Exploring Japan through captivating maps that reveal its culture and geography

Japan. Japan is a country and it's beautiful. Whenever I do research for videos I find that the best way to find out information about a place is through maps. This, associated with the fact that I'm obsessed with them, especially old ones, makes it so that I spend way too long looking at them. But in this video I want to show you a series of maps of Japan and through them learn some interesting facts about the country as well as some internal comparisons between its regions. Let's start with one of the ones on the thumbnail, military bases. Ever since the end of World War II, US military presence in Japan has been a constant, in a similar way that they still exist in Germany, despite the reasoning for both having been surpassed. In Japan, many say it was to make sure a democratic transition took place, pushing away the fear of a communist takeover like China or the Soviet Union, as well as to guarantee American influence, of course. They have been present for over 65 years now, with over 50,000 personnel up to today, and they even have their own insignia slash symbol, which incidentally looks pretty cool. In this map, we can see exactly where they are stationed. There are 8 main bases spread across the territory. In Okinawa especially, US facilities take over a large percentage of the island's territory. But in addition to these 8 main bases, we also have several other placements of US troops and personnel. This map chart points that out and shows us, for instance, ports where US warships are stationed and which material is present as well. Another interesting map is simply the territorial organization of Japan. In case you don't know, Japan is divided into prefectures, 47 of them to be precise. They have arguably some of the coolest regional flags in the world. I did a video about this some time ago, I'll put the link for it in the description. Each prefecture is a part of a region and there are 8 regions, which we see here on this map in different colors. Understanding this territorial organization is important since we'll have some maps that compare each region slash prefecture and some indicators. I think Japan has always been organized in a regional structure if that makes sense. This old map shows us Japanese provinces. In this next map we can see the population density of Japan. This is from the year 2000. I know a lot has happened in 20 years but the point I want to make with this map is still valid. Japan has a very high concentration of population in small areas of its country. They have 125 million people and over half of them, 75 million, live in this line right here. It's known as the Tokaido Belt, often seen as a megalopolis given that it united many of the country's main cities. Nearly all manufacturing industry in the nation is also located in this area. The zone is also known as the Tokaido megalopolis, and this map from as early as 1968 already depicted it. The reason why it exists might be coincidental, cities in this area concentrated industry, therefore grew so much in population that they ended up connecting with each other, but the reason why manufacturing is concentrated there and the reason why they expanded in the directions that they did is likely related to Japan's terrain, the country is very mountainous. This is a topographic map, a somewhat exaggerated depiction, but we can see how prevalent mountains are almost everywhere on the islands. Korea, for instance, is also mountainous, but not as much in terrain occupation and elevation itself. Before we keep going with more maps, let's take a quick look at this week's sponsor. Today's video is sponsored by Ground News, an app and website that I've been using to learn about issues like the one I talk about in this video. Let me show you how this works. Check out this story about the UK government's policies. Not only can I see that there are 9 sources reporting about this topic, I can quickly identify which sources have a political bias according to ratings from independent news monitoring organizations. For instance, The Telegraph is given a right-wing bias, while The Independent is given a left-wing bias. I can also click through and read each article reporting on the story all in one place. They even present a bias distribution showing you which type of news sources reported on each topic the most, a really cool feature. One other thing that I love is that since they list international news, you can see their map feature where you move around the world and check which news are most relevant in each area. If you want to join me in being better informed when you read your news stories and want to take into account the origin of the article along with its content, go to ground.news slash knowledge or click the link in the description. Now, back to the maps. I found this really cool website which shows us a bunch of cool statistical maps divided by prefecture. Here, for instance, we can see the different levels of income that people have in each prefecture. We can see that Tokyo has the highest score at 92, followed by Aichi at 67, a huge difference between the capital and the second rated. The lowest is Okinawa at 30. The score takes into account average income through salaries, property income and business income of people in a region. In this other map, we can see the minimum wage. Tokyo and Kagawa are the only two prefectures with a minimum wage above 1000 Japanese yen. The ones in orange, yellow, light green and green get increasingly lower as we go through them. In Kyoto, the minimum wage is only 900 yen. In Nara, it's 838. And in Kochi, it's 792. With these two maps, we can see that the prefectures differ a lot when it comes to how much income people make. But there are some things in which they don't differ at all. For instance, this is a map that shows us the life expectancy in each Japanese prefecture. While there are groups of prefectures that have higher life expectancies, the darker ones on the map, the difference isn't too high. The prefecture with the highest life expectancy is Nagano with 84.7 and the lowest is Aomori with 82.3, a huge difference which isn't that relevant. Japan is one of the countries in the world with the highest life expectancy. But going back to the differences, this map shows us the amount of foreign residents in Japan. Through it, we can tell that the center region is the one with the most foreign people, being the center of industry and with most businesses having their headquarters there, at least the biggest ones. It makes sense that there is where people move to the most likely to work. Tokyo is the biggest, followed by Aichi and Osaka, but this only takes into account workers, although I would imagine that most foreign people who move to Japan go there to work, unless they are retired. Going into the other one on the thumbnail and one of the most interesting maps I think is the distribution of nuclear power plants in Japan. We can see here that Japan still has a significant amount of nuclear plants despite the great issue they had with one not too long ago. Because of that issue, many of the reactors have been decommissioned or are undergoing modifications. I don't think they decided to abandon nuclear power altogether, but they are attempting to make them more resilient to potential natural disasters. On this map, we can see about half have been decommissioned, very few in blue meet the new standards and just over a handful in yellow are functioning today, with three in green being built. Going back to population, one important characteristic about it everywhere is religion. Japan is mostly an atheist country, but a lot of people do follow Buddhism with Shintoism and Christian minorities. In this map, we can see the percentage of Buddhist households in Japan. We can tell they are more prevalent in the south as well as Hokkaido, but the north and east of the biggest islands aren't that high. These areas somewhat coincide with the prefectures where there's a higher amount of Shinto shrines, as we can see here, while Christians are even less present. This map doesn't give us values, just a higher or lower proportion. Keep in mind the total percent of Christians in the country is 1%. Tokyo has the highest percentage, likely due to the foreign people living there. Nagasaki as well, maybe due to its history as a colonial port. We just saw one map about people so let's see another one about the territory. This map shows us land use in Japan. Throughout we can see how the majority of the country is forest with areas in red being built infrastructure and yellow being agriculture. However I found this other map that allocates more territory to agriculture showing us the different types of farming that exists. The forest dominance is confirmed here which along with the mountains we saw earlier again justifies the non-existence of cities in most of this area. This really cool map shows us the distribution of societal clusters across the country. It goes hand in hand with the first map of population distribution as well, but I think it's also connected to the land use one we just saw. In red, we see urbanized areas, in yellow, suburban, which are essentially the connecting lines of the belt, while the rest is rural poor, mostly the forest and mountain areas, essentially the Japanese countryside, this lack of housing infrastructure and less income availability might lead to there being less people living there. And this next map shows us precisely population inflow inside Japan. Red means people are moving into these prefectures and blue means they are moving out of those prefectures. The area around Tokyo is almost the only one that is bringing people in with only four more being in red but only slightly. This shows us that there is almost a mass exodus of japanese population from everywhere in the country into tokyo perhaps where the jobs mostly are and perhaps due to the better income possibilities that we saw earlier quality of life does seem slightly higher in the south in this map we can see the human development index in each prefecture the darker the blue the higher the hdi which takes into account health care housing education etc japan has one of the highest hdis in the world so even the lower regions do very well, but we do notice a trend in the north doing slightly less well than the rest of the country, especially in the island of Hokkaido. And finally, this map shows the exclusive economic zone of Japan. We often forget that a country's territory is not limited by its land, but also includes the sea. When it comes to islands, the EEZ territory is particularly significant, because it is often very large and sometimes larger than the land territory itself. Here, we can see Japan's economic zone being incredibly large due to the other islands it controls in the Pacific Ocean. So, those are a few interesting maps of Japan that teach us about the country, about the way it organizes itself, about the people who live there and the way in which they live, their income, life expectancy, religion, among other things. As well as some specific things that we get to learn through these maps, like the distribution and presence of US military in the country as well as the nuclear power plants that they have. There's obviously more maps and statistics about Japan that I could have used for this video but these seem to be the most interesting among the ones I found. Which other countries should I make videos like this for and did you notice any mistakes on this one? Let me know in the comments. Thanks so much for watching this video, subscribe if you want and I will see you next time for more general knowledge.