午夜剧场

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

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

While there are many map lovers and fans of Tadataka Ino, there are few books that deal with the history of geodesy, and those that do exist focus mainly on technical explanations. However, the establishment of modern spatial recognition and technical environments, led by GPS, is a recent development. 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 fame, and within 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's visit to the Mizusawa Latitude Observatory and Jiro Nitta's "Mt. Tsurugi," as well as Aya Koda's "Kuzure" and the Tateyama Sabo erosion control works. Seismographs, telescopes, globes, planetariums, plotting machines, and benchmarks are also important "protagonists."

According to the editor, a 午夜剧场 alumni, the characteristic of this book is that it "becomes a single historical narrative centered on Goethe, making it read like a roller coaster." To convey the thrill of the reading experience, after much deliberation, I chose "Mephisto's Mantle" as the subtitle. In Goethe's tragedy "Faust," it is the means by which the devil takes the protagonist out of his gloomy laboratory into the outside world, but it is actually set against the historical background of the success of "manned flight by hot-air balloon."

Following the example of Goethe, who traveled until his later years, I flew around Japan and abroad to condense a vast amount of collected materials into this single volume. Why not embark on an intellectual time travel? Furthermore, I paid close attention to the quality and binding of the "physical book" so that the illustrations appear clearly. Please do pick up a copy and take a look.

Aeka Ishihara

Hosei University Press

392 pages, 3,500 yen (excluding tax)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time this magazine was published.