This reminds me I'm long overdue to read Hudson's "Conjuring Up Prehistory: Landscape and the Archaic in Japanese Nationalism."

I have re-edited this book and it is now ready for publication.

八郎湖 of course not really existing anymore! For anyone who isn't aware of this, they filled it in.

Material certainly circulated more readily when there was no international copyright convention! I attached a version of the 1864(3?) map below. The significant difference in map-making quality really stands out, but of course this atlas was kind of a "gold standard."

As you can surmise from these screenshots, genealogy making was an act of historical myth making, erasing less prestigious elements of backgrounds in favor of more lofty connections. As Spafford notes, this happened well before Tokugawa took power and was common amongst clans.

I will post some relevant parts here though.

This the original. He does skip entire bits (though this is the 1943 ed. maybe the one he is working off is different) For instance it is not Suzuki that says "I agree" prior to Nishida's remark but Kosaka in response to Suzuki responding to Koyama, but the Suzuki remark does not appear in Williams.