ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the role of geography in an articulation of political subjectivity in international politics. It specifically focuses on ocean in contrast to land, drawing on the modern Japanese experience. In Western geographical traditions, as Phil Steinberg (2001) states, the ocean has been largely perceived as “non-territory,” despite being essential to the construction of territorial states. But is this binary conception of ocean applicable to a country outside of Europe? As one way to address this question, this study examines the historically transforming discourse of the self-identification of the Japanese state and sheds light on the semantic contradiction in Japan’s Pacific Ocean. Though seldom examined in International Relations (IR), the ocean has contributed to the historical construction of Japan, not only as a European-type modern state, but also as a premodern Asian country. In this transition from one world system to another, the ocean in the Japanese geographical imagination has come to be contradictory as the ocean has been perceived as connection and blocking. This chapter demonstrates that this contradiction is not just a Japanese creation, but a product of complex historical interactions between the Japanese self and others.
