Nanban World Map Screens

The following paper investigates the ways in which European cartography blended with Japanese Buddhist cosmology and created a hybrid form of maps during the period of Japan’s first cultural encounter with Europeans in the second half of the 16th century and the early 17th century. The maps of Dutch cartographers heavily influenced these so-called nanban world-map screens created by Japanese artists. Nevertheless, their companion screens often depicted a local map of Japan in the gyoki tradition deeply embedded in the Buddhist faith system. With a focus on a seventeenth-century pair of folding screens, called the Nanban-Bunka-kan, the study argues, on the one hand, that Japanese artists used the European world map model to reinvent Japan’s global significance, which had been diminished by Buddhist cosmology. On the other hand, the companion screens express Japan’s desire to retain its traditions within the Buddhist realm, and they also emphasize its rejection of any possible foreign colonization. The placement of these seemingly two contrasting world views side-by-side supported the nationalistic ideals of Japanese war lords, who exploited these hybrid maps to validate their unification goals of the archipelago and conquests of foreign lands based on Japan’s newly acquired significance.