Japan is a country stretched over 3,000 kilometres of ocean, from the deep winters of Hokkaido to the subtropical islands off Okinawa, with three quarters of the land too steep to build on and almost everyone living on the coastal strips that are left. Learn the shape of it across 47 prefectures, the facts that make daily life legible from Tokyo to Fukuoka, and the first 101 words of a language written in three scripts at once.
An arc of roughly 14,000 islands sitting where several tectonic plates meet, three quarters of it mountain. What is left is a set of narrow coastal plains, and almost the whole country is pressed onto them.
Three maps of Japan itself, drawn from the same files the rounds are played on. The 47 prefectures are the frame everything else sits in; the cities and the sea that surrounds all of them go inside it.
Japanโs sacred volcano. See it from Lake Kawaguchi, or climb it in the July and August season.
Pair Tokyo with Kyoto and Nara, then add Mount Fuji and Hiroshima, with the mountain villages of central Honshu to go further. Essential is our shortlist for a first trip, and worth a detour goes further. Select a pin to read about a place, then play the map and find them all.
Hello, please, thank you, sorry: the eleven openers everything else builds on.
When you have had your fill of Japan, the countries in white have a guide like this one, and every other has maps of its own.