Meanwhile, recent additions to Apple Maps include cycling directions in Seattle and Look Around imagery in Atlanta, Sendai and Kanazawa.

After Mitsuo Fuchida commanded the air attack on Pearl Harbor, he drew a map to report on the damage his planes inflicted on the U.S. ships. That map, held by the Library of Congress, is the subject of an interactive story map from the Library: “This is the story of how Fuchida made the map, the history surrounding it, and an opportunity for the reader to interactively explore the map’s contents.” [Maps Mania]

Apple’s maps of Japan have also been updated—like the Look Around updates, this was probably originally intended to coincide with the Olympics—but O’Beirne concludes that the data comes from a third-party provider: the maps have even more detail than Apple’s U.S. maps in some cases, less detail in others.

David Cook has released his Illustrative Map of Japan, a hand-drawn pictorial map showing the principal Japanese islands in classic oblique, pictorial-map style. On Reddit Cook says that it took ten years, on and off, from concept to completion: “Conceptually I started in 2010, but actually drawing this version didn’t start until 2012 when I finally settled on a size and perspective. Tbh I did not work on it continuously all those years. The drawn portion wrapped up in 2017 and I didn’t start coloring it in until 2019.” It’ll be available for sale as a 24-by-36-inch print at some point. [r/MapPorn]

Britain had the Ordnance Survey, France the Cassini family. Japan had Inō Tadataka (伊能 忠敬, 1745-1818), who over a series of expeditions in the early 19th century conducted a systematic survey of Japan using modern techniques. Writing for Nippon.com, Inō’s biographer, Hoshino Yoshihisa, writes a long introduction to Inō’s life and work that is well worth the read. [Tony Campbell]

For more on the history of Japanese cartography, see Cartographic Japan, a collection of academic essays edited by Kären Wigen, Sugimoto Fumiko and Cary Karacas that was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2016.

Meanwhile, a seventeenth-century map of a legendary Japanese fortress has been discovered in a museum’s collection of paintings, the Asahi Shimbun reports. [WMS]

Scans from a colourful Japanese rail network map from 1936. Because it’s 1936, the map includes Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria. [via]

Oftentimes in Japan, I had no idea where I was going. The moments when I did felt like a perfect alignment of puzzle pieces that made the in-betweens worth it. I imagined myself like those ancient cartographers, trying to make sense of the jumble of crepes and onigiri, shrines and skyscrapers, neon and origami. I made my own maps, rewriting them over the ones I had hastily constructed on the flight over. I began to understand how mapping a place, even sketchily, can feel like owning a piece of it.

Emma Talkoff writes in the Harvard Crimson’s Fifteen Minutes magazine about her encounters with maps new and old during her time in Japan. [via]

An online map of Japanese municipalities that uses census data to measure their relative economic health. [via]