Capital city: Tokyo

Region: Asia

Area: 377 835 km²

Population: 126 974 628

Main cities: Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo, Kyoto, Kobe, Fukuoka, Kawasaki, Hiroshima, Kita-Kyushu, Sendai, Kagoshima, Niigata

Currency: yen

Dial code: 81

Internet code: JA

Information: Japan (Nihon or Nippon in Japanese) is a country located in northeast Asia, whose name means "origin of the sun" to refer to the rising sun. Japan is an archipelago boarding the eastern Asian coast. Four main islands make the country. From north to south: Hokkaido, Honshu (the biggest), Shikoku and Kyushu. Besides, the archipelago has 3000 smaller additional islands. Naha, on the island of Okinawa in the Ryukyu archipelago (Ryukyu retto in Japanese), is located at 600 km to the southwest of Kyushu. To the south of Tokyo, the archipelago of Nanpo stretches over more than 1000 km until Iwo Jima. To the north are the Sakhaline islands (Karafuto in Japanese) and Kouriles (Chishima retto which lies at more than 1200 km to the northeast of Hokkaido), which are Russian since 1945, but which are sometimes considered as the edge of the archipelago.