Recent scholarship in modern Japanese history, intent to discredit essentialist notions of a timeless national cultural identity, has depicted "Japaneseness" itself as a modern "invented tradition," dating back to the late nineteenth-century Meiji project of nation-building. The prolific print culture of early modern Japan has been the object of repeated scrutiny from historians and aesthetes, but Berry's virtuosic investigation (based primarily on the rich Mitsui Bunko Collection of published maps and illustrated books) recasts these materials as a "library of public information" that both reflected and nurtured a burgeoning national consciousness among seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japanese.
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