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Previous: Chapter 15 - Morocco
CHAPTER 16 - JAPAN
IN A NUTSHELL. Our word Japan comes from the Chinese zapagn which means to the east, or source of the sun. The Japanese call their country Nippon which means rising sun. Possibly no nation in the world has gone through such extremes of expansion and contraction as has Japan in the past century but today she has an area of 142,266 square miles and a population of about 85 million. This makes her a bit smaller than Montana but one of the most populous countries of the world being surpassed only by China, India, the U.S.S.R. and our own country.
Tokyo, the capital, is now the world's largest city passing both New York and London with her 8,622,519 citizens—and she is still growing.
The Japanese Empire consists of four principal islands, Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku and roughly a thousand smaller ones. Even were her land mass largely arable she would still be crowded with that population but actually Japan, and this comes as a surprise to many Westerners, can cultivate only 20% of her land area which makes her people so concentrated that there are few places on earth with a greater density of population.
Stretching as she does almost due north and south for a thousand miles, Japan can offer a wide range of climate. The northern island of Hokkaido can be quite cold but Kyushu and the islands still further south are mild and warm. In fact, the climatic difference is compared to Maine at one extreme and Georgia to the other. Scenically she has much to offer, her famed mountains such as Fujiyama are as spectacular as any in the world, her short rapid rivers, her forests of pine, her sandy beaches, her long stretches of rice paddies, her lovely lakes. All of these you have seen portrayed on Japanese prints. Japan can boast a beautiful land but by no means is it all delicate in its beauty as some Westerners seem to believe.
Children in Japanese schools are still taught that the Nipponese people are of divine origin and that the Empire was first founded in
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