Japan is an island country in East Asia made up of nearly 7,000 islands, though almost everyone lives on just four of them. Around 123 million people live in an area slightly smaller than California, and about three quarters of the country is mountains, which means the people are squeezed into the flat bits. It is one of the most earthquake-prone countries on Earth and one of the safest places to live, and both of those facts are connected.
Four Big Islands
Honshu is the largest and holds Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and around 80% of the population. Hokkaido in the north is cold and snowy with wide open farmland. Kyushu in the south-west is warm and volcanic. Shikoku is the smallest of the four and the least visited.
Below them stretches the Ryukyu chain, including Okinawa, which is subtropical and closer to Taiwan than to Tokyo. Japan is long — about 3,000 kilometres from end to end — so the north gets metres of snow while the south grows pineapples.
The four main islands are linked by tunnels and bridges. The Seikan Tunnel between Honshu and Hokkaido runs 53.9 kilometres, with 23 of them under the seabed, and was the longest rail tunnel in the world for nearly thirty years.
Mount Fuji
Fuji is 3,776 metres tall, the highest point in Japan, and it is an active volcano. It last erupted in 1707, throwing ash as far as Tokyo, 100 kilometres away.
Its near-perfect cone shape comes from being a stratovolcano built from many layers of ash and lava. Because it stands alone on a plain rather than in a range, it looks enormous from every direction, and it is visible from Tokyo on clear winter days.
Around 300,000 people climb it every summer, and it is the most-climbed mountain in the world. The traditional way is to start at night and reach the summit for sunrise, which the Japanese call goraiko. A well-known local saying is that a wise person climbs Fuji once and only a fool climbs it twice.
Living With Earthquakes
Japan sits where four tectonic plates meet, which is about as unlucky a location as exists. It records roughly 1,500 earthquakes a year that people can feel.
The country has responded by becoming the best in the world at handling them. Buildings sway on purpose; some skyscrapers sit on rubber and steel pads that let the ground move underneath them. Children practise earthquake drills from nursery school. Phones receive an alert seconds before the shaking arrives, because the first, faster wave is detected and the warning travels at the speed of light.
The 2011 Tohoku earthquake was magnitude 9.0, one of the largest ever recorded, and it moved the main island 2.4 metres east. Almost no buildings collapsed from the shaking itself. The tsunami that followed was the disaster, and Japan has since built sea walls up to 15 metres tall along much of the affected coast.
Bullet Trains
The Shinkansen opened in 1964, in time for the Tokyo Olympics, and it was the first high-speed railway in the world. Trains now run at up to 320 kilometres an hour.
The record for punctuality is the part that astonishes people. The average delay across the whole network is measured in seconds, not minutes. In 2017 a train company issued a public apology because a train left 20 seconds early.
No passenger has ever died in a Shinkansen derailment or collision in over sixty years of operation. The nose of the 500 series train was redesigned to look like a kingfisher's beak, after an engineer who was a birdwatcher noticed that kingfishers enter water without a splash — it solved a problem with sonic booms in tunnels and made the train quieter and more efficient.
Three Writing Systems
Japanese is written with three different scripts, used together in the same sentence.
Kanji are characters borrowed from Chinese, and each one stands for a meaning. Japanese children learn 1,026 of them in primary school and 2,136 in total by the end of secondary school. Hiragana is a set of 46 symbols for sounds, used for grammar and native words. Katakana is a matching set of 46, used for words borrowed from other languages.
So the word for television, borrowed from English, is written in katakana. The word for mountain is written with a kanji that is literally a picture of three peaks. And the little bits that hold the sentence together are hiragana. Learning to read Japanese means learning all three.
Try Writing Your Name
Foreign names in Japanese are written in katakana, spelled out by sound rather than by letter. Japanese has no standalone consonants except n, so every sound has to end in a vowel.
That is why Michael becomes Ma-i-ke-ru and Smith becomes Su-mi-su. An extra vowel gets added wherever the original has two consonants together.
Try saying your own name that way. Break it into syllables, and add a vowel after any consonant that does not have one. That single rule explains almost every English word that has been borrowed into Japanese: baseball becomes besuboru, and McDonald's becomes makudonarudo.
Food
Japanese food is built on rice, fish, soy and seasonal vegetables. Washoku, traditional Japanese cuisine, was added to UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2013.
Sushi did not start as a luxury. It began as a way of preserving fish by packing it in fermented rice, and the rice was thrown away. Modern sushi with fresh fish on vinegared rice was invented in Tokyo in the early 1800s as fast food, sold from street stalls.
Japan has more Michelin-starred restaurants than any other country, with Tokyo alone usually ahead of Paris. It also has around four million vending machines — roughly one for every thirty people — selling everything from hot coffee to soup.
Old and New Together
Japan has around 80,000 Shinto shrines and 77,000 Buddhist temples, and most Japanese people take part in both traditions without seeing any conflict. Babies are blessed at Shinto shrines, weddings may be Christian-style, and funerals are almost always Buddhist.
Kyoto was the capital for over a thousand years and has 17 UNESCO World Heritage sites. Tokyo, by contrast, is relentlessly modern, partly because so much of it was destroyed in the 1923 earthquake and again in 1945 and had to be rebuilt twice.
Japan also has some of the oldest companies in the world. Kongō Gumi, a temple construction firm, was founded in 578 and operated independently until 2006 — 1,428 years.
Games, Comics and Cartoons
Japan has exported more popular culture than almost any country of its size. Manga are Japanese comics, and they are read by adults as much as children — manga accounts for a large share of all books printed in Japan.
Anime is animated film and television, and it ranges from children's series to films that win international awards. Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away won the Academy Award for best animated feature in 2003 and was the highest-grossing film in Japanese history for nearly twenty years.
Nintendo started in 1889 making playing cards and did not make a video game until the 1970s. Mario, Pokemon, Zelda, Sonic, Pac-Man and Street Fighter are all Japanese. Karaoke is Japanese too — the word means empty orchestra — and so is the emoji, invented in 1999 by a designer working for a Japanese phone company.
Cherry Blossom
Every spring, cherry trees bloom across Japan for about a week, and the country stops to look at them. The custom of sitting under the trees is called hanami, flower viewing, and it goes back over a thousand years.
The blossom front moves north up the country from late March to early May, and the weather agency forecasts it like a weather system. People check the forecast to plan parties.
Kyoto has cherry blossom records going back to 812 CE, kept by court diarists and monks, which makes them one of the longest continuous phenological records anywhere in the world. Scientists use them as evidence of a warming climate: the peak bloom date has moved noticeably earlier over the last century.
Rules and Habits
Japan has a lot of unwritten rules, and most of them are about not causing trouble for other people. The word is meiwaku, and avoiding it explains a great deal.
You take your shoes off indoors, and there is usually a step or a change of flooring to show you where. You do not eat while walking. You do not talk on the phone on a train, and carriages are quiet enough to read in. You bow rather than shake hands, and how deeply you bow depends on who you are greeting.
Japanese schoolchildren clean their own classrooms and serve each other lunch, with no cleaners for those areas. There are very few public bins, because people carry rubbish home — a habit that started for security reasons in the 1990s and stuck. Streets are nonetheless extremely clean.
An Ageing Country
Japan has the oldest population of any large country. Around 29% of Japanese people are over 65, and more adult nappies are sold there than baby ones.
It also has the longest life expectancy in the world, around 84 years. Okinawa in particular has an unusually high number of people over 100, and researchers have studied its diet and social habits for decades.
The population peaked around 2010 at 128 million and is now falling by several hundred thousand a year. Whole villages in the countryside have emptied, and Japan is a world leader in robotics partly because it has been looking for ways to cope with fewer working-age people. To keep exploring, read about where Japanese is spoken and how volcanoes work.