Fourteen thousand islands on moving ground
When Japan's mapping agency recounted its islands with modern technology in 2023, the total rose from 6,852 to 14,125. No new land had appeared: the old figure dated from 1987, when people worked through paper maps. An island must measure more than 100 metres around to qualify. About 81 percent of residents live on one of them, Honshu.
About 73 percent of the country is mountainous, and a UN assessment in 2015 found forest on 68.5 percent of the land, second only to Finland in the OECD. People crowd into the plains and basins of the remaining 27 percent.
The Pacific Plate sinks beneath the north at the Japan Trench, the Philippine Sea Plate slides under the south along the Nankai Trough, and the government lists 111 active volcanoes. Mount Ontake erupted on 27 September 2014 while rated at the lowest alert level, killing 58 people and leaving five missing.
The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 killed 105,000 people, and huge fires made the toll far worse. Rumours about Koreans then spread, and mobs killed several thousand Korean and Chinese immigrants. Historians say police and soldiers took part, while an official inquiry put the toll in the hundreds. On 11 March 2011 a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, the largest recorded in Japan, sent a tsunami ashore. Official tallies list nearly 20,000 dead and more than 2,500 missing. The wave also caused the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, and about 110,000 people left the zones around it.
From shoguns to an Asian empire
Emperor Kanmu moved the capital to Heian-kyō, now Kyoto, in 794. Military rule followed, first from Kamakura in 1185, and in 1603 Tokugawa Ieyasu became shogun at Edo.
Japan expelled most foreigners in 1639 after quarrels over Catholic missions and trade, and for two centuries only chartered Dutch and Chinese ships could do business. That ended when Commodore Matthew Perry brought four American ships into Tokyo Bay on 8 July 1853. A treaty the following March opened Shimoda and Hakodate as supply ports.
The shogun lost power in 1868 and the emperor was restored. Feudal domains became prefectures in 1871, universal conscription arrived in 1872, and by 1876 samurai could no longer openly carry swords.
The new state pushed outwards. A law of 1899 treated the Ainu of Hokkaido as a people to be assimilated, steering them from hunting to farming on land generally poorer than settlers received. It stood until 1997, and only in 2019 did a law name the Ainu an Indigenous people, though critics say it omits self-determination. The Ryukyu Kingdom, a trading state invaded by Satsuma in 1609, became Okinawa Prefecture in 1879, and its last king was forced to move to Tokyo. Japan also took Taiwan and southern Sakhalin, and annexed Korea in 1910.
War and its long aftermath
Full-scale war with China began on 7 July 1937. At Nanjing, from 13 December, Japanese troops carried out a massacre. The Tokyo war crimes tribunal estimated more than 200,000 dead, and other estimates run from 40,000 to over 340,000. Women were also forced to provide sexual services to soldiers at military comfort stations. No accurate count exists, and researchers' estimates range from 20,000 to 410,000.
The attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 brought war with the United States. Okinawa became a battlefield from 1 April to 22 June 1945, and local authorities count at least 149,425 Okinawans killed, driven to suicide or missing. American atomic bombs struck Hiroshima at 8:15 on 6 August and Nagasaki at 11:02 on 9 August. Hiroshima estimates about 140,000 dead by the end of December, though the precise number is unknown, and Nagasaki records 73,884. Japan signed its surrender on 2 September.
A US-led occupation lasted until 28 April 1952. The constitution enacted on 3 May 1947 reduced the emperor to a figurehead and renounced the right to wage war, and women gained the vote. Okinawa stayed under American administration until 1972. In January 2020 it held 70.3 percent of the land used exclusively by US forces in Japan, on 0.6 percent of the country's area.
An ageing country that keeps its timetable
The 2025 census counted 122,972,528 people, about 3.2 million fewer than in 2020, and Tokyo alone among the 47 prefectures grew. Foreign residents rose by 1,093,525 to a record 3,840,039, or 3.1 percent of the total. Births to Japanese citizens fell to 671,236 in 2025, a record low, with a fertility rate of 1.14. By September 2026 people aged 65 or over made up 29.6 percent of the population, the highest share among countries of 40 million or more.
Rapid growth from 1955 to the 1973 oil shock made Japan the world's third-largest economy, behind the United States and the Soviet Union. Toyota sold 11.3 million vehicles in 2025, its sixth straight year as the top-selling carmaker. The Tokaido Shinkansen, running since 1964, carried 432,000 passengers a day in the 2023 financial year. Its average delay was 1.6 minutes, natural disasters included, and no derailment or collision on the Shinkansen network has ever killed a passenger.
Written Japanese mixes Chinese-derived kanji with two further scripts, hiragana for grammatical endings and katakana for loanwords. UNESCO listed washoku, the traditional food culture, in 2013, citing its respect for nature.