What the World Looks Like by Yukako

“Draw a world map freely as you imagine!!!” How would you write your own world map if you are told to do so? I had never paid careful attention to how the world map looked like before that lesson. There was confusion in my mind at first, and so were there in the other students, I guess. Everyone looked like, “What? How are we supposed to be drawing the world maps all of the sudden?” Writing a world map sounds easy to draw, yet actually it didn’t go easy to me for the first time. The second time drawing went much easier to me.

Through the first observation, all the students emphasized their own countries and drew them much larger than the other countries around. They also didn’t draw their maps in detail. All the drawings seemed to be lack of geographical techniques because everyone drew it with easy shapes, yet they were still remaining their own countries on the maps to be the clearest and the detailed shaping.

How was the second observation? Well, what I observed by taking a look at the other’s maps for the second time drawing appeared to be very interesting to me. Second time drawing could be much easier comparing to the first one since everyone got ideas of how the general world map looked like after the first observation of others’ ones. Everyone drew the map of the world widely on the paper and tried not to focus on only the shapes of the countries they had already known. Besides, the maps of the most students from Japan drew their county with smaller sizes than the sizes for the first time. To be more interesting, more than half students drew the maps with much deeper strength of brushstrokes. That might show that they got better confidence to imagine in how the world map looked like after glancing through the others’ maps for the first time.

After observing all the drawings of the first and the second time, what I found something in common was that we never drew all the same map. The world maps we had drawn never looked the same. I realized there were many ways to draw the world maps meaning I could see the world maps from the other students’ perspectives. I myself drew my country Japan at the center of my map while the other students from the other countries never drew Japan at the center. The overcall observation tells me that there are various ways to express one thing.

Seeking the reasons why we drew the world maps after the observations, I found the importance of imagining the locations in worldwide geographically with wider Imaginations as a student of international relations. I am going to study more about the world internationally in detail. Without the great geographical imagination, you never get into deep understandings in any fields relating to the world wide studying. You can’t even imagine the rest of the world greatly unless you understand how it looks like. You had better be able to imagine the world to consider various kinds of international matters with more deep understanding as well as to broaden your own horizons by getting ideas from the other perspectives.

Those are what I’ve learned from the lesson of the observation of the world map. 

Yukako Ikezoe