Canada: welcome to the EU

I'm having a hell of a time trying to get hits on the board for this new website at work... the people who normally handle search engine optimization (SEO) have only done so for Japanese pages and aren't exactly fluent in what changes are needed for an English website. Most of their knowledge carries over, but it still means I need to put in some effort that they can't... sigh.

So anyway skip forward to me talking to this one SEO person about our google analytics account - she tells me we got a hit from someone in Europe for some reason, which I thought was odd since I had just checked it and the only hit I saw outside of Africa and Japan was in Canada. She pulls up the map, and sure enough I had to explain to her that it was in fact Canada and not Europe.

How the hell does someone make a mistake like that you ask? Well let me just show you the Japanese version of the world map and let you figure it out:
They put themselves in the center of the map, making them just as arrogant as the Europeans, and putting Europe where a Eurocentric mind might expect to find Canada. I guess it's one of those things that you usually just take for granted, but it does tell you a little about how you view the world. You can really mess with kids by showing them different maps of the world and how Japan isn't at the center of them. By the way, I think the kings of map manipulation for the purposes of self-gratification are still the Aussies...