Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how representations of the eruption of Mount Asama in 1783 in maps and broadsheets expanded its image as the “smoking mountain” in the popular imagination, and how the volcano's historical meanings as meisho were negotiated with its agency as a powerful environmental actant.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates how representations of the eruption of Mount Asama in 1783 in maps and broadsheets expanded its existing image as the “smoking mountain” in the popular imagination. The cultural memory of Mount Asama as a mountain emitting smoke and fire was reiterated across time and media – in ancient court poetry as well as in early modern illustrated travel guides, and in reference books such as the Wakan Sansai Zue (Illustrated Sino-Japanese Encyclopaedia of the Three Realms, first published in 1712). At the same time, as Goree (2022) has shown, printed illustrated guides to famous places in the eighteenth century increasingly framed local places as visual spectacles viewed through the leisurely gaze of urban travellers, often from the vantage point of the road or from above. Illustrated travel guides and maps registered Mount Asama within a prosperous landscape bounded by rice fields, villages, and roads. This paper argues that the representation of the volcano in illustrated travel guides and maps added further historical layers of meaning to its image as meisho and that this affected how its eruption in 1783 was registered in maps and in broadsheets. The eruption of Mount Asama brought home the realisation that the “smoking mountain” could not be framed simply as a visual spectacle to be viewed from the road or as an unchanging component of a prosperous landscape. Its secretions – ash, smoke, fire, and mudflow buried rice fields and blocked rivers, demonstrating its agency as a powerful environmental actant affecting tangible change in the land. How was the cultural memory of the mountain which was grounded in historical layers of representation as meisho negotiated with its environmental impact on the land?