Asia: Japan “Japan: Teaching Critical Geopolitics in the Imaginary West”

Although Japan is geographically located in Asia, historically and politically, it is recognized as part of the West. However, not only the recent intensification of the rivalry between China and the United States but also economic and technological globalization have made this ambivalent a-geographical identity far more complex and even fragile, despite the Japanese people generally in favor of it. This chapter describes my teaching strategy for a general education course titled “Global Cooperation” in this difficult geopolitical setting. Employing critical geopolitics as the main theory of the course, I invite students to reconsider the imaginative geography of Japan in the West to understand the reality of world politics. In doing so, the course reimagines the global common interest in an increasingly hostile world.