Edward Boyle | International Research Center for Japanese Studies (original) (raw)
Articles by Edward Boyle
Asian Geographer, 2021
This article utilizes an interdisciplinary border studies perspective in order to explain the abs... more This article utilizes an interdisciplinary border studies perspective in order to explain the absence of regional integration in Northeast Asia. While in other parts of the world, such as Europe or Southeast Asia, the cessation of the Cold War and increasing cross-border linkages promoted the emergence of integrative institutions and imagined regional communities, this has not occurred in Northeast Asia. Although the region experienced a veritable explosion of cross-border activity in the aftermath of the Cold War, potentially beneficial effects of economic and migratory flows for inter-state relations have not led to comparable success constructing regional institutions. The central issue with which the article is concerned is to understand the role of borders in this marked absence of regional integration. The paper adopts a pluralistic perspective on Northeast Asia’s borders that considers them as institutions existing between states, processes of exchange and mobility over them, and as constituting the region as a borderland space characterized by functionally and spatially extensive contestation over state and regional boundaries. Border studies allow us to analyze the Northeast Asian region from the edges of both its constituent states and the region itself, and thus offers a multi-layered lens through which to examine this space. The historical and comparative analysis conducted here reveals the dynamics of regional development and constraints under which the region operates. The paper suggests that the contrast between the Northeast Asia’s sharp, securitized, internal borders, multiplying into novel spaces, and its undetermined outer ones accounts for the failure to integrate today.
Borders in Globalization Review, 2020
This commentary considers the effects of COVID-19 on the borderland communities of Meghalaya, a h... more This commentary considers the effects of COVID-19 on the borderland communities of Meghalaya, a hill state in Northeast India. Efforts to fence this border have failed to deter informal exchanges with Bangladeshi neighbours, but the national COVID-19 lockdown looks set to shift locals into relations of dependency on and within the nation’s borders, rather than across them.
Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 2020
This paper develops a dialogue between recent scholarship on Asian borderlands, infrastructure, a... more This paper develops a dialogue between recent scholarship on Asian borderlands, infrastructure, and Sino-Indian geopolitical competition. The idea of “infrastructural effects” helps articulate how the ideational and material terrain on which competition between India and China occurs can be understood as an uneven Himalayan borderland through which the two states are both separated and connected. Drawing upon the polyvalent meanings embodied in the concepts of redundancy, resilience, and repair, we use these terms as organizing tropes through which to develop our analysis of infrastructure's position at the intersection of the material and the social. With an empirical focus on Northeast India and Nepal, we highlight how the varied effects of temporality, materiality, and spatiality shape the discourses and practices of infrastructure in borderland spaces.
知っておきたいパラオ ボーダーランズの記憶を求めて, 2020
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, 2020
Japan defined its northern edge against Russia over the course of the 19th century. In earlier pe... more Japan defined its northern edge against Russia over the course of the 19th century. In earlier periods, an area and people known as Ezo marked the northern edge of Japanese state and society, but expansion of both the Russian and Japanese polities brought them into direct contact with one another around the Sea of Okhotsk. Perceptions of foreign threat accelerated Japan’s efforts to map and know Ezo, and shifted understandings of Japan’s northern edge outwards. Maritime routes defined this new northern edge of Japan, and their traces on the map tied distant locales to the national body.
Maritime space was therefore crucial to this expansion in conceptions of the nation, through which the maritime boundary of Japan came to incorporate much of the Ezo region. The mid-century opening of Japan transformed this maritime boundary, which was shaped in the latter half of the 19th century by Japan’s particular situation, even as global and universal concepts were drawn upon to justify its operation. Japan’s participation within international and inter-imperial society conferred upon it the ability to appeal to such concepts for legitimacy, a participation made possible by the state’s efforts to satisfactorily map and administer the boundaries of Japan’s northern edge.
antiAtlas, 2019
In this paper, we examine differences in how fragile borders are perceived by states and those re... more In this paper, we examine differences in how fragile borders are perceived by states and those resident along them. As the current policy of fencing indicates, India is conscious of the fragility of the Bangladesh border in Meghalaya. However, local markets on the border show residents able to mitigate its presence, not through ignoring its existence, but in dialogue with the state's own agents.
Roadsides, 2019
In this photo essay, we examine the laborious circulation of bodies necessary for the development... more In this photo essay, we examine the laborious circulation of bodies necessary for the development of infrastructure in Northeast India. The province of Arunachal Pradesh has been a site of territorial contestation between India and China. Recent years have seen a conscious effort by New Delhi to establish its presence in this frontier province, building roads and hydropower dams, and supplementing military infrastructure to protect its borders. Road development in Arunachal Pradesh materialises the Indian state’s claim to this territory, with connectivity improvements cementing its ties to the national body of India. This is predicated on the movement of labouring bodies to the periphery, who are put to work building the nation at its edges.
Japan Forum, 2019
This essay, introducing the special issue on ‘Borders of Memory’, aims to shed light on the links... more This essay, introducing the special issue on ‘Borders of Memory’, aims to shed light on the links between memory and heritage in contemporary Japan. It does so by examining how heritage sites serve as spaces within which collective memory is both affirmed and contested. Heritage sites enable us to survey the contours of the borders of memory that exist between different memory collectives. An analysis of South Korean and Chinese objections to the Meiji Industrial Sites shows how these heritage sites work as borders of memory, spaces where the competing collective memories of neighbouring East Asian governments and societies clash and rub up against one another. This analysis is then extended to the four articles that make up this special issue. In each case, it is the competing meanings invested in the site, and the struggle over the narrative within which it is incorporated, that results in such sites coming to be demarcated as borders of memory. Understanding these heritage sites as bordered spaces allows us to see such them as being not only where antagonistic collective memories come into contact, but also spaces through which they connect. The existence of such spaces enables the political process of articulating the stories associated with different memory collectives.
Japan’s early modern Tokugawa government (1603−1868) sponsored a series of projects of national m... more Japan’s early modern Tokugawa government (1603−1868) sponsored a series of projects of national mapping. The Matsumae family, ruling what is now Hokkaido, were loosely incorporated into these projects. It was only during the last of these, in the Tenpō era (1830−1848), that their lands were represented in the same manner as the rest of Japan because the central government made the final Matsumae-no-shima map. This article examines the production of this final official map of Japan’s north to argue that the Tokugawa’s institutional mapping made this region part of the nation through its own mapping framework, distinct from the cartographic forms with which national or imperial states are usually associated.
Europa Regional , 2017
Since 2013, Russian Border Security Forces have been constructing border fences at various points... more Since 2013, Russian Border Security Forces have been constructing border fences at various points along the Administrative Boundary Line that separates the de facto state of South Ossetia from the remainder of Georgian territory. This process of 'borderization' materializes what was formerly an administrative fiction on the ground, seeking to territorially demarcate the divide between the two communities. The fence in question has come to be referred to as the 'Little Berlin Wall', inherently comparing some comparatively insubstantial stretches of fencing and barbed wire with the imposing concrete fortifications that served to divide East and West Berlin at the height of the Cold War. This article argues for the utility of the notion of a discursive construction in analysing this border. The notion will be used to clarify how this superficially unjustifiable comparison indicates that the Administrative Boundary Line is both shaped by and restructuring the regional geography of Europe. The invocation of the Berlin Wall emphasizes that this material fencing divides Georgia. The effects of its deployment are felt at various scales, from how this boundary is seen as an illegitimate division of sovereign Georgian territory, to its role in constructing Europe's outer edge. The geographical and temporal division of Tbilisi-controlled Georgia from what lies on the other side of the " illegal " boundary works to incorporate Georgia firmly within Europe. This discursive construction at Europe's outer edge also indicates both the importance of border processes occurring at the margins of a regional geographic entity and how the local, national and wider regional scales are able to be tied together within Europe's post-Cold War borders.
This paper shall examine the process of borderization that has been proclaimed as occurring along... more This paper shall examine the process of borderization that has been proclaimed as occurring along the Georgian-South Ossetian boundary. This boundary is one that remains largely unrecognized, as the claims of the Georgian state to sovereignty over South Ossetia are accepted by the majority of the international community. The crucial exception to this is Russia, under whose aegis this process of borderization is occurring. The result is the creation of a physical barrier around the territory of South Ossetia, one that seeks to materialize what was previously an administrative fiction on the ground, halting the movement of people and goods across this border and dividing people from their livelihoods. The paper shall consider what meaning this fencing has within the context of Georgia's borders, and reflect upon the larger lessons that can be drawn for the concept of sovereignty and the status of borders in the contemporary world.
A renewed focus on the notion of empire has prompted an interest in questions of modern Japanese ... more A renewed focus on the notion of empire has prompted an interest in questions of modern Japanese imperialism after the Meiji Restoration, both in Japan and abroad. It has also focused attention on the issue of comparing empires across Eurasia during the early modern period, under the rubric of ‘global history’. Japan has not really been incorporated into this latter discussion. This article begins by examining the reasons for this lack of incorporation, before moving on to discuss the value of considering early modern Japan as an imperial formation. The lens it adopts is one of cartography, that quintessentially imperial practice that has featured heavily in discussions of a Eurasian early modernity. The article examines the cartographic incorporation of Japan’s northern region of the Yezo into Japan itself, culminating in the area being newly designated as Hokkaido in the early Meiji period, the newest circuit within Imperial Japan’s administrative map. This political outcome was the result of varied practices that found reflection across the Tokugawa–Meiji divide. Yet this intense variety of practices, constantly shifting in response to contingency, served to form the state-effect, through which the land of Yezo was granted its unity and represented on the map. The territory on the map provided the visual, graphic representation of the demarcation of authority of the state that authorized the practice of its own mapping. In this manner, the state mapped itself into Hokkaido and from this perspective, the division between the early modern and modern eras is far less significant than is frequently assumed.
This essay shall examine the period between the delineation of an area known as the ezochi and it... more This essay shall examine the period between the delineation of an area known as the ezochi and its incorporation as Hokkaido by the new Meiji state in 1869, while focusing on the role of cartography in ontologically creating Japan in the early modern era. The general narrative of national modernization has provided the paradigm within which the connections between the state and its cartography have been analyzed, which occludes the manner in which cartographic practice enabled the creation and mobilization of both territory and the state itself. A map must be considered as both “a determined cultural outcome” and as “an element of material culture”, and from this should emerge a critical history of cartographic practice as contingent on social, cultural and technical relations at particular times and places, as operating within a “certain horizon of possibilities”. It is through outlining this ‘horizon’ in the case of the ezochi, and emphasizing that this horizon was not static but shifting over time, that a non-teleological history of the Japanese mapping of this territory becomes possible.
Early Tokugawa cartography served to not only (re)produce and extend ritsuryō Imperial space, but to define a barbarian area outside of this space, known as the ezochi. This is a process of cultural production that serves to authorize itself, that creates the ezochi as a bounded territorial space available for representation while rebounding the territorial authority of the state within this political space. The ezochi is thus rendered extant from both within and without, a cartographic cultural production of a political space that ultimately conceals the politics of its own creation. Keeping the focus consciously comparative shall serve to underline how a study of the cartographic creation of territory by a state has a wider resonance beyond its narrow empirical specificity, while not merely reducing the maps to a marker of something else. The manner in which different states create different territorial spaces, and the way in which different territories are created by the state remains a topic of vital importance.
The history of mapmaking in and of the ezochi is bound up with the spatial ideas that underpinned the maps. The territorial extent over which authority could be claimed and exercised was created on the map, while the knowledge structure within which this mapping was undertaken provided the codes of its own cartographic discourse. This discourse served to structure knowledge claims about territory, allowing knowledge to be made commensurable across the territorial expanse of the state’s claims. In such cartography we note the state effect, the creation of the state through the combined discursive and institutional reflections of its activity. It is through such activity that there emerges a ‘bounded’ society as discursively and institutionally co-structured with the state itself, which enables the state’s policies aimed at the control, regulation and government of the social world. What we see in such cartography is not merely the manner in which the state makes its territory legible, and thus exploitable, by the state, for through the material production of its territory the state makes itself.
This piece seeks to demonstrate that, firstly, cartography cannot be seen as merely a representation of space, but as a means by which spaces are produced. Secondly, I emphasize the importance of appreciating that representation on cartographic material is bound up with culturally-, as well as functionally-, determined spatial ideas, and that a deeper engagement with these fundamental ideas may be required if we are to recontextualize the production of maps within the history of their making. Thirdly, I seek to stress that cartography should not be reduced to merely reflecting greater material, cultural or state forces, but that it has a part in creating the very forces it seeks to represent.
Chapters by Edward Boyle
Heritage, Contested Sites, and Borders of Memory in the Asia Pacific, 2023
This introduction describes the heritage boom that has gripped Asia and the Pacific in recent dec... more This introduction describes the heritage boom that has gripped Asia and the Pacific in recent decades, a result of socio-political change, globalization, and cycles of economic expansion and decline. In this region, too, the rise to prominence of heritage has brought to the fore local, national, and global contestations over the historical narratives and memories which inhere to heritage sites and practices. The intersection of varied actors, networks, and scales of governance at individual sites gives rise to a heritage cut through by borders of memory, which emerge and are redefined over the course of contestation which arises at specific heritage sites, and the larger narratives through which their meaning is made. Drawing on insights from the interdisciplinary border studies field, this introduction asserts the importance of reflecting on heritage as a process within which borders are demarcated, constituted, produced, and policed between different social actors and memory communities. The editors then outline and contextualize the contributions of the individual chapters that make up this volume, which collectively look to interrogate how the significance of heritage sites and practices comes to be contested along their borders of memory.
Geo-politics in Northeast Asia , 2022
Northeast Asia today is largely thought about in relation to the security concerns of its constit... more Northeast Asia today is largely thought about in relation to the security concerns of its constituent states. In this book, however, the importance of these issues is analyzed and filtered through the lens provided by Northeast Asia as an area of study. We refer to this approach as geo-politics in order to highlight the contested political claims made regarding a loosely defined area of the world, or "geo." In this Introduction, we will detail the importance of this framework for understanding Northeast Asia as a region, highlight the significance of the hyphen in both separating and linking the twinned terms of geo and politics together, and show how this approach is distinct from "geopolitics" in either its classical or critical variants.
Geo-politics in Northeast Asia, 2022
![Research paper thumbnail of Illuminating Edges: Borders as Institutions, Process, Space [PROOF]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/65545591/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands, 2021
This chapter highlights developments in border studies useful for analysing the Sino-North Korean... more This chapter highlights developments in border studies useful for analysing the Sino-North Korean boundary. The analytical instruments introduced here are drawn from a variety of work that is relevant to an interdisci-plinary examination of borders, and they collectively provide a series of spotlights able to be directed at particular aspects of this northeast Asian boundary. The border picked out under these lights is an institution that mediates between two sovereign state spaces, one that emerges through a number of practices that reference the linear limits of state sovereignty in an ongoing process of boundary maintenance. The border is therefore dynamic, shaped by a series of distinct, and often contradictory, processes that work to reshape the space of the border itself.
Asian Geographer, 2021
This article utilizes an interdisciplinary border studies perspective in order to explain the abs... more This article utilizes an interdisciplinary border studies perspective in order to explain the absence of regional integration in Northeast Asia. While in other parts of the world, such as Europe or Southeast Asia, the cessation of the Cold War and increasing cross-border linkages promoted the emergence of integrative institutions and imagined regional communities, this has not occurred in Northeast Asia. Although the region experienced a veritable explosion of cross-border activity in the aftermath of the Cold War, potentially beneficial effects of economic and migratory flows for inter-state relations have not led to comparable success constructing regional institutions. The central issue with which the article is concerned is to understand the role of borders in this marked absence of regional integration. The paper adopts a pluralistic perspective on Northeast Asia’s borders that considers them as institutions existing between states, processes of exchange and mobility over them, and as constituting the region as a borderland space characterized by functionally and spatially extensive contestation over state and regional boundaries. Border studies allow us to analyze the Northeast Asian region from the edges of both its constituent states and the region itself, and thus offers a multi-layered lens through which to examine this space. The historical and comparative analysis conducted here reveals the dynamics of regional development and constraints under which the region operates. The paper suggests that the contrast between the Northeast Asia’s sharp, securitized, internal borders, multiplying into novel spaces, and its undetermined outer ones accounts for the failure to integrate today.
Borders in Globalization Review, 2020
This commentary considers the effects of COVID-19 on the borderland communities of Meghalaya, a h... more This commentary considers the effects of COVID-19 on the borderland communities of Meghalaya, a hill state in Northeast India. Efforts to fence this border have failed to deter informal exchanges with Bangladeshi neighbours, but the national COVID-19 lockdown looks set to shift locals into relations of dependency on and within the nation’s borders, rather than across them.
Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 2020
This paper develops a dialogue between recent scholarship on Asian borderlands, infrastructure, a... more This paper develops a dialogue between recent scholarship on Asian borderlands, infrastructure, and Sino-Indian geopolitical competition. The idea of “infrastructural effects” helps articulate how the ideational and material terrain on which competition between India and China occurs can be understood as an uneven Himalayan borderland through which the two states are both separated and connected. Drawing upon the polyvalent meanings embodied in the concepts of redundancy, resilience, and repair, we use these terms as organizing tropes through which to develop our analysis of infrastructure's position at the intersection of the material and the social. With an empirical focus on Northeast India and Nepal, we highlight how the varied effects of temporality, materiality, and spatiality shape the discourses and practices of infrastructure in borderland spaces.
知っておきたいパラオ ボーダーランズの記憶を求めて, 2020
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, 2020
Japan defined its northern edge against Russia over the course of the 19th century. In earlier pe... more Japan defined its northern edge against Russia over the course of the 19th century. In earlier periods, an area and people known as Ezo marked the northern edge of Japanese state and society, but expansion of both the Russian and Japanese polities brought them into direct contact with one another around the Sea of Okhotsk. Perceptions of foreign threat accelerated Japan’s efforts to map and know Ezo, and shifted understandings of Japan’s northern edge outwards. Maritime routes defined this new northern edge of Japan, and their traces on the map tied distant locales to the national body.
Maritime space was therefore crucial to this expansion in conceptions of the nation, through which the maritime boundary of Japan came to incorporate much of the Ezo region. The mid-century opening of Japan transformed this maritime boundary, which was shaped in the latter half of the 19th century by Japan’s particular situation, even as global and universal concepts were drawn upon to justify its operation. Japan’s participation within international and inter-imperial society conferred upon it the ability to appeal to such concepts for legitimacy, a participation made possible by the state’s efforts to satisfactorily map and administer the boundaries of Japan’s northern edge.
antiAtlas, 2019
In this paper, we examine differences in how fragile borders are perceived by states and those re... more In this paper, we examine differences in how fragile borders are perceived by states and those resident along them. As the current policy of fencing indicates, India is conscious of the fragility of the Bangladesh border in Meghalaya. However, local markets on the border show residents able to mitigate its presence, not through ignoring its existence, but in dialogue with the state's own agents.
Roadsides, 2019
In this photo essay, we examine the laborious circulation of bodies necessary for the development... more In this photo essay, we examine the laborious circulation of bodies necessary for the development of infrastructure in Northeast India. The province of Arunachal Pradesh has been a site of territorial contestation between India and China. Recent years have seen a conscious effort by New Delhi to establish its presence in this frontier province, building roads and hydropower dams, and supplementing military infrastructure to protect its borders. Road development in Arunachal Pradesh materialises the Indian state’s claim to this territory, with connectivity improvements cementing its ties to the national body of India. This is predicated on the movement of labouring bodies to the periphery, who are put to work building the nation at its edges.
Japan Forum, 2019
This essay, introducing the special issue on ‘Borders of Memory’, aims to shed light on the links... more This essay, introducing the special issue on ‘Borders of Memory’, aims to shed light on the links between memory and heritage in contemporary Japan. It does so by examining how heritage sites serve as spaces within which collective memory is both affirmed and contested. Heritage sites enable us to survey the contours of the borders of memory that exist between different memory collectives. An analysis of South Korean and Chinese objections to the Meiji Industrial Sites shows how these heritage sites work as borders of memory, spaces where the competing collective memories of neighbouring East Asian governments and societies clash and rub up against one another. This analysis is then extended to the four articles that make up this special issue. In each case, it is the competing meanings invested in the site, and the struggle over the narrative within which it is incorporated, that results in such sites coming to be demarcated as borders of memory. Understanding these heritage sites as bordered spaces allows us to see such them as being not only where antagonistic collective memories come into contact, but also spaces through which they connect. The existence of such spaces enables the political process of articulating the stories associated with different memory collectives.
Japan’s early modern Tokugawa government (1603−1868) sponsored a series of projects of national m... more Japan’s early modern Tokugawa government (1603−1868) sponsored a series of projects of national mapping. The Matsumae family, ruling what is now Hokkaido, were loosely incorporated into these projects. It was only during the last of these, in the Tenpō era (1830−1848), that their lands were represented in the same manner as the rest of Japan because the central government made the final Matsumae-no-shima map. This article examines the production of this final official map of Japan’s north to argue that the Tokugawa’s institutional mapping made this region part of the nation through its own mapping framework, distinct from the cartographic forms with which national or imperial states are usually associated.
Europa Regional , 2017
Since 2013, Russian Border Security Forces have been constructing border fences at various points... more Since 2013, Russian Border Security Forces have been constructing border fences at various points along the Administrative Boundary Line that separates the de facto state of South Ossetia from the remainder of Georgian territory. This process of 'borderization' materializes what was formerly an administrative fiction on the ground, seeking to territorially demarcate the divide between the two communities. The fence in question has come to be referred to as the 'Little Berlin Wall', inherently comparing some comparatively insubstantial stretches of fencing and barbed wire with the imposing concrete fortifications that served to divide East and West Berlin at the height of the Cold War. This article argues for the utility of the notion of a discursive construction in analysing this border. The notion will be used to clarify how this superficially unjustifiable comparison indicates that the Administrative Boundary Line is both shaped by and restructuring the regional geography of Europe. The invocation of the Berlin Wall emphasizes that this material fencing divides Georgia. The effects of its deployment are felt at various scales, from how this boundary is seen as an illegitimate division of sovereign Georgian territory, to its role in constructing Europe's outer edge. The geographical and temporal division of Tbilisi-controlled Georgia from what lies on the other side of the " illegal " boundary works to incorporate Georgia firmly within Europe. This discursive construction at Europe's outer edge also indicates both the importance of border processes occurring at the margins of a regional geographic entity and how the local, national and wider regional scales are able to be tied together within Europe's post-Cold War borders.
This paper shall examine the process of borderization that has been proclaimed as occurring along... more This paper shall examine the process of borderization that has been proclaimed as occurring along the Georgian-South Ossetian boundary. This boundary is one that remains largely unrecognized, as the claims of the Georgian state to sovereignty over South Ossetia are accepted by the majority of the international community. The crucial exception to this is Russia, under whose aegis this process of borderization is occurring. The result is the creation of a physical barrier around the territory of South Ossetia, one that seeks to materialize what was previously an administrative fiction on the ground, halting the movement of people and goods across this border and dividing people from their livelihoods. The paper shall consider what meaning this fencing has within the context of Georgia's borders, and reflect upon the larger lessons that can be drawn for the concept of sovereignty and the status of borders in the contemporary world.
A renewed focus on the notion of empire has prompted an interest in questions of modern Japanese ... more A renewed focus on the notion of empire has prompted an interest in questions of modern Japanese imperialism after the Meiji Restoration, both in Japan and abroad. It has also focused attention on the issue of comparing empires across Eurasia during the early modern period, under the rubric of ‘global history’. Japan has not really been incorporated into this latter discussion. This article begins by examining the reasons for this lack of incorporation, before moving on to discuss the value of considering early modern Japan as an imperial formation. The lens it adopts is one of cartography, that quintessentially imperial practice that has featured heavily in discussions of a Eurasian early modernity. The article examines the cartographic incorporation of Japan’s northern region of the Yezo into Japan itself, culminating in the area being newly designated as Hokkaido in the early Meiji period, the newest circuit within Imperial Japan’s administrative map. This political outcome was the result of varied practices that found reflection across the Tokugawa–Meiji divide. Yet this intense variety of practices, constantly shifting in response to contingency, served to form the state-effect, through which the land of Yezo was granted its unity and represented on the map. The territory on the map provided the visual, graphic representation of the demarcation of authority of the state that authorized the practice of its own mapping. In this manner, the state mapped itself into Hokkaido and from this perspective, the division between the early modern and modern eras is far less significant than is frequently assumed.
This essay shall examine the period between the delineation of an area known as the ezochi and it... more This essay shall examine the period between the delineation of an area known as the ezochi and its incorporation as Hokkaido by the new Meiji state in 1869, while focusing on the role of cartography in ontologically creating Japan in the early modern era. The general narrative of national modernization has provided the paradigm within which the connections between the state and its cartography have been analyzed, which occludes the manner in which cartographic practice enabled the creation and mobilization of both territory and the state itself. A map must be considered as both “a determined cultural outcome” and as “an element of material culture”, and from this should emerge a critical history of cartographic practice as contingent on social, cultural and technical relations at particular times and places, as operating within a “certain horizon of possibilities”. It is through outlining this ‘horizon’ in the case of the ezochi, and emphasizing that this horizon was not static but shifting over time, that a non-teleological history of the Japanese mapping of this territory becomes possible.
Early Tokugawa cartography served to not only (re)produce and extend ritsuryō Imperial space, but to define a barbarian area outside of this space, known as the ezochi. This is a process of cultural production that serves to authorize itself, that creates the ezochi as a bounded territorial space available for representation while rebounding the territorial authority of the state within this political space. The ezochi is thus rendered extant from both within and without, a cartographic cultural production of a political space that ultimately conceals the politics of its own creation. Keeping the focus consciously comparative shall serve to underline how a study of the cartographic creation of territory by a state has a wider resonance beyond its narrow empirical specificity, while not merely reducing the maps to a marker of something else. The manner in which different states create different territorial spaces, and the way in which different territories are created by the state remains a topic of vital importance.
The history of mapmaking in and of the ezochi is bound up with the spatial ideas that underpinned the maps. The territorial extent over which authority could be claimed and exercised was created on the map, while the knowledge structure within which this mapping was undertaken provided the codes of its own cartographic discourse. This discourse served to structure knowledge claims about territory, allowing knowledge to be made commensurable across the territorial expanse of the state’s claims. In such cartography we note the state effect, the creation of the state through the combined discursive and institutional reflections of its activity. It is through such activity that there emerges a ‘bounded’ society as discursively and institutionally co-structured with the state itself, which enables the state’s policies aimed at the control, regulation and government of the social world. What we see in such cartography is not merely the manner in which the state makes its territory legible, and thus exploitable, by the state, for through the material production of its territory the state makes itself.
This piece seeks to demonstrate that, firstly, cartography cannot be seen as merely a representation of space, but as a means by which spaces are produced. Secondly, I emphasize the importance of appreciating that representation on cartographic material is bound up with culturally-, as well as functionally-, determined spatial ideas, and that a deeper engagement with these fundamental ideas may be required if we are to recontextualize the production of maps within the history of their making. Thirdly, I seek to stress that cartography should not be reduced to merely reflecting greater material, cultural or state forces, but that it has a part in creating the very forces it seeks to represent.
Heritage, Contested Sites, and Borders of Memory in the Asia Pacific, 2023
This introduction describes the heritage boom that has gripped Asia and the Pacific in recent dec... more This introduction describes the heritage boom that has gripped Asia and the Pacific in recent decades, a result of socio-political change, globalization, and cycles of economic expansion and decline. In this region, too, the rise to prominence of heritage has brought to the fore local, national, and global contestations over the historical narratives and memories which inhere to heritage sites and practices. The intersection of varied actors, networks, and scales of governance at individual sites gives rise to a heritage cut through by borders of memory, which emerge and are redefined over the course of contestation which arises at specific heritage sites, and the larger narratives through which their meaning is made. Drawing on insights from the interdisciplinary border studies field, this introduction asserts the importance of reflecting on heritage as a process within which borders are demarcated, constituted, produced, and policed between different social actors and memory communities. The editors then outline and contextualize the contributions of the individual chapters that make up this volume, which collectively look to interrogate how the significance of heritage sites and practices comes to be contested along their borders of memory.
Geo-politics in Northeast Asia , 2022
Northeast Asia today is largely thought about in relation to the security concerns of its constit... more Northeast Asia today is largely thought about in relation to the security concerns of its constituent states. In this book, however, the importance of these issues is analyzed and filtered through the lens provided by Northeast Asia as an area of study. We refer to this approach as geo-politics in order to highlight the contested political claims made regarding a loosely defined area of the world, or "geo." In this Introduction, we will detail the importance of this framework for understanding Northeast Asia as a region, highlight the significance of the hyphen in both separating and linking the twinned terms of geo and politics together, and show how this approach is distinct from "geopolitics" in either its classical or critical variants.
Geo-politics in Northeast Asia, 2022
Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands, 2021
This chapter highlights developments in border studies useful for analysing the Sino-North Korean... more This chapter highlights developments in border studies useful for analysing the Sino-North Korean boundary. The analytical instruments introduced here are drawn from a variety of work that is relevant to an interdisci-plinary examination of borders, and they collectively provide a series of spotlights able to be directed at particular aspects of this northeast Asian boundary. The border picked out under these lights is an institution that mediates between two sovereign state spaces, one that emerges through a number of practices that reference the linear limits of state sovereignty in an ongoing process of boundary maintenance. The border is therefore dynamic, shaped by a series of distinct, and often contradictory, processes that work to reshape the space of the border itself.
Mapping Empires: Colonial Cartographies of Land and Sea, 2020
In 1876, an American by the name of Benjamin Smith Lyman submitted to the Japanese government a g... more In 1876, an American by the name of Benjamin Smith Lyman submitted to the Japanese government a geological map of 'Yesso', which had been compiled under his direction. This map displayed the assumed stratigraphy of Hokkaido, in northern Japan, and is considered the first modern geological map to be produced by an Asian state. This provided a new means of comprehending territory, at exactly the moment the land in question was being represented as Hokkaido. The strata exhumed in the course of mapping this land at depth were not limited to those under the earth. The map was assembled atop a history of Japanese control over the region, one which accounted for the precocious presence of an earlier American survey, conducted under the previous Tokugawa government, which had sought to map mineral deposits in this land of Yesso. These in turn reflected a longer history of mineral extraction, present in the earliest accounts of Ezo, and a motivation for Japan to have long 'held the reins' over this amorphous region. The 1876 geological map is a striking example of colonial modernity, through which we are able to observe the institutional mimicry characteristic to, and increasingly emphasized in the study of, late-nineteenth century inter-imperial society. The presence of this map challenges us to recover the various strata atop of which this imperial sociability was able to flourish, and examine the role of the map in incorporating a modernizing Japan within a globally-comprehensible means of territorial authority and control.
The border serves as a site for formal and informal structures of interaction and exchange, with ... more The border serves as a site for formal and informal structures of interaction and exchange, with various actors and processes complimenting, contesting and overlapping in their functions and priorities. The fencing of the 4096km border between India and Bangladesh has proceeded at a steady pace over the last decade, and construction is due to begin along one section of the boundary in the state of Meghalaya. Since partition, life on either side of this borderline has involved relatively free movement across the national boundary, but there is strong support in principle on the Indian side for the fencing project. However, local concerns over losses of land and trade opportunities across the border are only being partially assuaged by Delhi. While the national government’s desire to encourage cross-border trade and economic corridors finds local reflection in the much-trumpeted border haats, or cross-border markets, their establishment depends on the border trade having been recognized in the first place. Yet most of this trade occurs without the knowledge of the national government, although with the connivance of its local officials. A close examination of the political processes shaping the operation of this border policy reveals both the national government’s desire to simplify its own edges and the multi-layered and contradictory manner in which this policy finds implementation at the border itself. This paper examines how the multi-layered infrastructure of border management impacts upon both local political processes and cross-border connectivity.
The Tokugawa era (1603–1868) witnessed a dramatic expansion in the creation and circulation of ma... more The Tokugawa era (1603–1868) witnessed a dramatic expansion in the creation and circulation of maps, which moved from being comparatively rare items at the beginning of the period to banal objects of mass-circulation at the end. Yet the shape of Japan being represented on these maps was greatly altered over the course of this period, particularly with regards to the amorphous area north of Japan, known as Ezo. This transformation in geographical representation similarly affected visions of Japan held beyond its shores, which were partially the product of an increasingly, if punctuated and inconsistent, global circulation of geographic materials in comprehensible forms.
The geography of these northern areas of Japan was gradually clarified by the early nineteenth century, as European efforts at mapping the region were combined with the results of a succession of Tokugawa state-sponsored exhibitions that explicitly aimed to increase the state’s knowledge of its diffuse northern reaches. It will be argued here that the relational aspect of cartographic exchange is crucial to the demarcation of this territory as being Japanese and under the authority of the Tokugawa state. Greater appreciation for the exchange involved in cartographic territorial creation not only allows for the transnational process of state demarcation to be recovered, but also hints at the inherently relational nature of the imperial sovereignty that came to literally remap vast areas of the globe during the nineteenth century.
Введение в исследования границ, 2015
В этой главе будет дан краткий обзор государственных границ в Азии. Поэтому первая наша задача со... more В этой главе будет дан краткий обзор государственных границ в Азии. Поэтому первая наша задача состоит в том, чтобы определить, что следует считать границами самой Азии, так как ее положение как «Другого» Европы часто принимается за нечто само собой разумеющееся. Названные термины берут свое начало в Древней Греции, отсылая к двум берегам водных путей, соединяющих Мраморное море с Босфором, Черным и Азовским морями, и как заметил Тойнби, «ошибка географа заключается здесь в попытке перевести утилитарный элемент навигационной номенклатуры на язык политики и культуры» 1 . Аргументы географов XIX в., таких как Александр фон Гумбольдт и Оскар Пешель, в пользу того, что Европа была лишь продолжением Азии, показывают, что это разделение является произвольным, но натурализовавшимся благодаря многократному использованию. Именно путем такой натурализации Европа в значительной степени вытеснила понятие «христианского мира» как «сплоченного культурного региона» 2 .
Ongoing arguments over how histories are honoured – as evidenced by the conflict between South Ko... more Ongoing arguments over how histories are honoured – as evidenced by the conflict between South Korea and Japan over the opening of Tokyo's Heritage Information Centre in June 2020 – reveal the extent to which heritage processes enable states to assert legitimacy and power on a global stage. Here, Contesting Memorial Spaces of Japan's Empire shines a timely spotlight on the complicated histories and disputed legacies of various sites associated with Japan's empire in Asia and the Pacific.
Bringing together a team of international scholars, this transnational study sees contested memorial spaces as windows for us to explore how borders are created, moved and altered in everyday life. From the Asan Bay Overlook Memorial Wall in Guam and the Puppet Emperor Palace in China to Japan's Ainu Museum and the Cowra War Cemetery in Australia, the diverse range of case studies examined here foreground the complex relationship Japan and its neighbours have with their imperial past and reveal how these relations stand at the intersection of individual actions, societal choices and memory collectives. In doing so, this innovative collection of essays bridges history, geography and heritage studies to provide an invaluable new approach to the study of imperial conflict and memory politics in modern Japan.
Geo-Politics in Northeast Asia focuses on the dynamics of Northeast Asia as a region. The chapter... more Geo-Politics in Northeast Asia focuses on the dynamics of Northeast Asia as a region. The chapters in this book offer a nuanced approach for understanding the geo-politics of this strategically critical area of the world.
Focusing on China, Japan, Russia, and the Koreas, as well as the involvement of the United States, the contributors to the volume offer a timely and critical analysis of Northeast Asia. They collectively emphasize the different scales at which the region holds significance, and particularly note how the region is often granted significance by local political forces as well as national interests. Borderlands and sub-regions are especially important in this perspective, and the contributors show both how regionalism influences the people living in these areas and how they in turn shape the political priorities of states. At the same time, the worsening of relations between Japan and the Koreas and the increasing assertiveness of both China and Russia make it essential to understand the dynamics of the region, as well as how they have changed during and following the Trump era.
Geo-Politics in Northeast Asia is essential reading for students and scholars of Political Geography, International Relations and Strategic Studies, as well as for those with a research focus on Northeast Asia, or the wider Asia-Pacific and Indo-Pacific regions.
Textbook, prepared by an international team of authors, represents the first systematic attempt t... more Textbook, prepared by an international team of authors, represents the first systematic attempt to cover in training purposes such a vast subject area of modern scientific knowledge as border studies. Chapters of the book tell the history of the development of border studies and their methodologies, the essence and variety of types of social boundaries, transborder relations and related regional processes, specificity of border and transborder policies. One section of the textbook provides an overview of the condition and functioning of state borders in all major regions of the world.
The publication is intended for students studying problems of social boundaries, as well as for researchers and practitioners, all those whose interests are related to this scientific field.
appearing in the CHINA REPORT 51 : 4 (2015), pp. 347-350
Roadsides, 2019
This second collection of Roadsides employs artistically rendered depictions of labor to show how... more This second collection of Roadsides employs artistically rendered depictions of labor to show how infrastructures become political and material things through social relations of work. Aesthetically creative and methodologically experimental, the articles utilize photographs, paintings, cartoons, and videos to examine and reveal the impacts and experiences of technological intervention that sometimes escape the frame of textual analysis. Taking up the challenge of labor across a range of scales and places, the collection moves from Nepal and India’s Himalayan borderlands to the Paraguayan Chaco, downtown London to the deserts of Sudan, and urban Sri Lanka to Afghanistan’s Wakhan highlands to illustrate many of the inevitable cracks in the dreams of infrastructural pasts and futures.