Around Japan, oceanic plates slide beneath continental plates. They move several centimeters a year. The Pacific Plate and the Philippine Sea Plate go under the North American Plate and the Eurasian Plate. That is why Japan has so much earthquake activity. Earthquake waves travel at two speeds. Fast P-waves move at about 7 kilometers a second. Slower S-waves move at about 4 kilometers a second, and they do more damage. A tsunami starts when a big undersea earthquake makes the sea floor rise or sink. The water above moves up or down. The movement spreads out in all directions as waves.

Mount Fuji sits about 110 kilometers west-southwest of Tokyo in central Honshu. It is 3,776 meters tall. Japan officially counts 111 active volcanoes, as of November 2026. Japan has two long rainy seasons. One comes in early summer, when the southeast monsoon begins. One comes in autumn, when the winds cease. As of November 2026, Sapporo, on Hokkaido, typically has more than 140 days of snowfall. In an average year it gets nearly 6 meters of snow.

Japan covers 377,975 square kilometers. Germany covers 357,596. So Japan is a little larger, about 6 percent bigger. Besides its main islands, the government counts more than 14,000 smaller islands, as of November 2026. As of October 1, 2025, the population of Tokyo Metropolis was estimated at 14.273 million. Japan had 123.05 million people on that date, by the national census. About 30 percent live in the Tokyo area, as of November 2026. That is Tokyo plus Kanagawa, Saitama and Chiba prefectures. Most Japanese people live elsewhere.

Forests cover about 25 million hectares, as of November 2026. That is about two-thirds of Japan's land. Japan has 35 national parks, as of November 2026. They run from Hokkaido in the north to Iriomote-Ishigaki in the south. Kushiro-shitsugen in eastern Hokkaido is the largest marshland in Japan. It covers 18,000 hectares. Japanese macaques, the snow monkeys, live farther north than any other primates in the world. The Japanese giant salamander can live for more than 70 years.

Sushi does not simply mean raw fish. The word joins the words for vinegar and rice. Sushi is vinegared rice paired with a garnish of seafood, egg or vegetables, raw or cooked. The vinegared rice is what makes the dish sushi. Eating habits have changed. As of November 2026, the latest figure shows that in 2023 people ate about 21.4 kilograms of seafood a year each. The peak was 40.2 kilograms in 2001. Rice eaten per person fell from 118.3 kilograms a year in 1962 to 54.4 kilograms in 2016. That is less than half.

The Jomon people of ancient Japan are named for their cord-marked pottery. The word Jomon means cord-marked. Origami began about 1,300 years ago, when the art of making paper reached Japan from China. The Tale of Genji is possibly the first novel in world literature. A diary entry shows that Murasaki Shikibu was writing it in 1008. Ieyasu Tokugawa had the emperor appoint him shogun. For two centuries Japan limited trade access to Dutch and Chinese ships with special charters.

In July 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry's ships entered Edo Bay. The Treaty of Kanagawa protected American sailors. It opened two Japanese ports for refueling and resupply. The Meiji period ran from 1868 to 1912. The Meiji Emperor reigned during it. Japan's first railway began operating on October 14, 1872. Emperor Meiji attended the opening ceremony at Shinbashi Station in Tokyo. In the Meiji period the capital moved from Kyoto to Edo, which was renamed Tokyo, meaning Eastern Capital.

The 1964 Tokyo Olympics were the first Games ever held in Asia. Japan's Tokaido Shinkansen bullet train began running that year. 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. A travel guide to Japanese trains says riders should not make phone calls on the train.

Japan predicts cherry-blossom dates with past records. Scientists use the link between temperatures and bloom dates in earlier years. They apply it to the temperatures measured since the previous fall. They also use weekly, monthly and three-month forecasts. For the forecast, the blooming date is the first day that five or six blossoms open on a sample tree. Full bloom is the first day that more than 80 percent have opened. The cherry blossom front starts in the south in late March. It moves northward as the season goes on. In the Edo period, hanami moved from private gardens to public spaces in cities. Ordinary people could join in.

Words to know

• tsunami: giant sea wave
• monsoon: seasonal wind
• Jomon: cord-marked
• hanami: blossom party