Discussions about “geopolitics” have flourished within the field of geography in recent years. In Japan, where geopolitics (chiseigaku) had been associated with empire expansion as well as German Geopolitik, the critical issues in geopolitics were not for their own features, but how they reveal ambivalent aspects of geography in general. In particular, two critical issues in geopolitics, political intentions and subjective interpretations of the world, make us realize that geographical descriptions may inevitably be political.
Today, the term “geopolitics” is not used to designate a branch of study, but has a variety of contents at the general level. In this paper, by referring to the definition of “orientalism” by Said (1978), I suggest the necessity of analyzing geopolitical texts from the standpoint of criticism. An author of a geopolitical text is not an individual subject. Whether (s)he is a politician or an editor of mass media, (s)he represents the government or nation under a wider umbrella of ideology. From such a viewpoint, we could establish a research agenda that critically examines various geographical descriptions under the term “geopolitics.”
