Japan

• 1. Introduction

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  Japan sits at the edge of the Pacific, a chain of 14,125 islands stretching more than 3,000 kilometers from the frigid Sea of Okhotsk to the warm East China Sea. Nearly 123 million people live on these islands as of 2026, pressed into coastal plains because three-quarters of the land is mountainous and forested. Tokyo, the capital, anchors a metropolitan area of 37.4 million people, the largest on earth.

  The questions that shape Japan's story are not small ones. How did a string of islands cut off from the Asian mainland by the Sea of Japan build one of the world's four largest economies? How did a nation that invaded its neighbors in the 1930s and 1940s become, within decades, the sole Asian member of the G7 and a country that has constitutionally renounced its right to declare war? And how does a population aging faster than almost any other on the planet, with a fertility rate of just 1.2, chart a path forward when its population is projected to fall from 123 million to around 88 million by 2065?

• 2. Deep Roots and Early Power

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  Modern humans reached the Japanese archipelago around 38,000 years ago, in what archaeologists call the Japanese Paleolithic. By around 14,500 BC, a hunter-gatherer culture had taken hold, producing clay vessels that rank among the oldest pottery ever found.

  The Yayoi people later arrived from the Korean Peninsula, bringing wet-rice farming, new pottery styles, and metallurgy. According to legend, Emperor Jimmu, said to be a descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu, founded a kingdom in central Japan in 660 BC, beginning an imperial line that has never broken.

  By 111 AD, Japan appeared in China's Book of Han as a land of a hundred small kingdoms. In 552, Buddhism reached Japan from the Korean kingdom of Baekje, and despite early resistance, it gained wide acceptance during the Asuka period beginning in 592. In 645, Prince Naka no Ōe and Fujiwara no Kamatari introduced the Taika Reforms, nationalizing all land and ordering a household registry to underpin a new tax system. These changes drew their model from China, and envoys were dispatched there to study Chinese writing, politics, art, and religion.

  A smallpox epidemic in 735-737 killed as much as one-third of Japan's population. Emperor Kanmu responded by moving the capital, settling on Heian-kyō, today's Kyoto, in 794. During the Heian period that followed, Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji, often described as the world's first novel, and the lyrics of Japan's national anthem, "Kimigayo," were composed.

• 3. Samurai, Shoguns, and Isolation

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  In 1185, Minamoto no Yoritomo defeated the Taira clan in the Genpei War and established a military government at Kamakura, placing real power in the hands of samurai warriors rather than the imperial court. The Kamakura shogunate twice repelled Mongol invasions, in 1274 and in 1281, but was eventually overthrown.

  The Ashikaga shogunate that followed could not control the feudal warlords known as daimyō, and civil war erupted in 1467, opening a century of conflict called the Sengoku period. Portuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries arrived during the 16th century, the first direct contact between Japan and the West. Oda Nobunaga used European firearms to overpower rival daimyō. After Nobunaga's death in 1582, Toyotomi Hideyoshi unified Japan and launched two unsuccessful invasions of Korea in 1592 and 1597.

  Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated rival clans at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and was appointed shōgun by Emperor Go-Yōzei in 1603. He established the Tokugawa shogunate at Edo, the city now called Tokyo, and in 1639 implemented the sakoku isolationist policy, sealing Japan from the outside world for more than two centuries. The Edo period that followed was one of tenuous but real stability. Roads, water transportation networks, and financial instruments including futures contracts and banking emerged. Contact with the Dutch enclave in Nagasaki kept a narrow channel to Western science open, a practice called rangaku.

• 4. Meiji Transformation and War

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  In July 1853, Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrived at Uraga with four warships his hosts called "Black Ships," forcing Japan's opening. The resulting Convention of Kanagawa in March 1854 ended isolation. The shogunate fell, and the Meiji Restoration of 1868 returned nominal power to the emperor.

  Japan moved fast. The Cabinet introduced the Meiji Constitution on the 29th of November 1890. The country won the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894-1895 and the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-1905, gaining control of Taiwan, Korea, and the southern half of Sakhalin. Japan annexed Korea in 1910. The Japanese population doubled from 35 million in 1873 to 70 million by 1935.

  World War I allowed Japan to seize German Pacific and Chinese possessions. The 1923 Great Tokyo Earthquake killed over 140,000 people and triggered a period of political instability. Japan invaded and occupied Manchuria in 1931, then withdrew from the League of Nations in 1933 after international condemnation. In 1936, it signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Nazi Germany. The full-scale invasion of China began in 1937. On December 7-8, 1941, Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor and British positions across Asia, drawing Japan into World War II as an Axis power.

  The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, combined with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, led to Japan's unconditional surrender. Millions of Japanese settlers were repatriated from former colonies, and the Allies convened the International Military Tribunal for the Far East to prosecute Japanese war leaders.

• 5. Postwar Reconstruction and the Lost Decades

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  Japan adopted a new constitution in 1947 emphasizing liberal democratic principles. The Allied occupation ended with the Treaty of San Francisco in 1952. In 1956, Japan joined the United Nations.

  What followed was one of the most rapid economic expansions in recorded history. Japan rose to become the world's second-largest economy, driven by automotive and electronics manufacturing. This growth ended in the mid-1990s when an asset price bubble collapsed, beginning what became known as the "Lost Decades," a prolonged stretch of economic stagnation and low inflation.

  The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, one of the largest in Japan's recorded history, triggered the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. By May 2012 all of Japan's nuclear power plants had been taken offline amid public opposition. The Sendai Nuclear Power Plant restarted in 2015.

  On the 1st of May 2019, Emperor Naruhito took the Chrysanthemum Throne after the historic abdication of his father Akihito, beginning the Reiwa era. Today Japan holds the world's fourth-largest economy by nominal GDP. Its national debt is estimated at 237% relative to GDP, the highest ratio among advanced economies. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who took office after winning the 2025 Liberal Democratic Party leadership election, leads a government navigating these pressures alongside a defense budget that the previous prime minister instructed should increase by 65% through 2027.

• 6. People, Society, and Culture

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  Japan has the highest proportion of elderly citizens of any country, with over 29.3% of the population aged 65 or older. Its median age of 48.4 is the highest in the world. The total fertility rate of 1.2 sits far below the replacement level of 2.1. As of 2023-92% of Japanese lived in cities.

  The University of Tokyo is Japan's top-ranked institution. Japanese 15-year-olds score third in the world on the Programme for International Student Assessment. Japan spent 7.4% of GDP on education in 2021. Japanese women are more highly educated than men: 59% of women hold a university degree, against 52% of men.

  In 2020, life expectancy at birth was 85 years, the highest in the world. Infant mortality stood at 2 per 1,000 live births. Since 1981, cancer has been Japan's leading cause of death, accounting for 27% of deaths in 2018.

  The Tale of Genji, ukiyo-e prints that shaped Western post-Impressionism, the theatrical forms of noh and kabuki, and the manga and anime industries that have generated some of the world's highest-grossing media franchises all originate here. Japan has produced 22 Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, or medicine, and three Fields medalists. Ishirō Honda's Godzilla, made in Japan, launched the longest-running film franchise in history.

• 7. Geopolitics and the Road Ahead

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  Article 9 of Japan's 1947 constitution renounces the right to declare war, yet Japan maintains the tenth-largest military budget in the world as of 2024, spending 1.4% of GDP on defense. The Japan Self-Defense Forces first deployed overseas since World War II in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2015, parliament passed legislation allowing the JSDF to act in an "existential crisis situation."

  Japan joined the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with the United States, Australia, and India in 2017, aiming to limit Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific. It contests Russia's control of the Southern Kuril Islands, occupied by the Soviet Union in 1945, and claims the Senkaku Islands despite Chinese counterclaims.

  Japan is the world's fifth-largest donor of official development assistance, giving US$9.2 billion in 2014. It attracted 36.9 million international tourists in 2024. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency plans to build a Moon base and land astronauts by 2030. Its lunar probe SELENE, launched from Tanegashima Space Center in 2007, was the largest lunar mission since Apollo before it was deliberately crashed into the Moon on the 11th of June 2009.