Viewed Sideways. Donald Richie

are still some signs of disagreement. Naval authorities in Japan and South Korea search ancient maps in an attempt to find precedent to bolster either Japan’s claim to calling the body of water between it and the mainland peninsula the Japan Sea, or Korea’s claim that this same body of water ought to be called the Korean Sea, or at least, in Korean, the East Sea.

      Having observed so much squabbling over borders—for history is a record of little else—one begins to question just what it is that borders mean. The dictionary offers only limited help: a border is a line or frontier separating political divisions or geographic regions, something that indicates a limit or a boundary.

      But borders do more. They not only limit, they also define the area within the borders. Americans who now claim that they are first and foremost Americans are exhibiting that phenomenon. They are defining themselves through their boundaries, having chosen to see self as nationality.

      Nonetheless, that nationality, that self, can be defined only through comparison with other nationalities, other selves. Without the rich the poor could not so rightly define their state; without the powers of darkness or the axis of evil the rightness of a particular belief or a particular political strategy could not be made so apparent. There is nothing sinister in this. It is simply that borders define not only “us” but also “them,” something other, something different, hopefully opposite, against which we may define ourselves.

      Borders thus aid in our predicating who we are since it is only by comparison with a neighbor that we may learn this. Japan is still comparing itself to the continent across the Pacific and not to those other countries nearer at hand. And they, the rest of Asia, are comparing themselves to each other and, increasingly, to Japan as well. This may all end up as stagnant mass-Americanization but at present it is an interestingly roiling batch of emulation and rivalry, of borders physical, political, and metaphorical, of cross-border interactions, of boundaries erected and struck down, and occasionally of exceptional borders as well. “That long frontier from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, guarded only by neighborly respect and honorable obligations”—Winston Churchill was speaking of the U.S.–Canadian border but indicating a possibility, rare in this world of boundaries though it is.

      The example of Japan on which I have predicated this talk does not offer much in the way of possibilities but it does indicate an isolated example of the uses of borders and the employment of boundaries, and some indication as to how we might begin to think of these infuriating, fruitful divisions.

      —2004

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