Shigeru Kobayashi 小林茂, Gaihōzu: Teikoku Nihon No Ajia Chizu 外邦図—帝国日本のアジア地図 [Pictures of Foreign Countries: Japanese Empire's Maps on Asia]

InGaihōzu, professional geographer Shigeru Kobayashi depicts the history of Japan’s map-making activity deployed outside of its current boundary. Starting as the “modernization” of cartographic practices, or catching up to the “global standard,” it subsequently expanded over the Japanese Archipelago and culminated in 1945, when its territory shrank and former maps drawn by the Empire were redefined as “pictures of foreign countries.” In this book, the trained geographer shedsmore light on geographic practices, with ample illustrations and detailed episodes, than geopolitical discourses. However, according to Thongchai Winichakul, it is the modern geographical knowledge and technology that constructed the boundaries of/between nation-states as cultural/political artifacts (Winichakul 1994). In this regard, science and technology studies (STS) scholars could read the geographical knowledge-making practices described in this book from their own perspectives, possibly focusing more on the dynamic interactions between knowledge and politics. The first step for the Japanese cartographic regime tomove overseaswasmapping a neighboring terra incognita, the Korean Peninsula, and transforming it into a scientifically understandable territory. A seawater survey of 1875 deployed by the Japanese Navy, which the author calls a forcible but modern survey brought into the East Asian spaces, finally led to an unequal treaty between the Japanese andKorean governments. In the inland regions, according to Kobayashi, cartographic reconnaissance faced more difficulties than did coastal surveying. However, changes in the international relationships in East Asia since the 1880s have enabled Japanese military officers to explore the peninsula and to survey on location. More often than not, to paraphrase D. Graham Burnett (2000), surveyors find themselves outside of their own boundaries. Kobayashi shows that more than a few surveyors were murdered in Korean and/or Chinese fields by infuriated inhabitants,