Map education can be divided into three fields, i. e. map-reading, map-drawing and map-making. This paper is aimed at clarifying the development of map education in primary schools during the first half of the Meiji era, until 1886.
Since the beginning of compulsory education, map education has been achieved by the exchange of questions and answers between the teacher and pupiles and by using a blank map designed to enable pupiles to memorize place names.
The teaching of map-drawing was started a little later than that of map-reading, in 1876, when the book “HOW TO DRAW MAPS” was published by the Ministry of Education.
Teaching of map-making started even later than that of map-reading and map-drawing, in 1877-1887, when the concept of developmental education was introduced into Japan from Europe and the United States.
The concepts of teaching map-reading, map-drawing and map-making were completed in the first half of the Meiji era. However, this idea, which was imported from Europe and the United States, seems incompatible to the backward content of Japanese school text-books and the actual situation of school teaching in Japan.
In order to clarify the actual situation of the map education provided in those times, it is necessary to collect more detailed data related to the school education in that days.

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Since the latter half of 1970s, especially in the 1980s, measures to cope with the accelerated internationalization of the Japanese economy and society have been discussed in the various fields, inculding education. In the case of education, for example, the measures along with those to meet the information-oriented society were the points at issue in the Curriculum Council held from 1985 to 1987. The reform of the curriculum proposed in its final report, which contains the dismantlement of the subject “Social Studies” in the high school curriculum, is grounded on those measures, too.
Under these circumstances one problem is to examine the reasonability of the reported curriculum reform, another is to clarify the actual conditions of the Japanese pupils' perceptions of the foreign countries or international understanding.
This study is, to approach the latter problem, intended to analize the perceptions and factual knowlege of Japanese pupils about the USSR compared with those of British pupils, the survey report of which has been published by M. Worster, S. Lawrence and S. Lugg in “Teaching Geography”.
This study draws the following conclusions: Firstly, both Japanese and British pupils have fairly low levels of factual knowlege about the USSR, the contents of which show certain differences between them. Secondly, pupils in both countries have similar stereotyped perceptions and images of the USSR and its people, with differences in their details among three age groups. Thirdly, their perceptions and images in both countries relate closely with the information supplied by the media about the USSR. At the same time, it seems that Japanese pupils are more susceptible to the media-based information than their counterparts in Britain.

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