[2] Her final year of secondary education was spent at Seikyo Gakuin High School in the city of Kawachinagano in western Japan.
Wigen collaborated on projects with the David Rumsey Map Center,[4] located in Stanford's Green Library, which opened for public in April 2016.
Accumulated over 40 years, the diverse collection includes atlases, globes, and children's maps, with a particular focus on North and South America.
"[5] Wigen's first book, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920 (1995), explores the Ina Valley of southern Nagano Prefecture in Japan and how the silk industry transformed it.
She argues that the processes that generated these changes, especially local industrial development and political centralization, contributed to Japan's rise to imperial power.
Wigen examined Nagano prefecture as a whole in her third book,, A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912 (2010), which explores the roles of cartography, chorography, and regionalism.
These include Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges (co-editor with Jerry H. Bentley and Renate Bridenthal), Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps (co-edited with Fumiko Sugimoto and Cary Karacas),[8] and Time in Maps: From the Early Modern Era to our Digital Age (co-edited with Caroline Winterer).