Japanese archipelago in the context of "Mainland Japan"

Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asian mainland, it is bordered to the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea in the south. The Japanese archipelago consists of four major islands alongside 14,121 smaller islands. Japan is divided into 47 administrative prefectures and eight traditional regions, and around 75% of its terrain is mountainous and heavily forested, concentrating its agriculture and highly urbanized population along its eastern coastal plains. With a population of over 123 million as of 2025, it is the world's 11th most populous country. Tokyo is the country's capital and largest city.

The first known habitation of the archipelago dates to the Upper Paleolithic, with the beginning of the Japanese Paleolithic dating to c. 36,000 BC. Between the 4th and 6th centuries, its kingdoms were united under an emperor in Nara and later Heian-kyō. From the 12th century, actual power was held by military aristocrats known as shōgun and feudal lords called daimyō, enforced by warrior nobility named samurai. After rule by the Kamakura and Ashikaga shogunates and a century of warring states, Japan was unified in 1600 by the Tokugawa shogunate, which implemented an isolationist foreign policy. In 1853, an American fleet forced Japan to open trade to the West, which led to the end of the shogunate and the restoration of imperial power in 1868.

The Sea of Japan (see below for other names) is the marginal sea between the Japanese archipelago, Sakhalin, the Korean Peninsula, and the mainland of the Russian Far East. The Japanese archipelago separates the sea from the Pacific Ocean. Like the Mediterranean Sea, it has almost no tides due to its nearly complete enclosure from the Pacific Ocean. This isolation also affects faunal diversity and salinity, both of which are lower than in the open ocean. The sea has no large islands, bays or capes. Its water balance is mostly determined by the inflow and outflow through the straits connecting it to the neighboring seas and the Pacific Ocean. Few rivers discharge into the sea and their total contribution to the water exchange is within 1%.

The seawater has an elevated concentration of dissolved oxygen that results in high biological productivity. Therefore, fishing is the dominant economic activity in the region. The intensity of shipments across the sea has been moderate owing to political issues, but it is steadily increasing as a result of the growth of East Asian economies.

Japan is an archipelagic country comprising a stratovolcanic archipelago over 3,000 km (1,900 mi) along the Pacific coast of East Asia. It consists of 14,125 islands. The five main islands are Hokkaido, Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku, and Okinawa. The other 14,120 islands are classified as "remote islands" by the Japanese government. The Ryukyu Islands and Nanpō Islands are south and east of the main islands.

The territory covers 377,973.89 km (145,936.53 sq mi). It is the fourth-largest island country in the world and the largest island country in East Asia. The country has the 6th longest coastline at 29,751 km (18,486 mi) and the 8th largest Exclusive Economic Zone of 4,470,000 km (1,730,000 sq mi) in the world.

An archipelago (/ˌɑːrkəˈpɛləɡoʊ/ AR-kə-PEL-ə-goh), sometimes called an island group or island chain, is a chain, cluster, or collection of islands. An archipelago may be in an ocean, a sea, or a smaller body of water. Examples of archipelagos include the Aegean Islands (the origin of the term), the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, the Stockholm Archipelago, the Malay Archipelago (which includes the Indonesian and Philippine Archipelagos), the Lucayan (Bahamian) Archipelago, the Japanese archipelago, and the Hawaiian Archipelago.

The Empire of Japan, also known as the Japanese Empire or Imperial Japan, was the Japanese nation state that existed from the Meiji Restoration on January 3, 1868, until the Constitution of Japan took effect on May 3, 1947. From August 1910 to September 1945, it included the Japanese archipelago, the Kurils, Karafuto, Korea, and Taiwan. The South Seas Mandate and concessions such as the Kwantung Leased Territory were de jure not internal parts of the empire but dependent territories. In the closing stages of World War II, with Japan defeated alongside the rest of the Axis powers, the formalized surrender was issued on September 2, 1945, in compliance with the Potsdam Declaration of the Allies, and the empire's territory subsequently shrunk to cover only the Japanese archipelago resembling modern Japan.

Under the slogans of "Enrich the Country, Strengthen the Armed Forces" and "Promote Industry" which followed the Boshin War and the restoration of power to the emperor from the shogun, Japan underwent a period of large-scale industrialization and militarization, often regarded as the fastest modernization of any country to date. All of these aspects contributed to Japan's emergence as a great power following the First Sino-Japanese War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Russo-Japanese War, and World War I. Economic and political turmoil in the 1920s, including the Great Depression, led to the rise of militarism, nationalism, statism and authoritarianism, during which Japan joined the Axis alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, conquering a large part of the Asia–Pacific; during this period, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) committed numerous atrocities and war crimes, including the Nanjing Massacre. There has been a debate over defining the political system of Japan as a dictatorship, which has been disputed due by the absence of a dictator, and over calling it fascist. The other suggested terms were para-fascism, militarism, corporatism, totalitarianism, and police state.

The first human inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago have been traced to the Paleolithic, around 38–39,000 years ago. The Jōmon period, named after its cord-marked pottery, was followed by the Yayoi period in the first millennium BC when new inventions were introduced from Asia. During this period, the first known written reference to Japan was recorded in the Chinese Book of Han in the first century AD.

Around the 3rd century BC, the Yayoi people from the continent immigrated to the Japanese archipelago and introduced iron technology and agricultural civilization. Because they had an agricultural civilization, the population of the Yayoi began to grow rapidly and ultimately overwhelmed the Jōmon people, natives of the Japanese archipelago who were hunter-gatherers.Between the 4th and 9th centuries, Japan's many kingdoms and tribes were gradually unified under a centralized government, nominally controlled by the Emperor of Japan. The imperial dynasty established at this time continues to this day, albeit in an almost entirely ceremonial role. In 794, a new imperial capital was established at Heian-kyō (modern Kyoto), marking the beginning of the Heian period, which lasted until 1185. The Heian period is considered a golden age of classical Japanese culture. Japanese religious life from this time and onwards was a mix of native Shinto practices and Buddhism.

Okinawa Island (Japanese: 沖縄島, Hepburn: Okinawa-jima; Okinawan: 沖縄 / うちなー, romanized: Uchinā; Kunigami: ふちなー, romanized: Fuchináa), also known as Okinawa Main Island (沖縄本島, Okinawa-hontō), is the largest of the Okinawa Islands and the Ryukyu (Nansei) Islands of Japan in the Kyushu region. It is the smallest and least populated of the five main islands of Japan. The island is approximately 106 kilometres (66 mi) long, an average 11 kilometres (7 mi) wide, and has an area of 1,206.98 square kilometers (466.02 sq mi). It is roughly 640 kilometres (350 nmi; 400 mi) south of the main island of Kyushu and the rest of Japan. It is 500 km (270 nmi; 310 mi) northeast of Taiwan. The total population of Okinawa Island was 1,384,762 in 2009. The greater Naha area has roughly 800,000 residents, while the city itself has about 320,000 people. Naha is the seat of Okinawa Prefecture on the southwestern part of Okinawa Island. Okinawa has a humid subtropical climate.

Okinawa has been a strategic location for the United States Armed Forces since the Battle of Okinawa and the end of World War II. The island was formally controlled by the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands until 1972, with around 26,000 U.S. military personnel stationed on Okinawa today, comprising about half of the total complement of the United States Forces Japan, spread among 31 areas, across 13 bases and 48 training sites. United States military installations cover approximately 25% of the island and have been a point of contention among locals. Crimes committed by US military personnel, notably the 1995 Okinawa rape incident, have caused protests against the US military presence in Okinawa.

Sakhalin (Russian: Сахалин, IPA: [səxɐˈlʲin]) is an island in Northeast Asia. Its north coast lies 6.5 km (4.0 mi) off the southeastern coast of Khabarovsk Krai in Russia, while its southern tip lies 40 kilometres (25 mi) north of the Japanese island of Hokkaido. An island of the West Pacific, Sakhalin divides the Sea of Okhotsk to its east from the Sea of Japan to its southwest. It is administered as part of Sakhalin Oblast and is the largest island of Russia, with an area of 72,492 square kilometres (27,989 sq mi). The island has a population of roughly 500,000, the majority of whom are Russians. The indigenous peoples of the island are the Ainu, Oroks, and Nivkhs, who are now present in very small numbers.

The island's name is derived from the Manchu word Sahaliyan (ᠰᠠᡥᠠᠯᡳᠶᠠᠨ), which was the name of the Qing dynasty city of Aigun. The Ainu people of Sakhalin paid tribute to the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties and accepted official appointments from them. Sometimes the relationship was forced but control from dynasties in China was loose for the most part.

The Tōhoku region (東北地方, Tōhoku-chihō; IPA: [toːhokɯ̥ tɕiꜜhoː]), Northeast region, Ōu region (奥羽地方, Ōu-chihō), or Northeast Japan (東北日本, Tōhoku Nihon) consists of the northeastern portion of Honshu, the largest island of Japan. This traditional region consists of six prefectures (ken): Akita, Aomori, Fukushima, Iwate, Miyagi, and Yamagata.

Tōhoku retains a reputation as a remote, scenic region with a harsh climate. In the 20th century, tourism became a major industry in the Tōhoku region.