This summer, I worked with Professor Asuka Sango from the Religion department on her ongoing Japanese map project regarding Carleton’s premodern and modern map collection. Our research focused on examining Japanese maps, secondary scholarship, and archival material to better understand the history of our map collection and how to utilize these maps in Professor Sango’s new class for Spring 2025, “Mapping Japan, the Real and the Imagined.”
Carleton has a limited premodern map inventory in the Special Collections library, so the majority of our research was on the modern maps we received from the Army Map Service (AMS) and Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1946. Though, when we visited the Special Collections, we discussed the logistics for the new course and listed which maps to display. I also checked to see if our premodern maps were digitized in other catalogs such as the Library of Congress and Stanford University’s library. These premodern maps are interesting because they defy the typical definition of a map as they vary from Buddhist cosmology images to board games.
As previously stated, we focused much of our research on the modern maps we received from the AMS. Carleton received maps created during World War II through the AMS Depository Program which was created to express gratitude to the many university and public libraries that provided the AMS and OSS with map intelligence to help the agencies curate maps during the war. These maps are largely topographic, but there were also a handful that illustrated the census, infrastructure, and agricultural data of Japan and its territories of the time. The library has about 100 sheets of OSS maps which we recorded and cross checked with other university catalogs to note where the same maps were digitized. We found that Carleton had a handful of OSS maps that other collections did not.
Through archival research with the help of Tom Lamb (Head of Carleton Archives) we were able to attempt to understand the history of our map collection. We looked at correspondence between Carleton and the AMS and Library of Congress as well as the Geology and Geography Department’s reports. It was interesting to learn that Carleton had initially rejected AMS’s offer to become a depository due to personnel, budget, and space limitations. It was found that President Gould later wrote to AMS that Carleton’s Geology and Geography Department would become a depository and had a collection of 100,000 maps valued at $250,000. When working with archival material, it was difficult to create a clear timeline of Carleton’s Japanese map collection history as it seems that we were missing some letters and reports that would have provided a more complete picture.
From this research experience, I was able to learn how to conduct humanities research. I had expected humanities research to be more straightforward than STEM research since I had thought that it would just entail studying primary and secondary sources. However, as I worked with the archival material, I learned that not every question can be answered from history. I had thought that studying the past would provide answers to explain how the map collection went from 100,000 to 1,800 map sheets, but we were only left with more questions. Not only did I gain this new perspective, but also learned how to organize and summarize my research which I could apply and build on in future projects. Overall, I had an enlightening experience and am grateful for this opportunity to have been able to learn about the fascinating maps and its history.