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Japan Destinations Travel Guide

Language: Japanese

Currency: Yen (JPY)

Calling Code: 81

Japan (in Japanese: 日本), is an insular sovereign country of East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean; it is located in the vicinity of China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia. The characters that make up the name of Japan mean "the origin of the sun," which is why the country is also known as the Land of the Rising Sun. Japan is an archipelago of 6852 islands. The Greater Tokyo Area is located on the island of Honshū, where the city of Tokyo, the de facto capital of the nation, is the largest metropolitan area in the world, with more than thirty million residents.

The archaeological remains indicate that the human being has lived in Japan since the Upper Paleolithic. The first written mention of the islands is found in texts from ancient China in the 1st century AD. C. The history of Japan has alternated periods of foreign influence with other very prolonged periods of total isolation. From the 12th century until 1868, Japan was ruled by successive military shoguna who exercised power in the name of the emperor. In the seventeenth century the country entered a long period of isolation that did not end until the mid-nineteenth century. After almost two decades of internal conflicts and insurrections, Emperor Meiji was restored as head of state in 1868 and the Empire of Japan was proclaimed.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, successes in the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War allowed Japan to expand its empire and strengthen its armed forces. The Second Sino-Japanese War that began in 1937, ended up being part of the Second World War since 1941, conflicts that ended after the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Since the adoption of the revised constitution in 1947, Japan has maintained a unitary constitutional monarchy with an emperor and a democratic governing body called the Diet.

Travel Destination in Japan