Ino Tadataka

Inō Tadataka (伊能 忠敬 February 11, 1745 - May 17, 1818) was a Japanese surveyor and cartographer. He is known for completing the first map of Japan created using modern surveying techniques.

Inō was born in Kujūkuri, a coastal village in Kazusa Province, in what is now Chiba Prefecture, and was adopted (aged seventeen) by the prosperous Inō family of Sawara (now a district of Katori, Chiba), a town in Shimōsa Province. He ran the family business, expanding its sake brewing and rice-trading concerns, until he retired at the age of 49. At this time he moved to Edo and became a pupil of astronomer Takahashi Yoshitoki, from whom he learned Western astronomy, geography, and mathematics.

In 1800, after nearly five years of study, the Shogunate permitted Inō to perform a survey of the country using his own money. This task, which consumed the remaining seventeen years of his life, covered the entire coastline and some of the interior of each of the Japanese home islands. During this period Inō reportedly spent 3,736 days making measurements (and travelled 34,913 kilometres), stopping regularly to present the Shogun with maps reflecting his survey's progress. He produced a number of detailed maps (some at a scale of 1:36,000, others at 1:216,000) of select parts of Japan, mostly in Kyūshū and Hokkaidō.

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