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Hi. We're going to kick start our unit on Japan talking about the physical and political geography of the country
Japan is an archipelago What is an archipelago you ask? An archipelago is a group or a chain of islands
Japan is made up of
thousands of islands of those
over 3000 islands about 400 are actually inhabited Of those 400, we'll talk about four
of those islands that are the main islands of Japan
those main islands from north to south are
Hokkaido Honshu
Shikoku and Kyushu
We'll talk about the significance of each of these islands as we move along in our unit but you do
need to know where these islands are located and the name of each of these inlands
The major bodies of water that
surround Japan include the Pacific Ocean
the Sea of Japan
the East China Sea
the Korean Strait
and the Philippine Sea
Japan because it has so many islands, it has thousands of miles of coastline and we'll be discussing why that's important to the Japanese
and the significance of
that fact both positive and negative
the physical landscape of Japan
is that japan's islands are rugged and mountainous. only about 11% of that land is actually arable. now arable we talked about
that term before throughout this year and that means at its land that is
available for farming it's fertile enough it's not rugged
is available for farming So if you take a look at the map here you can see all the browns and yellows that are down the spine of Japan
are the mountains that's where is tough to live there are people live in the mountains but it's not a place where
there can be a lot of farming going on a lot of
crops being produced so
it's a tough place to live
where you think two effects of the fact that
japan's islands are rugged mountainous are
also that only 11% of the land is arable. what is what is an effect of that
now moving into the political geography of Japan Tokyo is the capital of Japan and its largest city. It's one of the largest cities in the world
the country if Japan is about the same size as California. If we took square mileage
it would be about the same for both California and Japan if you compare the two
population of Japan is 127,000,000 people that's the 10th largest population in the world
about half the size less than half the size of the United States but again the United States is spread out on such a larger scale
where Japan compared to California has a lot more people...and we just talked about in the last slide that there's not a lot of space for them
to live so the population density is an issue because so many people live in so little amount of land
because only 11% of land is arable
Getting back to that population density idea
since most of the country is rugged and mountainous most people live along the coasts Japan is 18,500 miles of coastline again there
are positives and negatives than that on which we will discuss but it could take a look at the
map that this year the population density map. It's a thematic map
you can see that the darker the color is all the way to black the darker Reds there that's
where most of the people live and is mainly along the shoreline
the lighter pinks and whites that's when a lot of people lives in that takes up most of the land area
in japan so
a lot of people not a lot of space and that's one of the
of trademarks of Japan and the fact that they have so many people not a lot of farmland of a lot of people to feed that causes some
issues and it did lead to Japan's involvement and what they did
and tried to accomplish in world war two which will talk about towards the end this unit but this
gives you a quick idea of the physical landscape and the population
and the political geography
as well of Japan
now you'll be doing a political map and a physical map of Japan
and this should help you while you do that assignment. If you have any questions let me know
have a great one