It was at the beginning of the 17th century that Japanese scholars first began to articulate the notion that a model for political order might be found in the natural and physical world. Emerging from something like a medieval way of thinking and entering one much more politically conscious, Japan -- repeating a pattern experienced by all cultures -- defined "self" for reasons of governance.
At the beginning of that era of hopeful unification known as the Tokugawa period, even highly educated people had very loose notions of what it meant to call oneself "Japanese," since there was no singular concept of "nation" or "state." By the middle of this period, however, there was enough material available to conjure up images of something called "our realm" (honcho), the "entire country" (zenkoku) or "great Japan" (Dai Nihon).
Marcia Yonemoto has given us a history of this waking to the possibility of changing representations of "Japan," a political process that is still going on. She does this through a meticulous examination of the means -- from the earliest cartography (various maps of Japan, all of them partial), through a new kind of travel writing that was based on the cartography, then on to fictive accounts based on the original travel writing.