In preparation for teaching my Japanese Empire module this fall at St Andrews Claude Code and I put together an online interactive map of the Japanese empire. I hope it may be useful to others as well. I made use of various GIS sources available online, but also georeferenced a number of historical maps and tweaked other datasets in consoltation with historical maps. An endless amount of work could be done improving it. I think that is all I have time for this round, but I’d like to add some nice features in the future that would allow for custom sets of layers for particular moments, a “slides” feature that allows you to jump from view to view when explaining something, among other features.
For now, here are some things I find useful with it: You can switch between two moments, 1930 and around December, 1942 to explore each moment. Mouse over anything for more information about it, and click on things to view the more detailed descriptions in the information pane. You can swap between two depictions of Japanese occupation in China (see my last entry). You can shift-select to draw an area you want to zoom in on. When you do pan or zoom about, the URL will update so you can share a link to a particular place. You can show cities, some events, and other labels. When you turn on “administrative” some places will reveal their provinces and prefectures etc. allowing you to explore those. Zooming in closely on islands in the Pacific will load somewhat more detailed shapes for them. Finally, the “Layers” pane offers a few more ways to customize what you see with extra layers, different map projections and
Interactive Map of the Japanese Empire
I’ve tried to keep track of the sources used for the maps here, and the code for the website is here.
Note: while building the website the clanker (Claude Code) added lots of descriptions to entities on the maps. Some may shudder at it, and I’m usually not a fan. However, many of them are not bad, and useful enough I decided to leave them in. There are undoubtedly some issues and hallucinations with them, and I’ve made a number of changes already. These descriptions will be gradually fact checked over the coming months. I welcome feedback.
