The bronzed Great Buddha of Kamakura or Kamakura Daibutsu (February 2018).
Cartography, the process of creating maps, is both science and art. The right balance between these two very different disciplines is what makes a ‘good’ map.
The following slideshow gives you an insight into the 4-year apprenticeship that a Swiss cartographer had to go through 40 years ago. During the entrance exam to become a cartographer at my future employer, orell füssli, I had to draw the Kamakura Daibutsu in pencil. More than 30 years later I saw the Buddha with my own eyes. Unbeknownst to me (or not?), I was already in contact with Japan back then …
And so for over 30 years I had the privilege of working with the cartographic legacy of Eduard Imhof at orell füssli, and later as a partner and co-owner at Orell Füssli Kartographie AG in Zurich. I was project manager for digital cartography and pre-press for his Swiss school maps and the Swiss World Atlas for secondary schools for all those years. His design ideas have shaped me as a cartographer, and his ideas still guide my work, including my maps for Japan.
Surveying all the areas for the hiking maps myself would be extremely challenging and so I depend on reliable and accurate basic data from third-parties. The majority of this data can be obtained from GSI Japan, the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan. Anyone can download map data from the GSI website for a small fee. Unfortunately, the quality of this data is inconsistent and infrequently updated. For example, the position of a certain road can be off by up to 20 metres or a certain area might not have been updated in the past 10 years. This applies especially to rural areas far from the large urban centres, i.e. precisely the areas which are the focus of my hiking maps. The GSI seems to concentrate its efforts on densely populated areas; in a country as large as Japan, this is understandable to some extent.
Here, my honour as a cartographer demands I step in to rectify these shortcomings. The most important source of information for the maps I’m creating are the bloggers who write the hike descriptions. However, their information is naturally focussed on the route of the hike, i.e. only a small part of the map. However, I’m interested in the whole area surrounding the hiking route. I use all the sources of information that the Internet has to offer; be it satellite images from Google, Bing and Mapbox; well-known hiking portals in Japan such as Yamap or Yamareco; Japanese portals such as Navtime or Yahoo Japan (e.g. for bus routes and bus stops); blogs and websites of other hikers; information from local tourist offices and much more. This is because a “good” map always requires proper and thorough research, not only for the path along which you are hiking, but right up to the furthest corners of the map. I rarely use OpenStreetMap, and only as a last resort, as their data is often inaccurate, incorrect, or lacking information for the area I need.
The following two images (click to enlarge) show the sometimes unreliable nature of GSI data. On the left image a section of the map ‘Inazawa Hiking Trail 稲沢ハイキングコース Hiking Map (Kanto, Japan) 1:15,000’ with digitised roads and houses in pink based on Google satellite image data, and in black lines the GSI data.
The image on the right shows a section of the map ‘Kenashi-yama 毛無山 Hiking Map (Chubu, Japan) 1:25,000’ in progress, with footpaths from GSI data in red and data from Yamap users (GPX data) in black.
This whole process, from determining how much area needs to be shown on the map, downloading and processing the map data, visualising the data, making adjustments and corrections, adding the hiking information to the finished map product, can take from 25-30 hours to over 80 hours (e.g. for the Buko-san map), depending on the map size and content.
For creating the maps I use three different software programmes: the free and open-source GIS software QGIS (e.g. for generating the first version of the shadow relief), the commercial cartography software Avenza MAPublisher® for importing, processing and exporting the data, and finally Adobe Illustrator for general cartography work.
The following example is an extract of the published map ‘Hirao Fuji 平尾富士 Hiking Map (Chubu, Japan) 1:10,000’ (revision status May 2024) and shows the original GSI map no. 543834 (1:25,000; revision status 2022), Google satellite image with GSI road axes and finished map from The Hokkaido Cartographer:
But in the end mistakes can never be completely avoided, also from my side. Therefore this process also depends on you, the users of the maps! Please write to me if you find incorrect information in using the contact form on the Contact Us page.
If you are wowed by the product, or have even used it to conduct an unforgettable outdoor experience, please consider making a donation on my Ko-fi page; as the name suggests, even the price of a cup of coffee would be very appreciated. By doing this, you will help keep this site running and enable me to continue creating maps. Thank you very much!
In any case, it is always a great pleasure to see how the caterpillar, the GSI data, turns into a beautiful butterfly, a map created by The Hokkaido Cartographer for JAPANWILDS.
A comparison between GSI map no. 543900 (1:25,000; revision status 2021/22) and Japanwilds ‘Happu-san 破風山 Hiking Map (Kanto, Japan) 1:25,000‘ (revision status March 2024).
