Japan is an island country, a string of islands on the eastern edge of Asia, and one way to understand how people live there is to walk through a home. In Japan, people take off their outdoor shoes at the genkan, the entryway, before stepping up into the home, and put on slippers. A tatami mat is about 91 by 182 centimeters (roughly 3 by 6 feet), twice as long as it is wide, and the size of a room is often given as the number of tatami mats that would fit in it, such as an 8-mat room. A traditional Japanese futon is laid out on the tatami floor at night for sleeping and put away in a closet in the morning, so the floor is cleared again each day.

Everyday life has its own customs and numbers. Bowing is a common way to say hello, to say thank you and to say sorry in Japan, and tipping is not common, even in bars, cafes, restaurants, taxis and hotels. Bathing has changed over time: in 1963 only 59.1 percent of Japanese homes had their own bath, and as of the end of March 2017 Japan had 3,900 public bathhouses (sento), the first time the number fell below 4,000 (as of November 2026). Vending machines are part of the street, too. At the end of 2017 Japan had 4,271,400 vending machines (as of November 2026).

Trains are a different kind of everyday life. Japan's first railway began operating on October 14, 1872, and Emperor Meiji attended the opening ceremony at Shinbashi Station in Tokyo. Almost a century later the Tokaido Shinkansen bullet train began running, in 1964, and as of November 2026 it has a top speed of 285 kilometers per hour. Tokaido Shinkansen 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 (as of November 2026). A travel guide to Japanese trains says riders should not make phone calls on the train.

School follows its own calendar and habits. The Japanese school year begins in April and ends in March. In Japanese school lunch, the students themselves serve the food to their classmates, and students in Japanese schools take turns cleaning their school, treating it as a normal part of school.

School days have their own events and tools. On sports day (undokai) at Japanese schools, students are split into a red team and a white team. Most children in Japan learn calligraphy, the art of beautiful writing with brush and ink, in elementary school, and Japanese randoseru school backpacks cost about 60,000 yen on average (as of November 2026).

Meals in Japan are made with lots of rice, fish and vegetables, and rice is the main food, so a lunch box often has a big helping of it. People eat with chopsticks, which are called hashi. Nori is seaweed made into thin, dried sheets that go with rice, such as around sushi and rice balls. In sushi, the vinegared rice is what makes the dish sushi, not the raw fish. Instant ramen noodles were invented in Japan: add hot water and a bowl of ramen is ready.

Sumo has strict rules and a strict calendar. A sumo wrestler loses a bout by being pushed out of the ring or by touching the ground with any part of his body except the soles of his feet. Professional sumo has six tournaments a year, each lasting 15 days: three in Tokyo, and one each in Osaka, Nagoya and Fukuoka. A Hawaiian wrestler called Takamiyama became the first foreign-born sumo wrestler to win a tournament, in 1972. Baseball is one of the most popular sports in Japan, and Japan's J.League began in 1993 with 10 teams and by 2023 had grown to 60 clubs in three divisions (J1, J2 and J3), as of November 2026.

The 1964 Tokyo Olympics were the first Games ever held in Asia. Judo became an Olympic sport at those Games; it was founded by Kano Jigoro, who started his own school called the Kodokan in 1882, and Kodokan means a school for studying the way. The Japan women's volleyball team won gold at Tokyo 1964 by beating the Soviet Union 3-0 in the final, and the match reportedly drew an 85 percent television viewing rate. Karate grew out of a fusion of Okinawa's own martial arts and ones from China; it was first called todi, China hand, and the Japanese pronunciation karate now uses characters meaning empty hand. Karate, sport climbing, surfing and skateboarding all made their Olympic debuts at the Tokyo 2020 Games, after a policy let host cities propose extra sports.

Games and cartoons made in Japan travel the world. Nintendo began as a maker of Japanese playing cards called hanafuda in Kyoto, long before it made video games, and Super Mario Bros. sold 40.2 million copies on the NES after its 1985 release (as of November 2026). Tamagotchi, egg-shaped virtual pets with a small screen and three buttons, went on sale in 1996 and had shipped 100 million units worldwide by the end of July 2025 (as of November 2026). The TV show Astro Boy, first shown on Fuji Television on January 1, 1963, was the first Japanese TV anime made as a long series; it began in the US in September 1963. Studio Ghibli was co-founded in 1985 by the filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, and Japanese sales of manga in print and e-book form reached a record 704.3 billion yen in 2024, of which smartphone e-comics made up 512.2 billion yen (as of November 2026).

Some Japanese ideas began in odd places. Karaoke, singing along to recorded music, began in Japan; the word joins kara (empty) and oke (orchestra), and it began in 1956 when a theater troupe's orchestra went on strike and recorded music was used, leaving the orchestra pit empty. Emoji began on Japanese mobile phones in the late 1990s, and they started as 176 characters, each 12 by 12 pixels, made by a Docomo employee for i-mode phones; Docomo could not copyright them, so rival phone companies offered emoji too. Origami began about 1,300 years ago, in the seventh century, when the art of making paper reached Japan from China, and paper folding got the name origami in the Edo period (1603 to 1868).

Science and industry also carry the Japanese name. Japan's Hayabusa2 space probe brought back pieces of the asteroid Ryugu to Earth, and it returned 5.4 grams of sample, 54 times its goal of 0.1 grams. Japan-born scientists have won 21 Nobel Prizes in the sciences in the 21st century (as of January 2026). Toyota Motor Corp. of Japan kept its title as the world's biggest carmaker for a sixth year in 2025 (as of January 2026), and Japan had 450,500 industrial robots in use in its factories after a 3 percent rise in 2024 (as of November 2026).

Customs and clothing keep older habits. The kimono is Japan's traditional clothing, and today most people wear it only on special occasions such as weddings. In the custom of hanami, families and friends eat, drink and hold parties under blooming cherry trees.

Places and a town's trash. Japan has 35 national parks, specially protected areas that range from Hokkaido in the north to Iriomote-Ishigaki in the south (as of November 2026). The town of Kamikatsu sorts its trash into 45 categories and recycles about 80 percent of its trash (81 percent in 2016), as of November 2026.

Japanese writing has three kinds of characters. Japanese is written with three kinds of characters: kanji, hiragana and katakana. Japan has two sets of syllable letters, hiragana and katakana, with 46 characters each, and each hiragana has a matching katakana. Japanese text is traditionally written in vertical columns, read from top to bottom, with the columns going from right to left. A traditional Japanese haiku is a short poem of three lines that counts 5, 7 and 5 sounds.

The population has its own record numbers. Japanese women's average life expectancy in 2024 was 87.13 years and men's was 81.09 years, and the average for women rose to 87.33 years in 2025 (as of November 2026). Germany overtook Japan's economy in size in 2023 (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).

Words to know

• genkan: entryway
• tatami: woven floor mat
• sento: public bathhouse
• kanji: Chinese-based characters
• hanafuda: Japanese playing cards