Asuka Sango uncovers Japanese map collection at Carleton with research grant from Japan Foundation of New York

On the first floor of Carleton’s Laurence McKinley Gould Library lives Special Collections. As the quietest floor in the building, it sees significantly less foot traffic than the upper ones, and Special Collections remains unnoticed by many Libe-goers. Until December 2022, Asuka Sango — director of cross-cultural studies, director of the Center for Global and Regional Studies, and John W. Nason Professor of Asian Studies and Religion — was also unaware of what Special Collections contained; and that she would go on to find the source of a significant research project inside. After presenting on a panel about collaboration between professors and librarians with Tom Lamb, college archivist and head of Special Collections & Archives, she found herself in conversation with Katie Lewis, cataloging and government documents librarian, who is in charge of maps in the Libe. As most of Sango’s academic work focuses on Japanese religions and cultures, she asked Lewis if Special Collections had any Japanese maps.

Lewis revealed that Carleton had an extensive collection of Japanese maps, with some produced by the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS, a precursor to the CIA), and others by Imperial Japan. The Japanese maps were captured by Allied forces after the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II, and given to the U.S. Army Map Service (AMS). After WWII, the AMS sent both map types, OSS-produced and captured alike, to libraries across the country, including our very own Libe. At Carleton, the maps have sat mostly untouched, because none of the College’s librarians have been able to translate the Japanese written on them. And thus, Sango fell into her project: Mapping Japan, the Real and the Imagined.

“I felt a sense of duty,” she said. “We had this great collection and no one’s doing anything with it… Before this, I had no interest in maps at all.” With the resources provided by her research grant from the Japan Foundation of New York (JFNY), this has changed dramatically.

Sango explained why the maps fascinated her so much: “The conventional definition of a map as a visual representation of a select surface of the Earth does not work for this project.” 

Maps that Sango studies contain much more than just geographic and topographic information. She showed me a map of Sumba, an island in Indonesia, and discussed how it’s difficult to separate the real from the imagined when looking at the map. Sumba was first colonized by the Dutch, who created the original topographic map. But, when Japan replaced the Dutch occupation in Indonesia, it captured the original Sumba map and reprinted it with additional Japanese comments about military strategy information.

“We tend to think of a map as an image… but these have so much text written on them,” Sango explained. “I like the interplay between text and images.” 

In addition, these different layers of the Sumba map allow some perspective on the history of colonialism in Sumba over time, and reveal ideological discourses that colonizers held about the island and its people.

“These maps were a tool of war, not just a scientific record,” Sango said. She plans to use the Sumba map to inform a forthcoming article about the interplay between the different time periods and colonial ideologies represented on the map. 

In addition to WWII-era maps, Sango is also interested in Japanese maps from the early modern period (1603–1868), such as Life Journey Maps. As a professor of religion at Carleton, Sango is especially interested in the maps that delve further into imagined cartography, and depict what she calls “a moral landscape.” Life Journey Maps use spacial communication to explain cultural and religious teachings. 

“Your whole life is a process of moral cultivation to get to the higher place — the mountains,” she said, pointing to how the mountains on the Life Journey Map included in this story are named after Confucian virtues.

Similarly, Sango has extended this lens of inquiry to board games from the same period, called sugoroku. She showed me the sugoroku that depicts a Buddhist worldview (a Buddhist worldview map is actually the header image for this story). In Sango’s view, maps and board games are both two-dimensional objects that orient our sense of time, space, and life.

Since starting this project, Sango has built up Carleton’s collection of premodern Japanese maps in addition to the existing AMS maps. The current full collection contains five sheets of early modern maps; 1,800 sheets of captured maps; and an as-of-yet-uncounted number of OSS-created maps. She plans to teach a course in Spring 2025 about Japanese cartography, drawing on her research thus far. The course — ASST 285: Mapping Japan, the Real and the Imagined — will focus on Carleton’s Japanese maps and culminate in a student-guided tour. Sango also hopes to make some of the maps publicly available and to organize an official map exhibit for the Perlman Teaching Museum in a few years. In line with this, Sango has worked with students over the summer and during the academic year to digitize and understand Carleton’s Japanese map collection. Over the summer, George Conlan ’25 and Ayana Sakamoto ’26 served as Student Research Partners (SRPs), and this academic year, Conlan joined Yianmiao Wang ’25 to serve as Sango’s research assistants. Conlan and Sakamoto presented their findings at Carleton’s Undergraduate Research Symposium on October 18, 2024. Sango has also presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies and the Midwestern Japan Seminar since beginning this project.

Sango’s JFNY grant is providing extensive resources, including funds for hiring student research assistants; the digitization process; buying additional premodern maps; inviting two guest speakers for her academic course; traveling to Washington, D.C. to view the captured map collection at the Library of Congress; and traveling to Japan to talk to Shigeru Kobayashi, professor emeritus at Osaka University, whom Sango calls “the pioneer of the study of Japanese captured maps.”

Sango explained that her work through the grant involves not only her personal area of research interest — premodern Japan — but also integrates her teaching through her spring course at Carleton. Through her research and teaching, she wants Carleton students “to know that we have these wonderful map collections and actually use them.”

The digitization process for Sango’s project is still ongoing, and Sango is continuing to uncover more information about Carleton’s map collections. Her enthusiasm for the project is evident, despite the unconventional way she fell into it. 

“I got sucked into this project so quickly,” she said. “It just happened to me and it keeps happening to me.” 

Sango also underscored her appreciation for the librarians she has worked with during this project. 

“I’ve learned a lot about the work of librarians,” Sango said. “Having data is not enough. We need librarians to process and organize it, and to make it more accessible for everyone else. [Librarians] are critical and indispensable for our research and teaching.”