Japan sits where plates of the Earth's crust meet. Around the country, oceanic plates slide beneath continental plates several centimeters a year, which is why Japan has so much earthquake activity. When an oceanic plate sinks beneath a continental plate, the continental plate is dragged down and strain builds up. When the strain gets too big, the continental plate jumps up and the tremors are called interplate earthquakes. Japan's shaking scale, the seismic intensity scale, has 10 degrees and describes how strong the ground motion is at one place. Magnitude is a different measure: each 1-degree increase means about 32 times more energy released by the earthquake.

Earthquake waves travel at two speeds: fast P-waves at about 7 km/s and slower, more damaging S-waves at about 4 km/s. At a point 50 km from an earthquake's start, a P-wave arrives after about 7 seconds and the S-wave after about 13 seconds, so places farther away get more warning time. Earthquake Early Warnings are issued slightly after a quake begins; they are not predictions that tell people an earthquake will happen in advance. As of November 2026, the Japan Meteorological Agency has about 600 seismic intensity meters around the country and collects data from another 3,600 stations, so shaking can be measured in many places.

A tsunami starts when a big undersea earthquake makes the sea floor rise or sink; the water above moves up or down and the movement spreads out in all directions as waves. Tsunami waves slow down as the sea gets shallower, so the trailing waves catch up with those ahead near the coast and the tsunami grows much higher. To warn fast, Japan's weather agency simulates many possible undersea quakes ahead of time and stores the tsunami arrival times and heights in a database. After a big quake it matches the quake's location and size to the closest stored case.

Mount Fuji, 3,776 meters tall, sits about 110 km (70 miles) west-southwest of Tokyo in central Honshu. It is an active volcano. Its Hoei eruption happened on its southeastern slope on December 16, 1707, and as of November 2026 that was its last, more than 300 years ago. As of November 2026, Japan officially counts 111 active volcanoes, so Fuji is one among many.

In spring, Japan follows the cherry blossom front. The blooming date is the first day five or six blossoms open on a sample tree, and full bloom is the first day more than 80% have opened. Kyoto's cherry-blossom records go back more than 1,200 years, the longest known data set of its kind. Scientists can use them because the flowering dates come from documents and diaries from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries. As of November 2026, a 2022 study concluded that human-caused climate change is the main reason Kyoto's peak cherry bloom now comes earlier in spring. The famous Yoshino trees are clones, which is why so many bloom at the same time.

A traditional Japanese haiku is a short poem of three lines that counts 5, 7 and 5 sounds. The short haiku broke away from renga in the sixteenth century and was mastered a century later by the poet Matsuo Basho. Writing itself arrived from outside. Japan had no writing system, adopted Chinese characters, and later built the native scripts hiragana and katakana from them. Hiragana are simple, cursive forms of whole kanji, while katakana are taken from parts of more complex kanji. Japanese text is traditionally written in vertical columns, read from top to bottom, with the columns going from right to left.

Japan's capital moved from Kyoto, where it had been since 794, to Tokyo, meaning Eastern Capital, in the Meiji period, which ran from 1868 to 1912. The old Tokugawa class system of samurai, farmers, artisans and merchants was abolished by 1871.

Japan's first railway began operating on October 14, 1872, and Emperor Meiji attended the opening ceremony at Shinbashi Station in Tokyo. The Tokaido Shinkansen bullet train began running in 1964. As of November 2026, it has a top speed of 285 kilometers per hour. Its trains averaged a delay of 1.6 minutes per train in fiscal 2023, including delays from natural disasters. It was just 24 seconds in fiscal 2016.

Winter has its own record. As of November 2026, Sapporo, on Hokkaido, typically has more than 140 days of snowfall and nearly 6 meters (20 feet) of snow in an average year. In the winter of 1950 the first Sapporo Snow Festival drew about 50,000 people, a much larger crowd than expected. In 1972 Sapporo hosted the Winter Olympics, and the snow festival gained international recognition.

Sushi does not simply mean raw fish; the word joins the words for vinegar and rice, and sushi is vinegared rice paired with a garnish of seafood, egg or vegetables, raw or cooked. As of November 2026, Japanese people ate about 21.4 kilograms of seafood a year each in 2023, down from a peak of 40.2 kilograms in 2001. Rice eaten per person in Japan fell from 118.3 kilograms a year in 1962 to 54.4 kilograms in 2016, less than half. In fiscal 2025 it was 4.435 kilograms per person per month, down 6.1% from the year before and the lowest in seven years.

Nintendo began as a maker of Japanese playing cards called hanafuda in Kyoto, long before it made video games. As of November 2026, Super Mario Bros. sold 40.2 million copies on the NES after its 1985 release, and Tamagotchi, the egg-shaped virtual pets, went on sale in 1996 and had shipped 100 million units worldwide by the end of July 2025.

As of November 2026, Germany overtook Japan's economy in size in 2023. Japan had 450,500 industrial robots in use in its factories after a 3 percent rise in 2024, and at the end of 2017 it had 4,271,400 vending machines.

Japan had 671,236 babies born to Japanese nationals in 2025, a record low and 14,937 fewer than in 2024, as of November 2026. The share of Japan's population aged 65 or older reached a record 29.4 percent in 2025, as of September 2025. Japan's number of people aged 100 or older passed 100,000 for the first time, reaching 107,677 in September 2026.

Buildings are the other defense. Under Japan's 1981 building-code amendment, the goal for the strongest earthquakes is that a building should simply not collapse. Tokyo Skytree has a central pillar that works with a mass addition mechanism to calm shaking; its makers say it can reduce the response shear force by about 40% during a major earthquake.

Words to know

• tsunami: giant sea wave
• magnitude: quake energy size
• seismic: of earthquakes
• clones: exact copies
• haiku: short poem