Japan is an East Asian island nation. It is located in the Pacific Ocean, east of the Sea of Japan, the East China Sea, China, Korea, and Russia, and stretches from the Sea of Okhotsk to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south. Japan’s name is composed of characters that signify “sun origin,” and it is often referred to as the “Land of the Rising Sun.”
Japan is a 6,852-island stratovolcanic archipelago. Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku are the four biggest, accounting for about 97% of Japan’s geographical area. The nation is split into 47 prefectures, each of which is divided into eight regions. With a population of 126 million, it ranks ninth in the globe. Japanese people account for 98.5 percent of the total population of Japan. Around 9.1 million people reside in Tokyo’s core city, the country’s capital, which is the sixth biggest city proper in the OECD and the world’s fourth largest global metropolis. The Greater Tokyo Region, which encompasses Tokyo and many neighboring prefectures, is the world’s biggest metropolitan area, with a population of over 35 million and the world’s largest urban agglomeration economy.
Japan was populated as early as the Upper Paleolithic era, according to archaeological evidence. Japan is first mentioned in writing in Chinese historical books from the first century AD. Japan’s history has been defined by periods of influence from other areas, most notably China, followed by periods of isolation, most notably from Western Europe. Between the 12th and 18th centuries, Japan was governed by consecutive feudal military shoguns who ruled in the Emperor’s name.
Japan began a lengthy era of seclusion in the early 17th century, which ended in 1853 when a US navy pressed Japan to open to the West. After almost two decades of internal strife and rebellion, the Imperial Court reclaimed political control in 1868 with the assistance of numerous clans from Chsh and Satsuma, thus establishing the Empire of Japan. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Japan expanded its empire via victories in the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, and World War I.
The Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 was extended into World War II in 1941 and ended in 1945 as a result of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. Japan has maintained a unitary constitutional monarchy with an Emperor and an elected legislature known as the National Diet since adopting its new constitution in 1947.
Japan is a member of the United Nations, the Group of Seven, the Group of Eight, and the Group of Twenty, and is regarded as a major power. The nation has the third-largest economy in the world in terms of nominal GDP and the fourth-largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity. Additionally, it is the fourth biggest exporter and fourth largest importer in the world. The nation benefits from a highly trained workforce and is one of the most educated in the world, having one of the highest rates of people with a tertiary education.
Although Japan has relinquished its authority to declare war, it retains a sophisticated military with the ninth biggest military budget in the world, which is utilized for self-defense and peacekeeping missions. Japan is a developed nation with a high quality of living and a high Human Development Index, with the greatest life expectancy and third lowest infant mortality rates in the world.
