Five Japans (1936)

Japan first became known to Europeans through the account of Marco Polo at the close of the thirteenth century. Marco Polo had never been to Japan, but he had his information from the Great Khan.

Japan continued to be a mysterious country for Europeans. First Europeans who visited Japan in 1543 were Portuguese traders António da Mota and Francisco Zeimoto, who wanted to introduce hand-held guns for trade. But to their surprise, it turned out that the Japanese had already been using firearms 270 years before the first arrival of the Portuguese. This technology came to Japan from China.

From this point in time, more or less precise geographical descriptions of this country appear, and Japan has become more and more attractive to Westerners. This interest has not even subsided in the twenty-first century.

Below is an early masterpiece of Richard Edes’s presentation of Japan. TIME Fortune weekly magazine published these five thematic maps of Japan in 1936.

I – Japan is Coal and Iron
… as well as the lack of coal, iron, oil, rubber, and other industrial raw material is represented graphically in the lower left-hand corner opposite.

II – Japan is the Japanese
… the density of whose settlement upon arable land is 390 per square mile heavier than that of the Netherlands, the next most densely settled of great powers.

III – Japan is Land to Till
… of which there is only 15 percent of the total area here, represented by the green of rice paddies, mulberry plantations, and wheat fields.

IV – Japan is Six Cities
… of over half a million population and forty-two other cities above 75,000 and the railroads, shipping lines, and airlines connecting them.

V – Japan is Rock and Metal
… and the rock is the excellent backbone massive of the country, and the metal stabs in by brittle nerves of rail and wire from three great industrial centers on the coast.