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 outcome of Japan's own methods and practices of spatial cognition, rather than resulting from a (putatively) modern mode of surveying. The emergence of the 'land of the ezo' in Japan occured on the basis of information which circulated within and among the subjects and intellectuals of the Qing, Russian, Dutch, French, English, American, and other imperial formations, as well as Tokugawa Japan. This transborder circulation of geographic information enabled the creation and demarcation of an ezo space, whose existance was recognized 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

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