"War," someone has said, "is God's way of teaching Americans geography."
That I can name the countries that border Vietnam on the west, and more than one city in Iraq, and the approximate latitude of Seoul, South Korea--all evidence for the claim. But for me natural disasters work pretty well, too. I've been studying the map of Japan lately and can add, for example, Sendai to my list of Japanese cities, one that was formerly "filled" by Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Sapporo (host of the 1972 Winter Olympics and, I see now, to my surprise, having consulted Wikipedia, "the fifth largest Japanese city by population").
Anyway, I can tell, just from studying Google maps, especially the satellite pictures, that my conceptions about Japan are all wrong. For example, there is a lot of empty green space between towns, many of which are plainly small villages. And the pictures on TV give the lie to the view that the people are corporate automatons, the country just "Japan, Inc."
Susan Orlean develops the idea.
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