LOST IN THE MISTRANSLATION

<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Here’s Beryl Markham writing in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">West With The Night, </i>1942, which is a book about her travels in what was then British East Africa, now Kenya.</span><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">“A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.’ It says, ‘I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.’”</span><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7fVBSA-W7O..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7fVBSA-W7O..." width="550" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Safe to say that Beryl Markham never went to Tokyo, but I just did.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I walked a lot while I was there and most of the time I was carrying and frequently consulting a map.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unlike Ms. Markham I didn’t feel as though I had the earth in the palm of my hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mostly I felt as though I was carrying a rather useless piece of paper.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes, of course, I was also consulting a rather useless graphic on a cell phone screen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>True, given the dense population of Tokyo, was rarely alone, but a lot of the time I was lost.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-frhRMFeNYk..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="548" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-frhRMFeNYk..." width="640" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">To be honest, only rarely was I completely and utterly, irredeemably lost.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most of the time I had some rough, nebulous idea of where I was, and I’m enough of a psychogeographer to find that experience interesting, even desirable, but getting from where I was to where I wanted to be was (let’s say) challenging, and often confusing and ultimately downright exhausting.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Roland Barthes had something to say about this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Empire of Signs </i>he writes, of Tokyo, “This city can be known only by an activity of an ethnographic kind: you must orient yourself in it not by book, by address, but by walking, by sight, by habit, by experience; here every discovery is intense and fragile, it can be repeated or recovered only by memory of the trace it has left in you: to visit a place for the first time is thereby to begin to write it: the address not being written, it must establish its own writing.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/--y-6Gq58YX..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/--y-6Gq58YX..." width="442" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Not completely sure about that, Roland.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For one thing I would say that by no means every discovery in Tokyo is fragile; many of them are extremely robust, but they’re intense certainly,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still does Barthes make Tokyo sound like my kind of town.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it is.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-L00yzcF9IS..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-L00yzcF9IS..." width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">I walked in Tokyo, I walked a lot, in Shinjuku and Akihabara, in Ueno and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yanesen and Roppongi Hills, and it was very alien in some ways, surprisingly familiar in others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I mean we’ve all seen those pictures of the big bustling neon lit main streets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And</span><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> if we’ve seen the photographs of Araki and Moriyama then we’ve seen the back streets and alleys too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fsFEhA72i1..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fsFEhA72i1..." width="640" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">These images were accurate enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was rather more enchanted with the alleys than the main streets, and of course we’re always told how safe Tokyo is. I wasn’t taking anything for granted but I was probably less guarded as I walked around the edgelands of Tokyo than I might have been in some other cities.</span><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">I took a couple of maps with me, but once I got there I kept picking up dozens of the things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They seemed to be everywhere.</span><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some, of course, were just tourist maps whose main reason for existing wasn’t to help travelers go wherever they pleased, so much as direct them to some very specific places, i.e. the businesses that had paid to have advertisements on the back of these maps.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was a plain enough illustration that maps are always in somebody’s interest, and that these interests may not necessarily be the same as yours, though of course if you’re looking for a sushi restaurant then these interests may coincide. Here's part of the collection:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dWs7U6Ef_G..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dWs7U6Ef_G..." width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">There were also a lot of public maps, on street corners, in parks, in stations, even sometimes in the sidewalk.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_J4NBczUCM..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_J4NBczUCM..." width="598" /></a></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Vc0ZUuYUzR..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Vc0ZUuYUzR..." width="480" /></a></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">And I did find it some consolation that as I walked I saw many locals who seemed as lost as I was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They too stared at those street corner maps with as much confusion as I did.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’d also see them staring at maps on their cell phones, sometimes using the cell phone to photograph the street corner map.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It made me feel just slightly less of a buffoon.</span> </div><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt;"></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt;"> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></span></div><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt;"></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LYR35muzAj..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LYR35muzAj..." width="604" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div></span><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt;"> <div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">There were also these helpful signs directing you to places where you could cross the street.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m an observer of these things. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have photographs taken in Suffolk, in England only a few years back in which the walking man is wearing flared trousers, and here the walking man was wearing a hat:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1QipfdmBmu..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1QipfdmBmu..." width="640" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The parts of Tokyo I was in weren’t absolutely, completely free of graffiti, but by any standard I know they were very limited, and such street art as there was seemed very minor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t know if this means Tokyo really needs Banksy or whether they’d just throw him in jail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;"></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DyKaPPIm7l..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DyKaPPIm7l..." width="640" /></a></div></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">But oddly enough those street crossing signs were quite a target for low level doodling and stickering and general abuse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I haven’t worked out why that is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe it’s because of the hat.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ueSKvsA-n7..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ueSKvsA-n7..." width="640" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Tokyo, certainly to a first timer, though I’d imagine to anyone, seems to be a place of strange and complex and often mysterious spaces, some are big and broad and strangely empty, elsewhere there are tiny alleyways and gaps between buildings that are barely wide enough for a human being to walk through, though the cats seems to like those places just fine.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uIclQ4Snyo..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uIclQ4Snyo..." width="480" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">And there are certain spaces, under freeways or bridges or railway lines that do feel strangely different from their western equivalents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the west they might be considered non-spaces, but in Tokyo they seem much more part of the fabric of the city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe that’s because there are so many of them that if you thought of them as non-place then you’d have to think of much of the city as a blank.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">I walked reasonably far and reasonably wide, though I could certainly have walked further and wider.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most of the walking was not quite aimless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Generally I was trying to get somewhere, say to a gallery or bookshop or bar or restaurant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More often than not I got there, but not absolutely always.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still I was well prepared for serendipity, and that I found in spades.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-R8FEBkzlQc..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-R8FEBkzlQc..." width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6OH8gcvwuN..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6OH8gcvwuN..." width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Y0PB74w9gG..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Y0PB74w9gG..." width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gXnACA2f2_..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gXnACA2f2_..." width="240" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">And if nobody was in any doubt that I was a tourist and didn’t belong there, I never sense any hostility, nor frankly much in the way of curiosity about me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe this was an illusion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If we accept that the Japanese are a very polite race, maybe they were just too polite to express either their hostility or their curiosity. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just one old jogger came up to me and me where I was from and how long I’d been in Tokyo, otherwise I was ignored as just another gaijin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was prepared to settle for that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-rylQkusmpl..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-rylQkusmpl..." width="640" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Since I got back I’ve been reading </span><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Barrie Shelton's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Learning from the Japanese City</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He writes,</span><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> “</span><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">To a Westerner, the Japanese maps may be seen to fragment the landscape. The Japanese maps are rather like a cubist painting where one can see on a single surface, many aspects of a three-dimensional object which could not be seen from a single static viewpoint. Considered another way, they may be seen to integrate the landscape for they show it, as it is commonly experienced by the majority of those who move through it. In other words, it is more a product of experience than the Western map which is more one of intellect.”</span><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">I think I know what he means, though of course I also think you could argue that one of the main duties of a map is to offer information for people who <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">don’t </i>have experience of moving through a given landscape.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you “commonly” move through it then why did you need a map?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> </span><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EqhlVqaIPa..." style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="508" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EqhlVqaIPa..." width="640" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "geneva"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Shelton also refers to an early eighteenth century map showing the whole of Japan, a map that was 7 inches high and 28 feet long.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I haven’t seen this map and it doesn’t sound as though Shalton has either, but it sounds a wonderful thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wonder if Ed Ruscha knew about this map when he did his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Every Building on the Sunset Strip</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Then and Now).</i> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In any case, in honor of this concept I did buy the map you see below, by no means as long and thin as the 18<sup>th</sup> century map, but long and thin enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Suitable for framing no doubt, but quite a challenge for the framer.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Qopdn_ftzo..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Qopdn_ftzo..." width="302" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheHol..." height="1" width="1" alt=""/>

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Published on March 23, 2016 10:35

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