Modern Geodesy as Liberal Arts: Spreading Mephisto's Cloak

2021/02/17

My book "A Journey into the History of Modern Surveying," published in 2015, led me to a new world. It became a topic of conversation in fields such as mapping, surveying, earth sciences, and civil engineering within the Faculty of Science and Technology, more so than among the literary scholars I had targeted, and it even led to a connection with the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (GSI).

Goethe, a darling of an era when science and literature coexisted under the name of "philosophy/liberal arts," lamented in his later years that the two had become specialized and parted ways. For me, his name is the magic spell that lightly leaps over the strict boundaries between the humanities and the sciences. However, since my previous book surprised people because "a Goethe scholar wrote a research book on the history of surveying," this time, with the concept of "a story of geodesy that only a Goethe scholar could write," I challenged myself to write a book in a soft style that general readers could also enjoy.

While there are many map enthusiasts and fans of Ino Tadataka, there are few books dealing with the history of geodesy, and those that do exist focus mainly on technical explanations. But the modern spatial awareness and technical environment, led by GPS, were established only recently. This book features many figures fascinated by the shape of the Earth, including Goethe's contemporaries Euler, Gauss, and A. v. Humboldt, as well as the next-generation optical trio of Zeiss, Abbe, and Schott; Daguerre and Nadar of photography; and in Japan, Hisashi Kimura of the Z-term, Aikitsu Tanakadate who also studied at the Juku, and Fusakichi Omori of seismology. I also wove in episodes following Kenji Miyazawa, who visited the Mizusawa Latitude Observatory in Iwate, and Jiro Nitta's "Mt. Tsurugi," as well as Aya Koda's "Kuzure" and the Tateyama Sabo. Seismographs, telescopes, globes, planetariums, photogrammetric plotters, and benchmarks are also important "protagonists."

According to an editor who is a Keio University alumni, a characteristic of this book is that it "becomes a single historical narrative centered on Goethe, reading like a roller coaster." To convey the pleasure of a thrilling read, after much deliberation, I chose "Mephisto's Cloak" as the subtitle. In Goethe's tragedy "Faust," it is the means by which the devil takes the protagonist out of his gloomy study into the outside world, but in fact, the success of "manned flight by hot-air balloon" lies in the historical background.

Following the example of Goethe, who traveled until his later years, why not go on an intellectual time travel with this book, which condenses the vast amount of materials I collected while flying around Japan and abroad? Furthermore, I paid close attention to the quality and binding of the "physical book" so that the illustrations can be seen clearly. Please pick it up and take a look.

Modern Geodesy as Liberal Arts: Spreading Mephisto's Cloak

Aeka Ishihara

Hosei University Press

392 pages, 3,500 yen (excluding tax)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.