Driving Directions To Shanghai

If you look up driving directions from Tokyo, Japan to Shanghai, China on Googlemaps, you get a guide, written in Han and Kanji, of which roads to take and of when, on them, to turn left and right. Step number 48, however, is slightly different. The directions tell you to “Jet ski across the Pacific Ocean” for 783 km (about 486 miles).

The jet ski trip leg of this journey starts out at a campground on the Shimo-Koshiki Island. There don’t seem to be any jet ski rental shacks there, though; you’ll have to bring your own. That island and the five others of the Koshikijima chain were divided into a series of 14 villages until they merged with other towns on the larger Kyushu island to form the city of Satsumasendai back in 2004.  It’s still a relatively empty island and pictures on the internet show the mountains butting right up against the surf. The vistas are gorgeous.

Since Shanghai is a coastal city, your jet ski trip ends right in town. You come to shore not far from the Baoshan library. The Shanghai harbor is pretty, as the Huangpo River opens into the Yangtze. There’s a lighthouse there, visible in Google’s pictures of the area, on a stretch of rock that juts hundreds of feet into the water. It all looks very serene, but it might be troubling to find a place to park your jet ski.

All this is actually just to talk about Googlemaps. I’ve never been to Shanghai nor the Shimo-Koshiki Island. Really, I didn’t even know that the island existed before Googlemaps told me so.

But I did have an abstract understanding that a place called Tokyo and a place called Shanghai both existed, somewhere on the other side of the world. On a flight, I had a brief layover in Tokyo once, but I can’t really claim that I have been to either city. In fact, I doubt I would be able to point them out on unlabeled maps of Japan and China. I know that they exist, but not where, precisely.

Which is why Googlemaps, as an extension of the internet writ large, has helped make places seem more real, even while itself existing in a non-place online. Like a regular map but with a personality, Google’s program puts locations in context. Because of my insistence that I am a visual learner (though science tells me that that isn’t an actual category of learning process) I believe that defining a place by describing its relation to other places makes it seem more real.

It’s a relative sort of reality. I like to believe that knowing that, say, a specific building is in the northwest quadrant of some city I have never visited helps me to understand that neighborhood and, by extension, the metropolis. My friend lives by a park, I think, looking at her apartment building, and my childhood house is right there, between two larger thoroughfares whose size I never really acknowledged. And the distance from here to there is easily navigable — a few toll roads, a few interstates, and a clean blue line telling me which way to go. It’s not really so far, the distance between us. Nor unfamiliar. The vibrant circulatory system of the world’s streets starts to make sense, finally.

Because maps are good — they help us visualize our place in the world — but interactive maps that talk back to us by prescribing routes and listing points of interest, those have the power to re-imagine and re-shape space. In the same way that online social networks alter our social spheres, interactive maps allow us to alter our big sphere of a planet. Points are not fixed; they are malleable, contextualized by other places in space. Like the counter-intuitive maps you can buy at infoshops that have the South Pole at the top, Googlemaps shows you the utter randomness of traditional cartography. Shanghai is not just a dot at the edge of a greenish-brown shape; it is an actual place with a culture and a literature and libraries full of history. It is a city in which people live and die and for many of them it holds everything they have ever known. And the Shimo-Koshiki Island is not so isolated, no matter how much water surrounds it. It is always just a jet ski ride away.

-Julian Hattem