The Japan guide
Everything you need to know about Japan, all in one place
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 hundred words of a language written in three scripts at once.
Japan ยท Facts
Read it, then make it stick
Selected topic
Geography of Japan
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.
Japan ยท Maps
Know the shape of the country
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.
Pick a map. It opens and plays right here.
Japan ยท Words
Take Japanese with you
Lesson 1 of 10
Greetings and politeness
Hello, thanks, please: the ten openers everything else builds on.
Explore more country maps
Keep going one country deeper
When you have had your fill of Japan, every country here has maps of its own.