1873 Somezaki Map of Korea

A stunning 1873 large-scale map of Korea edited by Somezaki Nobufusa (染崎延房). It was produced in the wake of Japan's Meiji Restoration, as ambitious empire builders were eyeing their neighbor to the west for imperial expansion.

A Closer Look

The Korean Peninsula is displayed in detail, along with outlying islands and neighboring portions of China and Japan. Roads as well as the maritime route to Tsushima (at bottom-right) are indicated with red lines. The eight traditional provinces of Korea are noted and are grouped into twos for purposes of color shading, with the exceptions of Gyeonggi Province (京畿道), which was home to Seoul, and Gyeongsang in the southeast, home to Busan and several other large cities. Military posts along land and maritime borders are marked with red circles, as is Pyongyang. Aside from cities, rivers, mountains, islands, and other features are labelled throughout. The map is accompanied by a sheet noting information on Korea's area, administrative divisions, and distances from Seoul to provincial capitals and to Beijing.

The Dokdo-Takeshima Dispute

The island of Ulleungdo / Umutsuryōtō (鬱陵島) appears off the eastern coast of Korea, closer to the Korean coast and a bit larger than it is in actuality, presumably due to its importance for navigation. It is noted as being an outlying island of Takeshima (竹島), known in Korean as Dokdo and internationally as the Liancourt Rocks, which in recent decades have been a disputed territory and a major impediment in Korean-Japanese relations. Below Umutsuryōtō is an island labelled as Usando (亐山島). The sheet accompanying the map notes that Umutsuryōtō is also known as Isodake (弓嵩島). In fact, these names, along with Matsushima (松島), were used somewhat interchangeably and inconsistently on Japanese maps of the Edo and early Meiji period. These discrepancies have been used as ammunition by both the Korean and Japanese governments to advance territorial claims to the Liancourt Rocks, but in reality they reveal the imperfect and confused development of cartographic knowledge over many centuries.

Japan Imperial Ambitions in Korea

This map was produced just five years after Japan's Meiji Restoration, which launched the country on a crash course of military, economic, social, and cultural transformation. The samurai-intellectuals who led the Meiji reforms saw the attainment of colonies as one of the main sources of Western power and something Japan sorely lacked. Starting with easy targets like Hokkaido (already part of the Japanese realm) and the Ryukyu Islands, colonial development projects were tested out that would influence later events far beyond the Japanese home islands.

Even as Japan was just beginning to test the waters of imperial competition, some of the most ambitious and aggressive of the early Meiji-era reformers saw Korea as an essential part of Japan's future empire. Korea at this time was riven by factional infighting, with a young king whose rule was delayed by the regency of his father, the Heungseon Daewongun, a hardliner fiercely committed to resisting any foreign influence. Even Chinese and Japanese traders were limited to outposts along the edge of Korea, in the latter case the waegwan (Japanese ethnic enclaves) in Busan and other coastal cities. Foreign missions tried repeatedly to cajole or force a treaty with Korea that would allow for trading and extraterritorial rights, with no success. Several foreign vessels were fired upon by Korean coastal defenses, including the Japanese ship Un'yo in 1875.

This incident, along with the end of the Heungseon Daewongun's regency and a small but growing contingent of the Korean elite welcoming a closer relationship with Japan, was the background to the Treaty of Ganghwa, signed in 1876. Just as Commodore Perry's 'black ships' had employed gunboat diplomacy to open Japan to foreign trade and influence in 1853, Japan now displayed the same tactics towards Korea hardly twenty years later. The treaty effectively ended Korea's status as a tributary state and protectorate of China, opened Pusan, Incheon, and Wonsan for trade, and granted Japanese citizens much greater freedom of movement and legal protections in Korea. Over time, these rights allowed Japanese businesses to gain preponderance in the Korean market, a key step on the road to colonial control. These changes are reflected on the map, as the use of 'the Country of Korea' (朝鮮國) rather than simply 'Korea' (朝鮮) in the title implies a distance and independence from China, while the use of the characters 京城 (Keijō / Gyeongseong) for Seoul, instead of Hanyang or Hanseong, presaged the city's renaming under Japanese colonial rule.

Publication History and Census

This map was published in 1873. It was edited by Somezaki Nobufusa (染崎延房), who is sometimes referred to by Tamenaga Shunsui (為永春水), the name of his teacher which became his own pen upon his teacher's death in 1844. Izumoji Manjirō (出雲寺萬次郎) and Chōjiya Heibei (丁子屋平兵衛) are listed as publishers. Three bookseller-distributors are listed in the publication information at bottom-left, including two surnamed Chōjiya, suggesting a connection with the publisher. This map should not be confused with the similarly titled similarly titled '五畿八道朝鮮國細見全圖' published by Kitabatake Mohē (北畠茂兵衛) the following year.

Though the present example is a separate issue, the map was also published as part of the work Korean Affairs (朝鮮事情) by Somezaki and Ishizuka Neisai (石塚寧斎) in 1874, which was a reprint of a 1794 work by Oda Ikugorō (小田幾五郎), a translator on Tsushima Island who had interviewed Korean officials. Some eighty years later, Somezaki summarized Oda's work to provide a window on Korea, showing the lack of up-to-date knowledge about Korea in Japan in the early days of the Meiji Restoration. It is worth noting that Somezaki and Ishizuka's work is distinct from a book by the same title published in stages over the mid-late 1870s which was a translation of Claude-Charles Dallet's Histoire de l'Église de Corée.

The present map is quite scarce, being held by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (as part of the American Geographical Society Library), the National Diet Library, the National Archives of Japan, the Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo Keizai University, and Kobe University, while the two-volume work Korean Affairs is held by Cornell University and the National Diet Library.