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of for over 100 years now Japan has been
one of the world's most powerful
civilizations her impact on culture
technology and society has been among
the greatest in history but all of this
is despite her civilizations spawnpoint
being not necessarily the greatest the
core of Japanese civilization has always
been based around the Japanese
archipelago in the Pacific Ocean Japan
has always been an island civilization
and modern day Japan consists of six
thousand eight hundred and fifty two
different islands although there is
really only four important ones that you
need to know about Hokkaido Honshu
sakoku and Kyushu all of these islands
combined give Japan a land area that's
roughly equivalent to the US state of
California but it's a lot more spread
out than that if you place Japan off the
east coast of the United States the
southernmost islands would be south of
Miami while the northernmost would be
above Halifax and unlike California
Japan has a population of nearly 127
million people more than three times the
population in California however most of
this population is concentrated into
just a few small areas on the island of
Honshu in a topographic map helps to
explain why this is Japan's first major
geographic weakness the home islands are
absolutely covered with mountains
seventy-three percent of Japan's total
land area in fact is mountainous which
means that most of Japan's land is
incredibly difficult and expensive to
develop for human habitation with only
27% of our land not being covered by
mountains it means that despite being
much larger in overall territory Japan
has about the same amount of livable and
workable land that South Korea has most
of the Japanese population is therefore
crowded and stuffed into highly
concentrated dense urban areas across
the scatter plains in between the
mountains like the no B plane home to
seven million or the Osaka plane home to
over 19 million Japanese civilization
historically was bay
around the Osaka plane with the capital
in Kyoto before it was moved to the
larger more strategic and more
productive Kanto Plain in the 17th
century the Kanto Plain is the largest
single area of flat land in Japan with
the highest potential for agriculture
and cheap expansion and it's why today
the plane is home to the largest urban
area in the world
Tokyo home to 3 out of every 10 Japanese
38 million people concentrated into an
area the size of Kuwait all three of
these planes are home to massive urban
areas because of their flat land and
location nearby two Bay's that allow for
easy trade and transportation in Japan
has always had to rely on trade to
maintain her status as a great power
because the biggest weakness in Japan's
geography is maintaining her enormous
population on an island that doesn't
have enough resources to sustain it only
12% of Japan's land is arable and
suitable for farming compared with 25%
of the UK's land 34% of Germany's land
or 53 percent of India's land the
Japanese islands are also famously poor
in natural resources with virtually no
oil reserves natural gas coal or
minerals
therefore Japan has always had to look
abroad for the resources to feed her
population and fuel her economy either
through trade or through conquest Japan
currently relies extremely heavily on
imported food stuffs and fossil fuels
and for a time the government tried to
offset this dependence by switching to
nuclear power in 2010 25 percent of
Japan's electricity came from domestic
nuclear energy production but Japan's
other great geographic weakness
intervened a severe vulnerability to
natural disasters the 2011 earthquake
and tsunami triggered a nuclear meltdown
at the Fukushima nuclear reactor plant
in the resulting outcry and public
opinion against nuclear energy led to
the closure of every single nuclear
power plant in the entire country by
2012 today only four percent of Japan's
electricity comes from nuclear power and
the country is even more dependent on
fossil fuel imports and another disaster
could strike again at any time Japan
is after all one of the most vulnerable
countries in the world to natural
disasters and certainly the most
vulnerable great power by a wide margin
the top two most expensive disasters in
human history both took place in Japan
the previously mentioned 2011 earthquake
and tsunami that caused four hundred and
eleven billion dollars in damages and
the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake that
caused three hundred and thirty billion
dollars in damages
Japan's geographic location is
unfortunately at the intersection of
four different tectonic plates that are
grinding and scraping past one another
which often causes huge earthquakes and
devastating tsunamis but those aren't
the only disasters that Japan has to
worry about the intersection of these
plates has also given the Japanese
islands 108 current active volcanoes ten
percent of all the active volcanoes in
the world which occasionally erupt to
cause even more damage the various
natural disasters and ruggah geography
have made development in Japan
historically difficult but they also
make any outside invasion of Japan a
very difficult thing to accomplish
throughout our entire history Japan has
never once been conquered by an outside
power and part of the reason for this is
just because historically Japan has been
located pretty far away from all the
other major world powers China is
located 800 kilometres away across an
open ocean and the only major time an
invasion came from this direction was
when the Mongols attempted to invade
twice in the 13th century and failed
twice from two different typhoons that
destroyed their fleets natural disasters
can occasionally work in Japan's favor
after all and since Japan is located so
far away from the troubles of Asia and
the rest of the world they have the
option at any time to pursue a policy of
isolationism which they did for over two
centuries between 1641 and 1853 when
Japan had essentially zero contact with
the outside world and punished any
Japanese person leaving the islands with
death if they ever returned but the lack
of raw materials and farmland at home
needed to supply her
economy and feed her people has
occasionally led Japan to pursue a very
different policy of imperialism to
conquer what she needs and Korea has
always been the first target the
peninsula is a logical choice for
expansion because it's close to Japan's
core it can serve as a funnel for the
Japanese military to push deeper into
Asia from and it's rich with natural
mineral resources and arable land a
unified Japan
attempted to conquer Korea once for
these reasons before the isolationist
period in 1592 and then again in 20th
century after the end of the
isolationist period
Japan's rapidly industrializing economy
in the 20th century demanded things like
oil coal steel and of course food all of
which Japan's geography has relatively
poor amounts of and so Japan said about
on decades of conquest and war to secure
those resources she conquered Taiwan
from China defeated Russia and conquered
Korea attacked Germany and conquered her
Pacific Islands attacked China again to
conquer Manchuria and then eventually
invaded all of China it was a dangerous
addiction that Japan struggled to
satisfy because every attack that Japan
made resulted in even more international
sanctions that restricted her ability to
trade for resources and continue her
Wars when the US embargo Japan in 1940
and cut off her oil supply the Japanese
military calculated that they only had
two years left of oil in their reserves
before they ran dry and couldn't
continue the need for oil placed on them
by their geography and trade
restrictions caused the Japanese
military to commit to invading Indonesia
and the Philippines which would
eventually bring in basically the entire
world against them
Japan overextended themselves all across
the Pacific and with rapidly depleting
reserves of oil and coal that they
couldn't possibly replenish back at home
they inevitably lost against a massive
coalition that they couldn't have ever
hoped to defeat but the allies of the
war faced the same problem that the
mongols faced in the 13th century
invading Japan itself really really
sucks
Japan planned
massive all-out defense of their home
islands that probably would have cost
the Allies millions of casualties
so rather than dealing with that the
u.s. resulted to dropping the atomic
bombs and Japan surrendered without it
ever coming to that in the aftermath
Japan lost all of her imperial conquest
since her Industrial Revolution and was
once again confined to the meager
resources and farmland of the Japanese
home islands Japan continues to claim
the southern Kuril Islands however which
were annexed by the Soviet Union in
leader Russia after the war and because
of that dispute Russia and Japan have
still to this day in 2019 never signed
an official peace treaty ending the
second world war between them the Japan
of today however manages its geography
struggle by trading for its resources
rather than conquering them Japan has
since specialized in automobiles
electronics industrial equipment and
robotics and trades these specialized
goods for the raw materials and
foodstuff that she desperately needs 84%
of Japan's energy and 50% of her meat is
imported from other countries and she is
the world's largest importer of natural
gas second largest coal importer second
largest agricultural importer and third
largest oil importer it's safe to say
that Japan still struggles with her
geographic limitations and still deals
with them by seeking out resources
abroad just in a different manner than
she has in the past of course the way
that Japan attempted to solve her
geographic limitations in the past
through conquest was not justifiable
however if you want to see a much more
in-depth video explaining how and why
Japan fought World War 2 and how her
geography hurt and helped you should
check out apocalypse the Second World
War next on curiosity stream a glorious
six-part documentary series that
explains the full history of the Second
World War through archival footage that
has been painstakingly colored in so
that you can see the events the same way
as the people who lived through it
actually did this is just one of
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