Ino Tadataka: Meridian Dreams

Biographical portrait of Ino Tadataka, a Japanese measurer and cartographer. He traversed the length and breadth of Japan on foot for 17 years, starting at age 55, to perform his surveys. The precision of his maps owed much to the fact that he was the first surveyor in Japan to fuse ground measurements with observations of the heavens. He began the work as a private endeavour, but soon earned the Shogunate's trust, transforming it into a national undertaking. His maps were later used for many years as the foundation for maps produced by modern survey techniques.