The Points and Lines of Japan’s North China Occupation, 1942

Anyone making a map of the Japanese occupation of China, or more generally of the wartime Japanese empire as a whole has a few ways they can go about it. The first and most common option is to depict the geographical expanse of Japanese control in the form of a mostly unbroken field of controlled territory as we see in Image 1 below, found in the Wikipedia entry for the empire of Japan. This approach has the advantage of simplicity and allows the viewer to consider a broader view of the scene without much clutter. The downside, however, is that it gives viewers who are less familiar with the reality of heavily contested military occupations like that of Japan in China the illusion that the war exists predominantly along the line where colors meet. It hides the reality of military occupations that are, for the most part, thin on the ground beyond a series of “points and lines” centered on larger settlements, strategically located garrisons, and the communication and transportation…