work scarce during the Depression, he moved to New York and worked in interior and industrial design. A 1932 Time map assignment launched his career in magazine cartography; he later became a staff cartographer for Fortune before returning to freelance work in 1938, maintaining important associations with Fortune and Life. During World War II, Harrison challenged the familiar north-up, Mercator-centered view of world affairs through polar projections, orthographic views, and oblique perspectives that emphasized the Earth's curvature and the proximity of continents in an age of aviation. His Three Approaches to the U.S. (1940) and The World Divided (1941) made American strategic vulnerability visually immediate, supporting an internationalist understanding of the conflict rather than geographical isolation. His influential Look at the World: The Fortune Atlas for World Strategy appeared in 1944. Although admired for their explanatory power, his departures from conventional orientation, scale, and projection also attracted criticism from professional geographers and cartographers. Harrison taught at Syracuse University from 1945 to 1949 and consulted for government agencies, including the Office of Strategic Services, the State Department, and the U.S. Geological Survey. His later publications included The Ginn World Atlas (1963), and he contributed shaded-relief cartography to The National Atlas of the United States of America. He received the American Geographical Society's Miller Medal in 1968. An enthusiastic birdwatcher with a sustained interest in Central Park conservation, Harrison died in New York City on January 5, 1994; the Library of Congress acquired his professional and personal papers in 1995.   Further Details...

Condition

Very good. Exhibits light wear along original centerfold.