Tokyo, Japan

 

Japan (Japanese: 日本, Nippon or Nihon,[nb 1] and formally 日本国)[nb 2] is an island US in East Asia. It is located in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by using the Sea of Japan, whilst extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north towards the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south. Japan is a section of the Ring of Fire, and spans an archipelago of 6852 islands protecting 377,975 rectangular kilometers (145,937 sq mi); the 5 major islands are Hokkaido, Honshu (the "mainland"), Shikoku, Kyushu, and Okinawa. Tokyo is the nation's capital and biggest city; different principal cities consist of Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo, Fukuoka, Kobe, and Kyoto.

Japan is the eleventh-most populous USA in the world, as properly as one of the most densely populated and urbanized. About three-fourths of the country's terrain is mountainous, concentrating its populace of 125.44 million on slim coastal plains. Japan is divided into forty seven administrative prefectures and eight normal regions. The Greater Tokyo Area is the most populous metropolitan location in the world, with greater than 37.4 million residents.

Japan has been inhabited due to the fact the Upper Paleolithic length (30,000 BC), although the first written point out of the archipelago seems in a Chinese chronicle (the Book of Han) completed in the 2nd century AD. Between the 4th and ninth centuries, the kingdoms of Japan grew to be unified below an emperor and the imperial court docket based totally in Heian-kyō. Beginning in the twelfth century, political strength used to be held through a sequence of army dictators (shōgun) and feudal lords (daimyō), and enforced with the aid of a classification of warrior blue blood (samurai). After a century-long length of civil war, the US was once reunified in 1603 beneath the Tokugawa shogunate, which enacted an isolationist overseas policy. In 1854, a United States fleet compelled Japan to open change to the West, which led to the quit of the shogunate and the restoration of imperial strength in 1868. In the Meiji period, the Empire of Japan adopted a Western-modeled charter and pursued a software of industrialization and modernization. Amidst a upward jostle in militarism and foreign places colonization, Japan invaded China in 1937 and entered World War II as an Axis energy in 1941. After suffering defeat in the Pacific War and two atomic bombings, Japan surrendered in 1945 and got here below a seven-year Allied occupation, at some point of which it adopted a new constitution. Under the 1947 constitution, Japan has maintained a unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy with a bicameral legislature, the National Diet.

Japan is a superb energy and a member of several global organizations, which include the United Nations (since 1956), the OECD, the G20 and the Group of Seven. Although it has renounced its proper to declare war, the US continues Self-Defense Forces that rank as one of the world's strongest militaries. After World War II, Japan skilled file boom in an financial miracle, turning into the second-largest economic system in the world through 1972 however has stagnated due to the fact that 1995 in what is referred to as the Lost Decades. As of 2021, the country's financial system is the third-largest with the aid of nominal GDP and the fourth-largest by means of PPP. Ranked "very high" on the Human Development Index, Japan has one of the world's perfect lifestyles expectancies, even though it is experiencing a decline in population. A world chief in the automotive, robotics and electronics industries, Japan has made large contributions to science and technology. The lifestyle of Japan is properly acknowledged round the world, such as its art, cuisine, music, and famous culture, which encompasses distinguished comic, animation and video recreation industries.