Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia comprising a large stratovolcanic archipelago extending along the Pacific coast of Asia. Measured from the geographic coordinate system, Japan is 36? north of the equator and 138? east of the Prime Meridian. The country is north-northeast of China and Taiwan (separated by the East China Sea) and slightly east of Korea (separated by the Sea of Japan). The country is south of the Russian Far East. Japan's capital is Tokyo, and it's major cities are: Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Sapporo, Nagasaki.

Japan consists of several thousands of islands, of which Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku are the four largest. Japan's closest neighbors are Korea, Russia and China. The Sea of Japan separates the Asian continent from the Japanese archipelago. Japan's area is comparable to that of Germany or California. Japan's northernmost islands are located on a similar geographical latitude as Milan or Portland, while her southernmost islands are on a similar latitude as the Bahamas. More than 50% of the country is mountainous and covered by forests. Japan is a relatively small country, approximately 1/48 the size of Russia and 1/25 the size of China in land area. Moreover, Japanese land area is smaller than the state of California in the United States. There are also about 3,000 smaller islands, including Okinawa, and islets, some inhabited and others uninhabited. In total, as of 2006, Japan's territory is 377,923.1 km2, of which 374,834 km2 is land and 3,091 km2 water. Includes the Bonin Islands, Daito-shoto, Marcus Island, Okino-tori-shima, the Ryukyu Islands, and the Volcano Islands. Ownership of the Liancourt Rocks is in dispute. The national territory also includes the small Bonin or Ogasawara Islands, which include Iwo Jima and the Volcano Islands (Kazan Retto), stretching some 1,100 kilometers from the main islands. A territorial dispute with Russia, dating from the end of World War II, over the two southernmost of the Kuril Islands, Etorofu (Iturup) and Kunashiri, and the smaller Shikotan and Habomai Islands northeast of Hokkaido remains a sensitive spot in Japanese-Russian relations as of 2005. Excluding disputed territory, the archipelago covers about 377,000 square kilometers. No point in Japan is more than 150 kilometers from the sea. Japan is surrounded by the sea and is composed of 4 major islands and many small islands. The 4 major islands are Hokkaiodo, Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu. Japan stretches from northeast to southwest, and the length is approximately 3500 km (2173.91 miles). about 60% of the Japanese landscape is steep mountainous regions covered with forest. Approximately 70% of the total Japanese population is concentrated in the plains and basins, an area comprising just 24% of the habitable land.

Ten percent of the world's active volcanoes - forty in the early 1990s (another 148 were dormant) - are found in Japan, which lies in a zone of extreme crustal instability. As many as 1,500 earthquakes are recorded yearly, and magnitudes of four to six on the Richter scale are not uncommon. Minor tremors occur almost daily in one part of the country or another, causing slight shaking of buildings.

Japan has a population of approximately 127,078,679, including approximately two million foreign residents. More than half of the non Japanese population is of Korean descent ( 2009 est.) packed tightly into a rather small geographic area. The official language in Japan is Japanese. Japanese is spoken only in Japan. The literacy rate in Japan is very close to 100 percent and 95 percent of the Japanese population has a high school education. Japan has some of the most densely populated areas in the world. Much of Japan's 127 million people live in crowded cities along the coast. Population growth rate is about -0.191% (2009 est.).

Japanese Language: Japanese (nihongo) is spoken in Japan, and essentially nowhere else. The Japanese language is distinct from Chinese and Korean, although the written form uses Chinese (kanji) characters, and is not known to be related to any other language.

Japanese society, with its ideology of homogeneity, has traditionally been intolerant of ethnic and other differences. People identified as different might be considered "polluted"--the category applied historically to the outcasts of Japan, particularly the hisabetsu buraku, "discriminated communities," often called burakumin, a term some find offensive--and thus not suitable as marriage partners or employees.

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