"Thoughts on Waters and Lands of Japan" by Nishikawa Joken (1648 – 1724)

The present publication is a translation of Nishikawa Joken’s (1648 – 1724) treatise Nihon Suido Ko:(“Thoughts on Waters and Lands of Japan”), with commentaries and a preface. The treatise was composed approximately in 1700 and published in Kyoto in the beginning of the 18th century. Nishikawa based his work on traditional East-Asian system of knowledge as well as on the European geographical data. This eclectic combination produced an original work, which one can hardly attribute as a reproduction of Western science, neither as Japanese traditional thought. The aim of the author was to describe the position of Japan within the world and to explain why this position was unique and advantageous. Although attempts to reconsider Japan’s inferior to China position were not uncommon during the Tokugawa age, Nishikawa’s originality lies in his way of argumentation. He uses the rhetoric of geographic determinism. It is due to a specific location and consequently the advantageous interaction of elements and branches that Japan is the home for luminous deities. The good nature and the devotedness to the right rituals of the Japanese people are also the product of the beneficial geomantic characteristics. The other topics the author considers are the attempt to confound the bias that Japan is small in size, the underneath meaning and the etymology of different names of Japan, the general structure of the world. Nihon Suido Ko: is a valuable source on the early development of Japanese national self-identification as well as on the history of Japanese geographic thought.