Japan

Japan is a country made of islands.

The sea is all around it. Japan has big mountains and green forests. It has busy cities with tall buildings. The capital city is called Tokyo.

Japan is an island country in East Asia, in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of the Asian mainland. Its four biggest islands are Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku, and more than 14,000 smaller islands lie around them.

Japan is a land of steep mountains and thick forests, with busy cities squeezed onto the flatter land near the coast. Its capital is Tokyo, one of the largest cities in the world. About 124 million people live in Japan, and most of them speak Japanese.

Japan is an archipelago that curves for about 2,400 km from northeast to southwest, parallel to the Asian mainland and separated from it by the Sea of Japan. It lies between roughly 20° and 45° north and 123° and 154° east. Japan's statistics bureau counts five main islands (Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu and Okinawa) and more than 14,000 smaller ones, with a total surface area of about 378,000 square kilometers.

Mountains and hills cover about three-quarters of the land, and forest and fields cover 67 percent of it (2020). The population, 123.80 million in 2024, is concentrated on the low-lying plains along the Pacific coast of Honshu, where Tokyo, the capital since 1868, stands.

Tokyo is the biggest city in Japan.

It has very tall towers. Kyoto is an old city with gardens and wooden buildings. Himeji Castle is big and white. It has white walls and many roofs.

Tokyo is Japan's capital, home to about 14 million people (2022). It used to be called Edo, and it became the capital in 1868. Kyoto was the capital for more than a thousand years before that. It was built in the year 794, and its old wooden buildings and gardens are a World Heritage Site.

Himeji Castle is a huge white castle from the early 1600s, made of 83 wooden buildings with white plastered walls. On Itsukushima, an island in the Seto Inland Sea, a Shinto shrine with buildings from the 1100s stands between the mountains and the sea.

Tokyo, formerly Edo, became the imperial capital in 1868, replacing Kyoto, and is now one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world (about 14.3 million people in the city in 2022). Kyoto was founded in 794 on the model of ancient Chinese capitals and remained the imperial capital until the mid-19th century; UNESCO lists its historic monuments for their wooden architecture and gardens, which influenced garden design worldwide. Britannica notes that Kyoto's Golden Pavilion (Kinkaku) was first built in the 15th century, but the present building dates from the 1950s.

Himeji Castle, a World Heritage Site since 1993, is described by UNESCO as the finest surviving example of early 17th-century Japanese castle architecture: 83 buildings in wood, with white plastered earthen walls and layered roofs. Itsukushima Shrine, a place of Shinto worship, has buildings dating from the 12th century and was inscribed in 1996.

Japan has many mountains.

Some mountains are volcanoes. Mount Fuji is the tallest one. Its top is often white with snow. In winter, some parts of Japan get lots and lots of snow.

Most of Japan is mountains and hills, and many of them are volcanoes. Japan sits where four of the giant plates of Earth's crust push against each other. That is why it has so many earthquakes and volcanoes: the official count in 2017 was 111 active volcanoes, about one in every ten in the world.

The highest is Mount Fuji, 3,776 meters tall, often capped with snow. Japan's weather changes from north to south. In winter, northwest winds drop heavy snow on the Sea of Japan side of Honshu, and from summer to autumn, typhoons can sweep in from the Pacific.

Japan lies at the meeting point of the Eurasian, North American, Pacific and Philippine Sea plates. Collision and subduction along these boundaries cause frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions; Japan holds about 10 percent of the world's active volcanoes, officially 111 in 2017, a count that changes as research and criteria change. Mount Fuji, a solitary stratovolcano 3,776 m high, is the tallest of them.

The climate is temperate but varies widely. Winter monsoon winds bring heavy snow to the Sea of Japan side of Honshu and dry weather to the Pacific side; there are two rainy spells, in early summer and in autumn, and typhoons arrive from summer to autumn. In the south, Yakushima's forests hold about 1,900 plant species and subspecies, including ancient Japanese cedars (sugi).

Japan has snow monkeys.

Some of them warm up in hot water pools. Tall white cranes stand in the snow. A giant salamander lives in fast, rocky streams.

The Japanese macaque, also called the snow monkey, is a monkey native to Japan. In the north of Honshu, some live in mountains that are covered in snow for eight months of the year, and some groups spend much of the day sitting in warm hot springs.

The red-crowned crane is one of the world's largest cranes, about 158 centimeters tall, with a red patch on its head. The cranes in eastern Japan stay all year instead of migrating. The Japanese giant salamander can grow up to 1.5 meters long and breathes mostly through its wrinkly skin.

Macaca fuscata, the Japanese macaque, is a primate native to Japan. Britannica describes populations in northern Honshu living in mountains snow-covered for eight months a year, some of which spend much of the day in hot springs. The IUCN lists it as Least Concern.

The red-crowned crane (Grus japonensis) stands about 158 cm tall with a wingspan up to 2.5 m; the Japanese population, in eastern Japan, is non-migratory, although the species as a whole migrates. The Japanese giant salamander (Andrias japonicus), second-largest salamander in the world at up to 1.5 m and 23 kg, lives in rocky, fast-flowing streams and takes in most of its oxygen through its skin. The IUCN lists both as Vulnerable.

About 124 million people live in Japan.

Most people speak Japanese. Japanese writing uses three sets of letters and signs. Many meals have rice, fish and vegetables.

About 124 million people live in Japan, and many of them live on the low-lying land along the coast. Japanese is the main language. It is written with kanji, characters that came from Chinese, plus two sets of sound symbols called hiragana and katakana.

The Ainu are an Indigenous people of Hokkaido in the north, with their own language, and today people are working to revive it. Traditional Japanese cooking, called washoku, uses rice, fish, vegetables and wild plants, and families pass on cooking skills at shared mealtimes.

Japan's population was 123.80 million in 2024, down 0.55 million from the year before, and 29.3 percent of people were aged 65 or over, a record high. The population is heavily concentrated in the low-lying areas along the Pacific coast of Honshu. Japanese is the official language, written in kanji (characters adapted from Chinese) together with the hiragana and katakana syllabaries.

The Ainu, who traditionally lived in Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, were officially recognized as an Indigenous people in 2008; the Ainu language is a language isolate, and a revitalization movement has taught it formally since the 1980s. Shinto and Buddhism are the main religious traditions, and many people follow practices from both. Washoku, traditional Japanese food culture based on local ingredients such as rice, fish, vegetables and wild plants, was added to UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage lists in 2013.