Mapping Tokyo : cartography and modernity in Japan in the early Meiji period

Studies of the Early Meiji Period have until now been mainly articulated around the issue of continuity and discontinuity between the Edo and Meiji eras. Thus Tokyo has become the central locus of production of multiple discourses on Japanese modernity, urbanity and culture.

This work adopts a discontinuist approach by considering each era as two entirely distinct, although related, historical assemblages. For this, I focus my study on the conditions of production of Tokyo as a modern urban space. The entry into modernity is the crossing of a threshold. As Edo is marked by the order of the general equivalent and the law of the sumptury, Tokyo is produced in abstract space. We shift from an essentially heterogeneous space to a homogeneous, fragmented and hierarchized space. Following Henri Lefebvre, I try to analyze the production of modern abstract space as it is associated with a new mode of control of social space through administrative policies, cartography and urbanism.