Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the new Museum for Sovereignty and Territory, this paper will examine how Japan is utilizing maps and museums in order to re-articulate its claims to disputed territory. It will show how these bordering practices stabilize Japan's claims, and thus its self-identity.

Paper long abstract:

On 21 January 2020, the Museum for Sovereignty and Territory "re-opened" its doors at a new location in downtown Tokyo. Originally established in a small basement room in early 2018, the sevenfold expansion in floor space available at the new facility has enabled information on the Northern Territories to be added to the initial facilities focus on the Senkaku Islands and Takeshima. The new museum provides a means for the state to legitimate and "homogenize" its claims to these marginal scraps of territory, which are currently disputed between Japan and its three nearest neighbours.

Territorial disputes serve as an important mechanism through which state identity is performed, and innovative bordering practices provide a means of asserting and maintaining state territoriality. Such practices serve as a way for state actors to delineate, reproduce, and sometimes extend the contours of the national body beyond conventional understandings. The disputed territories that are the subject of the new museum are the most "over-determined" areas of Japan's contemporary borderline, serving as repositories for wider discourses surrounding the legitimate boundaries of the nation, with the contested meanings accorded these island spaces both within Japan and beyond its borders serving as proxies within broader discussions occurring with regards to Japan's past actions, its present legitimacy, and future viability.

This paper will focus upon the use of maps and museum displays as bordering practices, and analyse their effects through the lens of ontological security. The paper argues that the articulation of 'inherent territory' has provided a means for states to attempt to stabilize and routinize understandings regarding the state's extent, in response to anxiety generated by their participation in territorial disputes. As these novel bordering practices work to re-assert and re-routinize the stability of the state's claims (and thus its self-identity) both internally and externally, they paradoxically expose their inherent fluidity. In addition, a focus on border practices allows us to unsettle the endogenous/exogenous divide in how ontological security has been understood in IR (Mitzen 2006; Steele 2008).