Brief Basic Information about Japan — Part 1

4

February 8, 2014 by aueyama1

Hello, everyone! Let me briefly introduce myself. My name is Akane and I’m Japanese. Also, I’m a junior studying Mass Comm in college. Nice to meet you!

In this blog I’m going to share with you what Japan is actually like . I’m glad plenty of people will get to know about my country.

Let’s get started, take a look this the video!

(This video was made to attract international students by Keio University, which is a Japanese Ivy League university)

How do you feel about Japan so far? As you may see from the video, Japanese culture is mixed with everything. That is, the combination of ancient tradition and modern life are the norm for us.

Today, I’d like to give you summary of Japan.

First of all, where is Japan?

You can see a tiny island in the center of the world map. That is Japan. I know this map is a little bit weird for Americans,European and even African people because it’s a Japanese version of the world map. I’ll show you a familiar one.

That’s why Japan is called the Far Eastern country. As an aside, I couldn’t understand why it is was said that my homeland was the Far East when I was young because it’s definitely in the middle of world map! However, I figured it out since I found there are several world maps in the world. It’s obviously the most Eastern island for Westerners.

Japan consists of 4 main islands and thousands of small ones. They can be divided into 9 regions and also there are 47 prefectures. As an aside again, I’m from Kobe which is in the Kansai region. (The pink color area in the map below.) I believe you’ve heard about “Kobe beef” before. Anyway, I’m gonna write about my city another time.

From the viewpoint of country area, Japan has an area of 377,900 km² while the U.S has 9,827,000 km². Put more graphically, USA is approximately 30 times as large as Japan. Moreover, mountains and hills cover more than 70% of the land. Only 12.4% of the country is arable. Also from the viewpoint of population, Japan has approximately 1.3 hundred million people, by contrast, USA has approximately 3 hundred million counterparts.

The crowdness as pictured above represents how crowded Japan is. It symbolises how busy our lives are. In the atmosphere there is always the feeling of excitement and anxiousness. There is always the action of the hustle and bustle in Japan. Maybe Japanese will die from suffication someday…

Anyway, that about does it for today. I’d like to continue next week.

See you soon.