Representing Japan
The work here grows out of my doctoral research, which was conducted at Hokkaido University and examined the early modern geographical imagination of the ezochi, the amorphuous region to Japan's north which would be colonized through the expansion of the Russian and Japanese states. The portion of this region claimed by Japan was that associated with and inhabited by the Ainu people, and is today referred to as Hokkaido.
My interest was in analyzing early modern Japan's awareness of this space as an outcome of situated methods and practices of spatial cognition, rather than resulting from a (putatively) modern mode of surveying. The emergence and demarcation of the 'land of the ezo' in Japan occured on the basis of information circulating within and among the subjects and intellectuals of not only the Tokugawa, but also the Qing, Russian, Dutch, French, English, American, and other imperial formations. It was this transborder circulation of materially-mediated geographical knowledge which enabled the creation and demarcation of an ezo space, which was made real even as its indigenuous inhabitants were geo-graphed out of existance over the course of this inter-imperial exchange of information.
Please see the publications below for more details. Monograph perpetually forthcoming.
Mapping of the Maritime Boundaries at Japan’s Northern Edge in the 19th Century, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (Oxford University Press, 2020) DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.412
Sketching Layers in Japan: Mineral wealth, geo-bodies and imperial territory, in Alexander Kent et al. (eds.), Mapping Empires: Colonial Cartographies of Land and Sea (Springer, 2020), 3–22 DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-23447-8_1
The Tenpō-Era (1830–1844) Map of Matsumae-no-shima and the Institutionalization of Tokugawa Cartography, Imago Mundi 70.2 (2018), 183–198 DOI: 10.1080/03085694.2018.1450542
Cartographic Exchange and Territorial Creation: Rewriting Northern Japan in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, in Altic, Demhardt & Vervust (eds.), Dissemination of Cartographic Knowledge (Springer, 2018), 75–98 DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-61515-8_6
Mapping Ezo: Representing the extent of Japan prior to the modern era, IMCoS 154 (2018), 31–40
Imperial Practice and the making of modern Japan’s territory: Towards a reconsideration of Empire’s boundaries, Geographical Review of Japan (Series B), 88.2 (2016), 66–79 DOI: 10.4157/geogrevjapanb.88.66
「徳川幕府による蝦夷地の創造 : 国家、領域及び地図」『北大法学論集』第63巻2号、2012年、178[179]－139[218]項 http://hdl.handle.net/2115/49790