Hatsusaburō Panoramic Map vs Portolan Chart
初三郎式鳥瞰図 / ポルトラーノ海図
Both sit in Diagrammatic Expression, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Hatsusaburō Panoramic Map
The tourist bird's-eye map style perfected by Hatsusaburō Yoshida: extravagantly curved horizons, exaggerated landmarks and a view that pulls distant cities into one sheet, turning Taishō and Shōwa era travel into pictorial maps.
Portolan Chart
A medieval working sea chart, crossed by radiating rhumb lines. Coastlines and place names run precisely along the vellum while flags and monsters fill the empty water, from a time when a map's usefulness and its ornament had not yet parted.
| Hatsusaburō Panoramic Map | Portolan Chart | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1913–1950s | 13th–17th century |
| Family | Diagrammatic Expression | Diagrammatic Expression |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Curving horizons / Exaggerated landmarks / Extreme wide-angle views / Painterly color | Radiating rhumb lines / Names perpendicular to coasts / The vellum ground / Flags and monsters as ornament |
| Best used for | Conveying a destination's whole layout and access in one enjoyable sheet · Placing distant landmarks on one view by ignoring real distance | Books and exhibitions telling the story of routes or trade as a map · Ornamental maps whose real subject is the memory held in place names |
| Type | Vertical brush lettering for place names, larger for the famous ones | Names packed perpendicular to the coast, key ports raised in red |
| Composition | Curve the horizon strongly and stretch the featured area toward the viewer | Several compass roses with straight lines radiating across the sheet |
| Material | Pale watercolor ground with shrine vermilion and mountain green printed over | Black and red on a vellum ground, flags and monsters in open water |
| Caution | Pushing curve and exaggeration until the order of the route breaks gives a map that is fun to look at and useless on the ground. | Drawing rhumb lines as pattern while ignoring how they answer the roses gives ornament that no longer looks like an instrument of navigation. |