In Gaihözu, 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 sheds more 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.
