Ukiyo-e “Pictures of the Floating World”

Soon after I posted my One Hundred Famous Views of Edo Map, Keir Clarke posted about another map of Japanese woodblock prints on his Maps Mania blog, well worth a read if you want to learn a bit about Japanese landscape art in the 19th C. It turns out that there are a lot more than Hiroshige’s One Hundred (which are actually 119) and someone had made a map of 297 of these prints across 5 series which had lost its base map and had a couple of other glitches. Keir threw down a challenge “Perhaps Steven could take a sneak peek at the map’s JavaScript, which contains the coordinates of all the woodblock prints featured, and use them to expand the scope of his own map.” “How difficult could that be?”, I thought. I searched Wikipedia and found articles on each of the other series and I used the Ukiyo-e map to get the locations (thanks to whoever made that) and Claude checked every one against Wikipedia and Wikidata. 12 were clearly wrong (e.g. the Naruto Whirlpools sat in Tokyo Bay), so we…