Physical FeaturesMap of Japan

Here you can find a physical features map of Japan for download or printing. Japan is an archipelago consisting of more than 3,000 islands in the Pacific Ocean, in Northeast Asia. Its 4 biggest islands are Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku.

Japan lies to the east of Korea and China, and to the southeast of Russia. The southermost Ryukyu islands of Okinawa prefecture are very near the Republic of China (Taiwan). And the island of Hokkaido borders Russia in the Sea of Okhotsk, where Russia currently occupies the southern Kuril islands that the USSR seized from Japan in WWII, subsequently expelling the Japanese residents.




Japan's total land area is 377,873 km² (145,883 square miles), though 70-80% of the country is mountainous uninhabitable land. That gives Japan's mainly coastal inhabitable areas an extremely high population density, with 130 million people squeezed into limited space. The coastal strip around Osaka Bay, extending from Hyogo Prefecture through Osaka and Wakayama Prefectures, is like one sprawling megacity with no uninhabited areas. I should know, because I live here! (^0^)/
Greater Tokyo is even more massive and densely populated.




the earliest known term used for maps in Japan is thought to be kata (形, roughly "form"), which was probably in use until roughly the 8th century. During the Nara period, the term zu (図) came into use, but the term most widely used and associated with maps in pre-modern Japan is ezu (絵図, roughly “picture diagram”). As the term implies, ezu were not necessarily geographically accurate depictions of physical landscape, as is generally associated with maps in modern times, but pictorial images, often including spiritual landscape in addition to physical geography.


Ezu often focused on the conveyance of relative information as opposed to adherence to visible contour. For example, an ezu of a temple may include surrounding scenery and clouds to give an impression of nature, human figures to give a sense of how the depicted space is used, and a scale in which more important buildings may appear bigger than less important ones, regardless of actual physical size. In the late 18th century,



Dutch translators in Nagasaki translated the word kaart (“map” in Dutch) as chizu (地図, now the generally accepted translation for “map”) into Japanese. From Kansei 12 (寛政１２年, 1800) to Bunsei 4 (文政４年, 1821), Ino Tadataka (伊能忠敬) led a government-sponsored topographic survey group and organized the first scientific map of the entire nation of Japan (although earlier government survey maps of the entire country were made in the Tokugawa period), a map which became widely known as the Ino-zu. Later, the Meiji government officially began using the Japanese term chizu in the education system, solidifying the place of the term chizu for "map" in Japanese.


The map was actually published in Japan in 1914 and the Japanese script is faithfully - apart from some misspellings - rendered into English with the correct dual names and also title added at the bottom of the print.