My paper analyses the socially and politically subversive value of the representation of meisho along the Tōkaidō road, in late Edo Japan.

Travel, a common practice within the bakuhan state (Ashiba, 1994; Vaporis, 1994; Vaporis, 1995; Nenzi, 2008; Funck and Cooper, 2013), is strictly entwined with social and political transformation (Lean and Staiff, 2016). One of the reasons for that is that it encompasses an appropriation of the landscape, that is, in itself, as an “instrument of cultural power” (Mitchell 1994, 1). This appropriation is reflected in and enhanced by travel literature – above all in largely distributed forms of disposable culture, such as commercial prints, maps and guides.

Representations of meisho are particularly interesting when analysed in this perspective, as meisho tended to be invested with (different, contested) meanings by a wide range of social actors, above all when, as in the case of the Tōkaidō, they were located in a both strategically relevant and highly traveled area. While part of an “official”, controlled landscape, as represented in Tokugawa sponsored maps, the meisho of Tōkaidō were in fact also invested with religious, lyrical and recreational meanings and they were sometimes intellectually appropriated through their representations even when, for practical or normative reasons, they could not materially be experienced. Such representations became “virtual” ways to defy boundaries and social conventions.

Using Tōkaidō meisho zue as a main example, I will analyse these mechanisms, and connect them to a fuller discussion of identity and social and cultural transformation in pre-modern Japan.