| This dissertation examines the development of aesthetic nationalism in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The discourse of landscapes was mobilized in the establishment of Japan as a modern nation, and through careful analysis of topographic writings, the present work articulates the radical change in descriptions of nature in the 1880s. In the case of early modern Japan, travel and travel writing developed in close association with the convention of "famous places," sites filled with popular histories and memories of the past. However, by emphasizing the medicinal effectiveness of hot springs, the discourse of nature in early Meiji period (1868-1912) employed new knowledge from the West, such as climatology, meteorology, mineralogy, geology, and psychiatric therapy.;By the 1890s, guidebooks highlighted pleasing views and climatological factors as enhancing the effectiveness of the rich minerals found in hot springs. The intersection between scientific discourses and indigenous tradition of topographic writings further produced the identification of "Japan" as an inherent repository of a nationally unique beauty. The present work positions On the Landscape of Japan (Nihon fukei-ron , 1894) written by geographer and journalist Shiga Shigetaka (1863-1927) as central to the process of translating the Western knowledge and, further, imagining a shared national space.;Through careful reading of Shiga's Landscape, this dissertation demonstrates the complex processes of creating a tradition of topographic writings. On the one hand, Shiga's text embodies scientific discourses to explain the beauty of Japanese landscape. At the same time, he makes a link to a well-known traveler and scholar, Kaibara Ekiken (1630-1714), who developed a new mode of writing about space and topography, movement across the landscape, and the relationship of spaces in the present to moments in the past. By separating Ekiken's spatial writings from conventional travel writing, this dissertation traces a genealogy of spatial writings from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century. Ultimately, it articulates social imagination of national space and time for modern Japan, which was grounded in the aestheticization and naturalization of Japan's geographic beauty. |
