What Is Japan? About The Country In Eastern Asia
JAPAN – In this topic, we are about to learn and discuss things to know about the Eastern Asian country called Japan.
It is an island country that is found in the eastern region of Asia.
Its official language is Japanese and is known locally as Nippon or Nihon (日本), or Nippon-koku or Nihon-koku (日本国).
It is surrounded by the waters of the following:
- Sea of Japan
- Pacific Ocean
- Sea of Okhotsk
- East China Sea
- Philippine Sea.
The country is composed of 6,852 islands, including five main islands and is separated into 47 prefectures, and traditional-wise 8 regions, namely:
- Hokkaidō
- Tōhoku
- Aomori
- Iwate
- Miyagi
- Akita
- Yamagata
- Fukushima
- Kantō
- Ibaraki
- Tochigi
- Gunma
- Saitama
- Chiba
- Tōkyō
- Kanagawa
- Chūbu
- Niigata
- Toyama
- Ishikawa
- Fukui
- Yamanashi
- Nagano
- Gifu
- Shizuoka
- Aichi
- Kansai
- Mie
- Shiga
- Kyōto
- Ōsaka
- Hyōgo
- Nara
- Wakayama
- Chūgoku
- Tottori
- Shimane
- Okayama
- Hiroshima
- Yamaguchi
- Shikoku
- Tokushima
- Kagawa
- Ehime
- Kōchi
- Kyūshū
- Fukuoka
- Saga
- Nagasaki
- Kumamoto
- Ōita
- Miyazaki
- Kagoshima
- Okinawa
Its capital is the city of Tokyo and has a population of about 126 million people, as of 2019. It has a land area of 377K kilometers squared or 145K square miles.
Its government is a unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy that is currently ruled by Emperor Naruhito in the current era known as Reiwa.
Its name is derived from the two characters nichi (日) which means sun or day, and hon (本) which means base or origin. The name, when combined means “origin of the sun”. Westerners called it the “Land of the Rising Sun”.
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