Opinion A world of difference By Tony Laszlo	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
世界が違って見えてくる 世界地図か地球儀を手近かに置こう。地理が分かると、新聞のニュースや本をずっと興味深く読めるようになる。

For someone who can get lost while answering the doorbell, I have a pretty good feel for geography. World geography, that is. If you need to find Drammen, Danang or Darfur on a map, I'm your man. You don't need to be especially brainy to have a decent sense of how the world is laid out, though. You do have to look at maps. Regularly. And the only way to do that is to have them readily at hand.

In my workspace, I have a nice big map of the world tacked up on the wall. Of the dozen or so varieties available in Tokyo, I ended up with one in English that puts Europe at the center of the world and has East Asia set off to the right. This is the world view that relegated Japan to the "Far East". It's an odd design for this market, but I guess it's what you get if you go for the map with the most detail.

When I read or hear about a place that I am not familiar with - this happens at least a few times each week - I can very easily step over to my map, pinpoint the location of the place, and burn it into my memory. And each time my eyes happen to fall upon the map from across the room - several times a day - I get a subtle reminder that I'm part of a bigger whole.

Of course, a globe provides a similar service. I'ｖe got one of those, too, set up in a different corner of the room. I guess it helps to remind me that our Earth is constantly spinning. I remember having fun, as a kid, trying to find the town on the globe that was precisely opposite to where I was, and imagining what it would be like to live there.

The Association of Japanese geographers recently found that more than 40 percent of the 3,700 Japanese university and high-school students they surveyed were unable to correctly identify Iraq on a map of the world. Even more concerning, perhaps, was the fact that one in 10 of the university students couldn't locate the neighboring country of North Korea. For high-schoolers, that figure was about one in four. Of course, geographers in other countries lament similar shortcomings in their own populations.

Knowledge of geography is an end, in and of itself. But it is also handy to have when engaging in any kind of business dealings with people outside of your own locality. And while it may not make you the star of the party, it could keep you from putting your foot in your mouth. Most importantly, it leads to greater literacy; it makes reading a newspaper or book much more interesting, and much less tedious. Let's face it, you're not going to be reading those "world news" articles about Brindisi, Bogota and Belfast if you can't create at least a basic image of where those places are in relation to you. And for that you need to make with the maps, or go get a globe.

Shukan ST: March 11, 2005

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