Geography of Japan
Japan is a stratovolcanic archipelago made up of 377,744 km² of islands and 3,091 km² of water and made up of more than six thousand islands that stretch along the east Asian coast of the Pacific Ocean and in the Ryukyu, Izu and Ogasawara. According to the 2005 census, it has a population of 127.55 million. The country is located northeast of China (separated by the East China Sea), slightly east of Korea (separated by the Sea of Japan), and south of Siberia, Russia. The five main islands, from north to south, are Hokkaidō, Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu, and Okinawa. The island of Okinawa (600 km southwest of Kyushu) is next in magnitude. About 73% of the country is mountainous, each island has its mountain range. The highest mountain is Mount Fuji (Fujisan) at 3,776m, followed by Kitadake at 3,193m. Because there is so little flat land in Japan, many hills and slopes are used entirely for cultivation. As it is located in an area of high volcanic activity, small magnitude tremors and occasional volcanic activity are frequent. Destructive earthquakes occur several times each century, often resulting in tsunamis.
Topography
The mountainous islands of the archipelago arc from the shores of East Asia. The national territory includes the small Nanpō islands, including the island of Iwo Jima, approximately 1,100 kilometers from the main islands. The particularity of Japan being an archipelago means that no point in Japan is more than 150 kilometers from the sea.
channels and three of them (Honshu, Shikoku and Kyūshū) through the Seto Sea. At the southern end are the Ryukyu Islands 970 kilometres south of the third largest island, Kyūshū.
The closest point to the Asian mainland is the Korean Peninsula at a distance of approximately 200 kilometers. It has always been connected to the mainland through sea trade routes: in the north with Siberia, in the west from the Tsushima Islands to the Korean Peninsula, and in the south with the ports of southern China.
It has approximately 84% of mountainous territory, 14% of the surface is dedicated to agricultural-livestock activities, 66% to forests and the remaining 20% is dedicated to other uses, due to the fact that its islands are a mountain range in the submerged part of the continental shelf, the islands being its peaks. Only about 25% of the territory is flat and it is where the population is concentrated. A long mountain range divides the archipelago in half, one of which is on the Pacific Ocean side and the other on the Sea of Japan side (shown on the topographic map). In the middle of the Pacific there are rugged mountains, approximately 1,500 to 3,000 meters high, which form deep valleys and gorges. In the center three mountain ranges converge: the Hida, the Kiso and the Akaishi, which form the Japanese Alps, Kitadake being its highest mountain at 3,193 meters, but the second highest in the country. The highest point of the territory is located on Mount Fuji, a dormant volcano since 1707 of 3776 meters located in the prefecture of Shizuoka.
None of the inhabited plains or valleys are wide. The largest is the Kanto Plain, where Tokyo is located, and it is only 13,000 square kilometers. Other important plains are: the Nōbi plain, which surrounds Nagoya; Kinki, in the Osaka-Kyoto area; that of Sendai, which surrounds the city of Sendai in northeast Honshū and that of Ishikari in Hokkaidō. Most of these plains are along the coast.
The scarce habitable surface of land underwent diverse modifications in its ecosystems throughout the centuries. The lands near the sea and rivers have numerous constructions of dikes and drainages, many hills and mountains are cut into stepped terraces to increase the arable land and to increase the building land. This process of modification of the environment continues today with the extension of the coastline and the construction of artificial islands for industries and for the growth of the port. An example of this is Kansai International Airport, in Osaka Bay.
Japan's rivers are often fast and steep, only a few are navigable, and most are less than 300 kilometers long. Despite this, Japan manages to take advantage of these rivers to produce hydroelectric power, although this resource is exploited almost to its capacity. The longest river in the territory is the Shinano, which rises in Nagano Prefecture to Niigata Prefecture. where it empties into the Sea of Japan, but it is only 367 kilometers long. The largest water reservoir is found in Lake Biwa northeast of Kyoto.
The length of the navigable coastline, especially in the Seto Sea, makes up for the lack of navigable rivers. The Pacific coast south of Tokyo has the characteristic of being long and very gradually increasing in depth due to sedimentation.
Actually, the jagged tops of a great ridge rising from the sea floor near the Japan and Bonin Trenches, where the ocean depth exceeds 30,000 feet. About 73% of the country is mountainous, generally covered in forests and cut by deep gorges where fast-flowing rivers form waterfalls.
Each island has its own mountain range. The highest mountain in Japan is Mount Fuji (Fujisan), at 3,776 meters high. It is followed by Kita-dake, with 3193 meters high. Because there is so little flat land in Japan, many hills and slopes are used entirely for cultivation.
Because Japan is located in an area of high volcanic activity, there are frequent small-magnitude tremors (about 1,500 a year, most of them minor but some quite intense) and some occasional volcanic activity as well. Destructive earthquakes they occur several times each century, often resulting in tsunamis. Due to this intense seismic activity, its orography has a certain particularity as a consequence of the aforementioned. Chains of mountains and volcanoes follow one another, occupying most of the territory, giving the islands an arched configuration, similar to a crescent, where Mount Fuji stands out as the highest point. More than 150 Japanese mountains are large volcanoes, and 60 of them are still active.
The Asama is the most active volcano in the entire archipelago, it is located on the island of Honshu approximately 100 km from Tokyo, it has a height of 2542 m. The rivers are mighty and some cross the same.
Climate
It is a rainy country with high humidity, it has a temperate climate with 4 different well-defined seasons, thanks to its distance from the equator. In any case, the northern climate is slightly cold temperate (Hokkaidō) with mild summers and heavy snowfall in winter. The center of the country is warm with long, hot, and humid summers and short, mild winters. The climate is sometimes affected by seasonal winds produced by cyclonic and anticyclonic centers that form on the mainland and in the Pacific (anticyclone or Hawaiian cyclone), generating winds from the mainland to the Pacific in winter and from the Pacific to the mainland in summer.
There are two primary factors in the influence of weather: proximity to the Asian continent and ocean currents. The climate from June to September is hot and humid due to the tropical wind currents that come from the Pacific Ocean and from Southeast Asia. These currents precipitate large amounts of water when they touch land, so summer is a time of significant rains, which begin at the beginning of June and last for about a month. It is followed by a hot season and from the beginning of August to the beginning of September, a period of typhoons, in which five or six of them pass through Japan and cause significant damage. The annual precipitation of rains is from 100 to 200 centimeters, but between 70 and 80 percent of these are concentrated in June and September.
In winter, the high pressure centers in the Siberian area and the low pressure centers in the North Pacific Ocean generate cold winds that cross Japan from west to east, producing significant snowfall on the Japanese coast of the Sea of Japan. As the winds collide against the mountain ranges in the center, the high altitudes end up precipitating the humidity of these winds in the form of snow and when passing through the Pacific coast of the country they arrive without carrying notable amounts of humidity, so they are not the main factor of snowfall on the Pacific coast.[citation required] In addition, this causes the winter weather to be dry and cloudless days on this coast, contrary to the winter on the west coast.
There are two ocean currents that affect the climate model: the warm Kuroshio current and the cold Oyashio current. The Kuroshio Current flows through the Pacific from Taiwan and past Japan well north of Tokyo, it is a current that brings a lot of heat to the east coast.
Fauna and flora
The fauna includes 132 species of mammals, 583 species of birds and 66 species of reptiles, batrachians and fish.
Mammals
Among the mammals we can highlight the Asian black bear, present in Honshu and Shikoku, although extinct in Kyushu, the Hokkaido brown bear (ursus arctos ussuriensis), an island where the black bear is not present; the wild boar, absent in Hokkaido, but present in the rest of the archipelago, the sika deer, the Japanese serow (a species of antelope similar to the chamois, found in the mountains of Honshu, and to a lesser extent in Kyushu and Shikoku); the red fox (absent from Shikoku), the Japanese marten (Martes melampus), the Japanese badger (Meles anakuma), present on the large islands, except Hokkaido, the tanuki, or raccoon dog, distributed throughout the archipelago. It is interesting to note the presence of two varieties of wild cat, restricted to small islands: the Iriomote cat, an island south of the Ryukyu, or the Tshushima cat that only inhabits this island, both are subspecies of the leopard cat. Varieties of the flying fox exist on Okinawa and the Bonin Islands. The Steller sea lion is concentrated in colonies off the coast of Hokkaido, although it does not breed. There is a highly threatened population of dugongs in the Ryukiu, although excessive human pressure, low numbers, and poor nature protection laws in Japan, could have already caused their extinction.
Japanese wolves also became extinct, both in the southern islands and in Hokkaido, their Japanese name is okami.
Among the introduced species we can mention the palm civet present in Honshu; the raccoon (Procyon lotor), distributed throughout Hokkaido and Honshu thanks to the release of pets, the muntjac present in Honshu (Boso peninsula and Oshima); the South American coypu introduced for its fur has spread to Honshu. The only primate is the Japanese macaque that inhabits Honshu and Shikoku and Kyushu and some smaller islands.
Birds:
Among the birds to mention only some of the most colorful we can mention the red-crowned crane in Hokkaido, the huge Steller's sea eagle (it is a variety of eagle), the common eagle, the golden eagle, the goshawk asiatica, the copper pheasant (Syrmaticus soemmerringii) and the green pheasant (Phasianus versicolor); both endemic to Japan, and present in Kyushu, Honshu, and Shikoku.
Vegetation:
The great variety of Japanese vegetation (about 17,000 species) is due to the climate and relief. Forests cover 67% of the country's surface and are made up mostly of broad-leaved and coniferous trees: Japanese chestnut, Japanese beech (fagus crenata and fagus japonica), maple, thuja, Japanese red pine (pinus densiflora), Korean pine (Pinus koraiensis and others (Pinus parviflora, Pinus thunbergii...) There are also several varieties of oaks (Quercus acuta, Quercus aliena, Quercus dentata, Quercus mongolica, Quercus variabilis and birch (Betula ermanii, Betula maximowicziana, Betula platyphylla) and ash (Fraxinus lanuginosa, Fraxinus mandshurica).
In general, we can point out that the Japanese vegetation ranges from clearly tropical in the Ryukiu, to that of the transitional forests between taiga and temperate deciduous in Hokkaido; going through the subtropical flora in southern Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu, with evergreen plants with glossy and waxy leaves, a kind of laurel forest (camellias, rhododendrons, camphor trees...) or the cold temperate of central Honshu, southern Hokkaido, and mountains of the two southern islands. In this area we find beeches and oaks. The conifers in their different and rich varieties are distributed throughout the archipelago. The plant species are mixed in the contact zones, making the vegetation especially rich and varied, and offering an autumn of spectacular colors in a good part of the country, similar to what happens in the forests of the American Appalachians. White and red plum trees, early-flowering cherry trees, as well as bamboo and pine trees have become traditional symbols of the country.
Geology
The islands are located in one of the most geologically unstable and complex areas on the planet. In general, it is a highly seismic country due to its location in the Pacific Ring of Fire. There have been five major earthquakes in Japan in the last 15 years.
The Japanese island group is, above all, the result of continuous and immense ocean movements that occurred for hundreds of millions of years from the middle of the Silurian Period to the Pleistocene. This process was as a result of the tectonic subduction of the Philippine plate and the Pacific plate under the continental Eurasian plate and North American plate.
Most of the terrestrial territory is based on the Okhotsk plate, its line of friction and rupture with the Eurasian plate (also known as the Amuria plate) being located to the south of the island of Honshū. The rest of the Japanese territory is located on the second mentioned plate. Meanwhile, the Ryūkyū island arc lies on the edge of the Philippine plate.
On the other hand, the union of the Philippine plate, the Eurasian plate and the Okhotsk plate occurs in the vicinity of Mount Fuji or Fujisan, a convergence with a high seismic and vulcanological potential.
This complex distribution gives rise to deep and extensive oceanic trenches, especially on the Pacific coast of the archipelago. The Japan Trench stands out in particular, 9000 meters deep, caused by a fault with a convergent edge due to subduction.
Japan was originally associated with the east coast of the Eurasian continent. The plates were subducted, being deeper than the Eurasian plate. These geologic processes pulled Japan eastward, causing the Sea of Japan to open around 15 million years ago and giving rise to a back-arc submarine basin. The Strait of Tartary and the Strait of Korea were opened much later.
The collisions between these plates and their subsequent subsidence generated the Kuril and Sakhalin-Hokkaidô island arcs (to the north), the Honshû arc, which connects Kyūshū, Shikoku, Honshû and western Hokkaidô (in the center), and the arches of the Ryûkyû and Izu-Ogasawara (in the south).
Japan is located in the volcanic area known as the Pacific Ring of Fire. Earth tremors are frequent (with low to moderate intensity) and occasional volcanic activity is actively felt on the islands.
A large number of local tectonic faults cross the surface, causing earthquakes of regular intensity. The largest are two transverse faults south of Honshū: the Itoigawa-Shizuoka Tectonic Line and the Japanese Mid-Japanese Tectonic Line, both transform faults lying at the boundary of the Okhotsk and Eurasian plates, along the Okhotsk mountain system. the island.
Earthquakes are extremely destructive, often resulting in tsunamis, with a frequency of several times in a century. More recent major earthquakes include the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake, the 2007 Chūetsu coastal earthquake, and the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami. Hot springs are numerous and have become resorts.
Each island has its own mountain range, which follows a transversal axis and divides them in half. In Japan there are around 200 volcanoes; sixty of them are active. The most famous is Mount Fuji (Fujisan), 3,776 meters high, crowned with perpetual snow. It is followed by Kitadake Mountain, which is 3,193 m high. Asama is the most active volcano in the entire archipelago, and is located on the island of Honshu, approximately 100 km from Tokyo. It has a height of 2542 m. Almost a third of the country consists of terranes of pyroclastic origin. The surface is mainly mountainous: only one fifth (27%) is made up of small plains, most of them of alluvial and sedimentary type along the coast.
Natural resources
Japan's natural resources are scarce (on land), with the exception of fisheries products (fish, crustaceans, whales, etc.), as well as some mining and logging industries.
Marine Life
Japan has one of the largest fishing fleets in the world. It accounts for almost 15% of the world's fish catch. In 2005, Japan ranked sixth in the world in terms of tonnage of fish caught (en:Fishing industry by country). Japan caught 4,074,580 tonnes of fish in 2005.
Ocean relief
Japan has the eighth largest exclusive economic zone. They are 4,479,388 km². There are many natural resources and in the oceanic relief. For example, methane hydrate, natural gas, metal and rare earth minerals. Deep sea mineral resources, such as polymetallic nodules, cobalt-rich crust deposits, and undersea hydrothermals, are found at depths greater than 1,000 meters. In 2012, Japanese scientists discovered the existence of 6.8 million tons of earths. rare near Minami Torishima, capable of supplying national needs for more than 200 years. It is estimated that there are 40 trillion cubic feet of methane hydrate in the eastern Nankai Trench.
Some figures
Surface
Total: 377973 km²
- Lands: 374882 km2
- Water: 3091 km 2, of which 670 km2 correspond to Lake Biwa, the third oldest freshwater lake in the world, located in the center of the main island of Honshu.
- Exclusive economic zone: 4,479,388 km2
Land use
1999 estimate
- The arable lands: 12 %
- Plant land: 2 %
- Pasta: 2 %
- Forests and wetlands: 66%
- Other: 18 %
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