The Japanese Empire

Cities, Events, Administrative boundaries, and other labels - Buttons at the top of the screen allow you to toggle the visibility of cities, some historical events, administrative boundaries for some of the countries shown and other labels. These may be the same in the 1930 and 1942 maps or may differ somewhat.

Which names - Other writes five kinds of name at once: countries and colonies, cities, provinces, places of interest, and seas, mountains and other natural features. They can be had separately. Hold the Other button down for half a second — or option-click it — for a short menu of the five, and the same five rows are under Labels in the Layers pane. Ticking one with Other off turns Other on; unticking the last one turns it off again.

The key as a set of switches - Hold down the year at the top of the key for half a second, or option-click it, and every row that stands for something on the map grows a tick box. Untick Colonies & leased territory and the colonies come off — or press the arrow beside it to open the six out and untick Kwantung alone, leaving Chōsen and Taiwan on. Rows that already have a switch elsewhere — Cities, Events, Places of interest, the rivers, the line of control — are that switch, so the Layers pane follows along. Reset map appears under the list once something has been taken off.

Other Layers - See the Layers pane for options to add or swap out layers to display.

Island Details - Some islands will get swapped out with a more detailed one as you zoom in closer to them.

Train Tools - Open Layers and tick Train Tools under Transport, then zoom in to a railway that has a timetable — Taiwan or Korea. The lines are drawn in the colours the timetable gives them, and a bar at the foot of the map runs the day: press play and the trains move at the rate you choose, from two minutes a second to twenty. Tap a station for the trains that called there, a moving train for what it is and where it is going, or the track itself for the line and a day's working on it — each with a link to its own printed table. On a large screen that table opens over the map rather than in another tab. It reads in English, Chinese or Japanese at the press of a button, and gives each station's reading under its name. Station and line names in the cards follow Use Japanese names: Mandarin with the characters after it by default, the Japanese reading when that is ticked. Taiwan's timetable is February 1936 and Korea's early 1938, neither of them one of this map's two dates. Korea's bar has a box for the lines beyond the peninsula — the Manchurian and Japanese connections and the ferries, drawn as straight lines between cities because their track is not yet sourced — and it is off until you tick it. Zooming back out puts the tools away, and so does the train button beside the zoom controls; the railway stays, drawn plainly in one colour. The button above it marks the stations on any railway you have switched on.

Demography - Open Layers and choose one of the maps under Demography — Korea has three: population density, citizenship, occupation — or press Provinces by Population Density at the foot of any Korean province's card — they are the same switch. The thirteen provinces are shaded by people per square kilometre in five classes, with the figure itself written on each one — dark on the pale bands, white on the deep. Taiwan's fifty-five districts are numbered the same way, the larger ones from the island view and the rest as you zoom in far enough to letter them. A unit the source has no figure for is left white and says so. Which year is drawn follows the map you are on, and the key at the left names it, says where each class begins and gives the source. Point at a province — or, on a phone, tap the country and then the province — for its population, the sex ratio, its share of Korea and its density; the same figures are in the card. Cheju carries Zenranan-dō's, because the 1942 returns count it there and do not break the island out. A Taiwanese 郡 or 市 carries the resident population of its date — the household registers at the end of 1930 on one map and of 1941 on the other — the prefecture it belonged to, and how many of its people were counted as Japanese, Taiwanese, Korean, Chinese or other foreign, and a Taiwanese city dot carries the 市 itself — seven of them in 1930 and eleven in 1941, four of the eleven raised to 市 after the boundaries this map draws, so the shape under those dots is still the district with the city inside it and the card says so. The two dates count the Government-General's demarcated "Aborigine Territory" differently and each card says which: in 1930 the Indigenous Peoples — 「蕃人」 in the source's own word — are counted there and nowhere else, so the fifty-five districts and that territory divide the colony between them exactly; in 1941 the same people are counted again in the district their ground lies in. The territory itself is left white on both, the source giving it no area to divide by. On the 1930 map the card also carries what the Korean census counted: the ages, the household registers and nationalities, and the nine categories of occupation — for the colony, for each province, and for each of the fourteen 府. Every table in that box has a Download CSV under it, and the file carries the figures themselves rather than the screen's wording, with the notes and the source at the foot of it. Population Table under the figures opens the whole column — the colony, then the provinces by size — with the source at the foot. It is one wide table — scroll it sideways for the ages, the registers and the trades, with the names held at the left. Press any column head to sort by it, and again to turn it over; Korea stays at the top, being the total rather than one of the thirteen. Japan has two dates now — the census of 1930 on the 1930 map and the census of 1940 on the December 1942 one — and the 1940 card carries what that census divided its people into: those registered in Japan proper, those registered in the 外地 (1,265,049 of them, most of them Koreans), foreign nationals, and the service personnel, who are counted inside the total rather than beside it. Japan's own card breaks the last two open: the 1,241,315 Koreans, 22,499 Taiwanese, 986 from Karafuto and 249 from the South Seas Mandate, and then every foreign nationality of a hundred or more by name — 19,453 Chinese, 4,755 Americans, 3,787 from Manchukuo, 2,713 Germans, and the 537 White Russians the census counted as a nationality of their own — with the remaining fifty countries in one line. Manchukuo has one map, its population in May 1943, and it is the one place where the shading and the shapes are of different years: the provinces here are traced from a 1935 sheet and there were fourteen of them then, where the May 1943 report has nineteen. Five had been made out of those fourteen in between and none of them out of a single parent, so they cannot be put back — they are in the table with no shape of their own, each card says which of the two years its outline and its figure belong to, and every density is the report's own rather than one worked out over the polygon. The classes are the report's too: it drew this map itself and the key uses its five steps. Six of the fourteen are left blank rather than shaded — 奉天, 安東, 濱江, 龍江, 三江 and 吉林, the six the later provinces were taken out of — because a 1943 density drawn on any of them would spread its people over ground that had stopped being theirs; their cards still carry the population and the sex ratio. At the foot of each table are the other tables — the other date, and the cities — and under them the two dates set against each other on the figures they share, with the change and the percentage worked out. The columns are named for the year the figures are of rather than the map they are drawn on, so Taiwan's reads 1930 and 1941: its later return is the register at the end of 1941. Where the two dates do not count the same thing the same way the table says so, and a row whose two figures are over different ground carries a dagger and an explanation under it — 臺東廳 and 花蓮港廳, which the 1930 return gives as the coastal strip the map draws and the 1941 one as the whole prefecture.

Railways beside the map - Zoom in to ground a railway crossed and a track button appears under the reset, with the station button beside it: Korea's railways over Korea, Taiwan's over Taiwan. It is the same switch as the one in Layers, and it is filled when the line is drawn.

Sugar railways - With Taiwan's railways on and the train tools away, zoom in to the island and a cane-stalk button appears beside the zoom controls. It draws the sugar company lines of 1929: 762 mm plantation track, thousands of kilometres of it across the western plain, under the government railway and much quieter than it.

Annotations - Draw your own marks over the map, name them, describe them and share them. See Drawing your own annotations below.

Links - If you pan or zoom to a location, and copy the URL, it will keep the bounding box information in the link allowing the person you are sharing the link with to view roughly the same location you are looking at. Useful if you want to share a specific view. Click on the page title in the top left to load the default view.

The Japanese Empire

Layers

Labels

Transport

Demography

Projection

Occupied China, Dec 1942

What the map covers

Annotations

Colour scheme

About these layers

About this map

Caution Around the Maps

A Todo List

Sources and credits

Feedback

How to use this map

How to use it

Shortcuts

Drawing your own annotations