Japan (日本 Nihon or Nippon ?, officially 日本国 Nihon-koku (? · I) or Nippon-koku, State of Japan) is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean; it has to the west the sea of ​​Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, to the north the sea of ​​Okhotsk and to the south the East China Sea and Taiwan. 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.

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Japan is an archipelago of 6852 islands. The Greater Tokyo Area 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.

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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.