The Map Redrawn Japan 1868–1878
1868
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The Map Redrawn
Japan 1868–1878
Sources and credits
The map shows who held the land on the eve of the Restoration, village by village. Adapted from Honda, Natsume and Nemoto, “Construction of Early Modern Village Territory Data” (Theory and Applications of GIS 34(1), 2026), data version 2.01 of Kyudaka_agrivillage, after the Kyūdaka kyūryō torishirabechō. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0; see data/LICENSE-map.txt. Village shapes: MAFF Agricultural Census 2015 rural community boundaries, credit required.
Villages held by several lords are shown under their first-listed lord. Shapes are 2015 coastlines and units, simplified; the source’s own date is unsettled, so the map is dated only to the eve of the Restoration. Hokkaidō, Ryukyu and Amami have no village data in the source, so Hokkaidō and Okinawa are outlines (Amami was Satsuma land and is not shown). Dates are Western calendar.
The prefectures of 1871 and 1876 follow the decrees county by county (1871 table, 1876 table). A few missing counties are inferred, split counties are assigned by rule (holding lord or modern boundary), and exclaves and later changes are not shown. Story sources: notes/sources.md.
Playback engine adapted from Time of the Magicians (Papermorph), MIT licence; see LICENSE-engine.txt.
Music: Japanese koto songs from Nagai and Obata’s 1895 collection, typeset by Tom Potter for the Mutopia Project (public domain), played by a synthesised koto made for this page.
Pictures: portraits and event pictures are public domain or CC0 (Wikimedia Commons, Rijksmuseum, the Met); details in img/SOURCES.md. The four walking figures were painted for this page by an image model (OpenAI gpt-image-2.5-flare) from period photographs; they are not photographs. Fonts (SIL Open Font Licence, texts in lib/fonts): EB Garamond and Noto Serif JP.