The perception of race in Marco Polo’s Medieval travels is a complex and needless to say, very misguided. In particular, I wish to discuss race in Japan and how it corelated with cartography.

 

To begin, Marco Polo’s “adventure” through Japan simply did not happen. The account of the land is horrifically inaccurate and there is no proof other than his own word that he traveled there. The way in which Polo describes Japan is comparable to a fictional land of horror like one from the popular anime series “Attack on Titan (AoT)”. The people of Japan are similar to the titan creatures, an exaggerated, misshapen, gigantic  mutation of humans. These titans live exclusively on an excluded island and eat the regular inhabitants. Similarly, Polo describes most “tribes” of the Japanese as deformed cannibals who are unidentifiable between male and female (again just like the titans in Aot).

I believe that Marco Polo bases his descriptions of the Japanese off of the medieval Mappamudies that would have been circulating throughout Italy in his life time. Most people except for those wealthy enough to travel would never have any exposure to other cultures/races and would only hear about them through stories (like in the bible) or ancient myths like Gog and Magog. In these stories warped adaptations of other races would be put to paper on maps. So even though Marco Polo never went to Japan he still made those claims based on the knowledge he was working with.