Anonymous | Map of the World (Sekai-zu) | Momoyama - Edo period, early 17th century

A group of lost Portuguese sailors marked the first European encounter with Japan in 1543. By the sixteenth century, Marco Polo’s (1254-1324) tales of the miraculous island kingdom of Zipangu from Il Milione (1298) had firmly rooted themselves in the European imagination. Spurred by the exploratory voyages sponsored by Philip II of Spain (1527-1598) in search of treasures and mysterious lands to the Far East, European explorers and maritime traders increasingly undertook the dangerous journey to discover lands beyond the known world.¹ The rest of the century was punctuated by an ever-increasing contact, trade and cultural exchange between the Europeans and Japanese: firearms, Christianity, Western-style painting and cartography were all introduced to Japan by way of the Portuguese merchants who established trade routes from their Southeast Asian bases to the archipelago during one of the most tumultuous eras in Japanese history.

The developing interest in the outside world meant mapping it. The influence of European maps on Japanese cartography, the late Sir Hugh Cortazzi writes, follows a clear trajectory: ‘The young nobles, representing the daimyo of Bungo, Arima, and Omura in Kyushu, who were sent by Father Valignano as an “embassy” to Europe received various presents during their stay in Portugal, Spain, and Italy. When they visited Padua, they are reported to have been given a copy of Ortelius’s celebrated atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, which they brought back to Japan [in 1590]. Other atlases were brought to Japan by the Jesuit missionaries. We also have records showing that the English sent maps. For instance, the cargo of the Thomas, which reached Hirado on June 20, 1616, included not only maps of British counties, Britain, and London, but also a world map and two globes’.²

The Japanese daimyo or wealthy merchants who commissioned such maps³ were surely fascinated by the outside world that was considerably greater than previously thought – in medieval Japan, the West was thought only to extend to India. During the latter half of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, screens depicting world maps (sekai-zu byobu), oftentimes with gold surrounds or exotic imagery, became vogue.

The present example shows China and Japan in a more central position compared with the first maps that were introduced to Japan with Europe at the centre. It is possible that an influencing factor was the world map made by Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), an Italian Catholic missionary, for the Wanli Emperor (1563-1620) in 1600. Known as the Shanhai yudi quantu [Complete Geographic Map of the Mountains and Streams], Ricci’s map was the first European map made for a Chinese audience. A printed version known as the Kunyu wangguo quantu [A Map of the Myriad Countries of the World] was published in Beijing in 1602.⁴ It is thought that Jesuits brought the 1602 version of Ricci’s map to Japan soon after its publication in China, and by as early as 1605, copies of it may have been used to teach geography and astronomy at the Jesuit academy in Kyoto.⁵ Ricci’s map placed China, and therefore Japan, in the centre. Although Japanese maps initially followed European models, later maps of the world produced in Japan show the archipelago more centrally located.⁶

Twenty-two late sixteenth and early seventeenth century nanban world map screens survived the Christian persecutions of the seventeenth century in Japan presumably due to their secular nature. Many Christian devotional works of art associated with the Jesuit missions were confiscated by the Tokugawa shogunate and destroyed.⁷ Drawing primarily from European maps of the world as their main subject, nanban world map screens show much variation in both style and composition: some are richly decorated with gold leaf, executed in expensive pigments and show exacting detail; others appear as schematic interpretations seemingly distant from original Western sources.⁸ This recently discovered example increases the recorded total of extant screens to twenty-three.

In this impressive six-fold screen, the sea is rendered a dark blue indigo; sailing its waters are the nau do trato Portuguese trading ships often referred to in Japanese as the kurofune, or black boats. Two scale bars in gold flank opposite sides of the map. Although there are instances of European-made maps, such as that by the Portuguese cartographer, Fernao Vaz Dourado (circa 1520-circa 1580) who employs scale bars on the sides of his maps, as well as Renwart Cysat’s map of Japan, Der grossen namhfften neuwlicherfunden Japponischen Insel, first published in the Wahrhafftiger Bericht in Freyburg in 1586, which depicts a scale bar horizontally laid beneath protractor, they do not appear to be a common feature of Japanese-made map screens of the period.

The map is shown here with sandbars, often indicated on marine charts, as well as the Great Wall of China. The shape of Japan is derived from Luis Teixeria’s map of the archipelago, Iaponiae Insulae Descriptio, produced in 1595. Furthermore, whereas as the Typus Orbis Terrarum and Bankoku Sozu screens has the continent of Antarctica sprawl across the lower section of the right-hand screen, the present example omits any indication of northern or southern polar continents, favouring instead a decorative application of scalloped gold-leaf clouds. A similar example of a six-panel folding screen depicting a world map (with scalloped cloud borders and the placement of the Western and Eastern hemispheres reversed) is in the collection of the Hosshin-ji, Obama, see Joseph F. Loh, When Worlds Collide – Art, Cartography, and Japanese Nanban World Map Screens (New York, 2013), p. 230, fig. 29. 

In sixteenth-century Europe, the donation of maps to rulers and popes was a well-established diplomatic practice, and a folding screen decorated with a map of China was presented to Philip II by the Tensho embassy, whilst a map of Oda Nobunaga’s (1534-1582) Azuchi Castle was given to Pope Gregory XIII (1502-1585).⁹

1. Joseph F. Loh, When Worlds Collide – Art, Cartography, and Japanese Nanban World Map Screens (New York, 2013), p. 5.

2. Hugh Cortazzi, Isles of Gold: Antique Maps of Japan (Tokyo, 1983), p. 25-26.

3. For further reading on the patronage of nanban screens, see Loh, When Worlds Collide, p. 40. 

4. Loh, When Worlds Collide, p. 178.

5. Ibid., p. 182.

6. Cortazzi, Isles of Gold, p. 26.

7. Loh, When Worlds Collide, p. 176.

8. Ibid., p. 24. 

9. Giovanni Raneri, Folding Screens, Cartography, and the Jesuit Mission in Japan, 1580-1614 (Manchester, 2015), p. 69.