We Are All “sort of” Flat-Earthers

 “How the maps we grow up with quietly shape our sense of the world.”

I grew up in Japan, and the world map I knew as a child looked very different from the one most people abroad are used to seeing.

Japan sits proudly in the middle, the Pacific Ocean stretches wide to the right with the United States beyond it, while the vast Eurasian continent unfolds to the left.

When I was in middle school, I was fascinated by the late Edo period — that turbulent time when Japan opened its doors to the world. The arrival of the Black Ships, the cry of “Revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians,” the clash between isolation and modernization — it all felt alive to me.

During lunch breaks, I would bury myself in the library, devouring books about that era. Through those pages, I could almost feel the heat of that age, the pulse of young men waiting for dawn with swords in hand, even the scent of iron and blood in the air.

…Until I got used to something.

That “something” was a different kind of map —
the Eurocentric world map.

this is what’s considered the “standard” world map.

In that version, Europe sits at the heart of the world. The Americas spread across the center like a great axis, and Japan appears as a small scattering of islands at the far right edge of the sea.

 Once I became accustomed to that image, something in my perception changed.

The era I had once felt so vividly — the passionate chaos of Japan’s transformation — suddenly seemed like a minor skirmish that took place on a tiny island at the edge of the world. When I realized how easily that feeling had shifted, I was genuinely frightened by the power of maps.

Let me be clear, I don’t mean to say that Eurocentric maps are unfair or discriminatory. What I realized is that the human brain seems to perceive the world as a flat map, not as a globe. And the impression we form from that flat image is far stronger than we imagine.

Most American children, for instance, grow up seeing a very different map.

notice how the perception of Greenland completely changes.
To most Japanese people, Greenland feels like a remote corner of the earth, to Americans, it’s an enormous northern extension of their own continent, a presence that feels much larger, not even comparable.

Our heads are shaped like a globe, and yet what fits inside them is only a flat map. It’s strange, isn’t it?