UCLA

For roughly a thousand years, from the eighth century through the end of the Meiji era (1868-1912), michiyuki—lyrical travel passages (generally 7-5 meter) whose artistry evoked the route, sights, movement, and impressions of a journey through rhetorical flourishes and poetic allusion—guided audiences through an imagined topography. Nodal sequences of place-linked actions that move protagonists from point of departure to destination, michiyuki produce surprising geographic constellations by bringing together disparate locations, temporalities, and persons in innovative ways. While widely appreciated for their aesthetic appeal, sophisticated poetic allusions, and requiem function, at their most basic level, michiyuki—as a narration of movement between two points—are a geographic product. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, a historical moment in which Japan’s topography was refashioned through dramatic transformations in the movement of people, commodities, and information, this dissertation reframes michiyuki as geo-social networks that mediate experiences of place, shaping early modern (1603-1868) and Meiji popular geographic consciousness. Where recent scholarship has re-envisioned folding screens, famous place compendia, Buddhist mandalas, and other media as “maps,” michiyuki reflect a complementary form of spatial awareness that maps often erase; the spatial practices according to which place is experienced. By modifying relationships between place-based structures, michiyuki suggest alternative modes of “being in place,” offering individuals and groups new ways of imagining, and laying claim to, a topography. In a geographic re-envisioning of early modern cultural production, this dissertation explores topographies underwritten by human trafficking along the Japan Sea coast; double-suicide journeys and criminal processions in Osaka; and rides on urban streetcar lines in Meiji era Tokyo and Osaka. I draw from the work of Edward Soja and Michel de Certeau in considering how place, space, and movement intersect in lived experience and how place is constituted via reiterative social practice. My project considers travel passages from sermon-ballads, kōwakamai, puppet theater, popular song, and others in conjunction with historical sources such as legal edicts, merchant house codes, maps, city guides, and sugoroku gameboards. In so doing, this research hopes to introduce new discourses to Japan’s early modern spatial vernacular and the role of Meiji era industrial technologies in revolutionizing the partitioning, reorganization, and centralization of this space.