The Japanese Homeland FM.Climate Resources

The Japanese Homeland

FM.Climate Resources

FN.Japan’s Core

75. Historical Background

76. Japan’s Postwar Miracle

77. Japanese Industry

78. The Industrious People behind Japanese Industry

79. Unfortunately Located Korea

80. Contrasts between the Two Koreas

81. Sunshine for Korea?

Japan consists of four main islands: Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu. The country is mountainous and volcanic thanks to its location along the Ring of Fire in the Pacific; it is also prone to earthquakes and tsunamis. Japan’s climate is monsoonal. Only a fraction of the country is arable; Japan is not a major agricultural producer, importing 60 percent of its food needs. However, Japan takes more fish from the sea than any other nation and has the world’s highest per capita consumption of seafood.

Early Japanese society was largely influenced by ancient Chinese civilization, though a distinct culture gradually emerged. Initial contact with European nations was halted within a few decades as Japan went into an extended period of isolation. Japan was forcibly reopened to the West in the 1850s, and in 1868 Japan officially re-engaged itself in world affairs during the Meiji Restoration. Japan became the first Asian nation to emerge as a modern world power, and it expanded rapidly, developing a large empire during the twentieth century. That empire was lost during World War II after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by U.S. nuclear bombs, which prompted Japan’s surrender.

After World War II, Japan and the United States began a close partnership that helped rebuild the Japanese economy. Despite the lack of many natural resources on its own soil, by the 1970s Japan was an industrial giant. Today Japan has the world’s second-largest economy. Japan’s ruling political party encouraged business, and Japan is renowned for producing energy-efficient goods. Japan’s economic fortunes ended in the early 1990s, and the country entered an extended recession brought about by subsidies to failing industries and massive, underutilized public works projects.

Japan is one of the world’s most ethnically homogeneous nations. Most of its 127 million people and economic activities are concentrated in the 700-mile-long core area, which includes Tokyo, the world’s largest city. Japan’s wealth is well-distributed among its famously hardworking people. The Japanese work ethic has made the country prosperous but has also led to social problems such as stress, suicide, depression, and alcoholism. Japan is a crowded nation, with a rapidly aging and declining population.

Japan’s standard of living compared with other MDCs is low.

The Korean Peninsula is surrounded by great powers – Japan, China, and Russia. This location has led to numerous conflicts throughout history. Japan occupied Korea for much of the early twentieth century, and after its withdrawal the U.S. and Soviet Union established governments on the peninsula that would be friendly to them. Soviet-backed North Korea invaded the South in 1950, leading to three years of war. North and South Korea remain divided along the very tense Demilitarized Zone and have not yet officially reconciled.

North Korea and South Korea share people of the same ethnicity and language. South Korea is by far the more populous and successful, with a strong economy and democratic government. North Korea has more mineral resources than the south, but its extremely oppressive, isolationist government greatly inhibits the country’s development. North Korea has been hit by repeated famines and has sought food and economic aid from the U.S., often using its possession of nuclear weapons as a bargaining tool. South

Korea is rapidly making the transition from LDC to MDC, and is now one of the more important economies in the world. South Korea is heavily urbanized, and Seoul is one of the world’s largest cities. Reunification between the two countries is very unlikely in the near future.

Key Terms and Concepts

150. 
     Japan’s four main islands are Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu. Japan also owns a long chain of islands south of Kyushu called the Ryukyu Islands, which include Okinawa. Japan used to own the southern half of Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands, but the Soviet Union took possession of those after World War II. Japan still claims the Kuril Islands. [p. 390]
     

151. 
     All of Japan’s main islands are mountainous, and there are a number of volcanoes throughout the country. Japan is located where the Pacific plate is subducted underneath the Eurasian plate, which is responsible for the volcanism and the numerous and sometimes devastating earthquakes and tsunamis Japan experiences. [pp. 390, 394-395]
     

152. 
     A humid subtropical climate covers Japan from Tokyo southward to the islands of Shikoku and Kyushu. A humid continental climate exists from Tokyo northward, with the long-summer type occurring over Honshu and the short-summer type over Hokkaido. Japan gets ample precipitation, and is also subject to typhoons in the summer. [p. 390]
     

153. 
     Rice is the dominant crop grown in Japan, but because of an overabundance of rice in recent years, the national government has taken to paying farmers not to grow rice. The Japanese diet is becoming more dependent upon wheat, which is often double-cropped with rice in southern portions of the country. Fruits, vegetables, tea, tobacco, sugarcane, and barley are also important agricultural products. [pp. 392-393]
     

154. 
     Japan’s main source of animal protein is sea fish, and Japan takes more fish from the sea than any other country. Japanese have the highest per capita consumption of fish and other marine foods; whale meat is also popular. Japan has an ambitious “inner space” program of deep-sea exploration to harvest the sea’s organic and mineral wealth. [p. 393]
     

155. 
     Japan’s core area is a corridor approximately 700 miles long, from the Tokyo metropolitan area in the east stretching westward across southern Honshu, along the Inland Sea, and into northern Kyushu. Most of Japan’s people and economic activity is located in this corridor. It includes major cities such as Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Kobe, Nagoya, Kitakyushu, and Fukuoka. Osaka and Yokohama are Japan’s main seaports, and the Tokyo area is the country’s capital and leading commercial center. Nagoya is a major industrial center. The western end of the Japanese core area was also the target of American nuclear weapons in World War II, when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were devastated and thousands killed. [pp. 393-396]
     

156. 
     Japan is a very homogeneous country ethnically; 99.5 percent of the country is ethnic Japanese. There is a very small Ainu population, a group ethnically unrelated to the Japanese. Japan has historically been reluctant to open the country to settlement from outsiders; 600,000 ethnic Koreans, descendants of workers brought to Japan during World War II, are the largest non-Japanese group; small numbers of people from other Asian and South American nations have also immigrated to Japan, mainly unskilled laborers. While ethnic uniformity has helped the country achieve a sense of unity and purpose, Japan has also developed a reputation for being intolerant of ethnic minorities. With Japan’s native population aging and declining in numbers, immigration from abroad may be Japan’s best way to maintain its economic vitality in the decades to come. [pp. 401-402]
     

157. 
     Japan’s lack of natural resources critical to its economic growth was one of the reasons Japan began vigorously expanding and creating an empire across Asia and the Pacific in the 1870s. Japan wished to secure its economy by having a large base from which to draw natural resources from; this would enable Japan to create more goods less expensively to sell on the world market and to residents of its colonies, making Japan a major world power. Japan lost its empire after World War II, and with Japan’s territory completely devoid of petroleum resources, it has had to import all its oil and natural gas, primarily from the Middle East. With few natural resources and a crowded population, Japan has since developed the world’s most energy-efficient economy. [pp. 399-400]
     

158. 
     Japan has been led by the same political party, the Liberal Democratic Party, since the end of U.S. military occupation in 1952. It is conservative and pro-business, promoting Japanese exports and keeping the value of the yen low. Japan has a very egalitarian society, with 80 percent of its population in the middle class, although women are not on equal footing with men in the workplace. The country is one of the wealthiest in the world, and has a highly skilled and educated population. The country’s work ethic is legendary, so much so that rising rates of suicide, alcoholism, and karoshi (death by overwork) are becoming major problems. Japan’s economy is the second largest and most energy-efficient on Earth, but it emphasizes selling its goods cheaply on the world market rather than raising the material standard of living for its citizens, many of whom live in small dwellings in overcrowded, polluted cities. [pp. 400-402]
     

159. 
     Korea was divided into two parts upon the surrender of Japanese forces on the peninsula in World War II. The Soviet Union accepted the surrender north of the 38th parallel, the U.S. accepted south of that line. Though it was not meant to be a boundary, it became one after Japan’s withdrawal, when both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. established governments in their respective portions of Korea that would be friendly to them. The Communist North invaded the South in 1950, leading to the Korean War. The current boundary between North and South Korea, the Demilitarized Zone, was the armistice line at the cease-fire agreement signed in 1953. [pp. 404-406]
     

160. 
     Japan and South Korea have tense relations partly from history (Japan’s long occupation of Korea) and partly from disputed ownership of islands in the sea between the two countries. South Korea controls several small islands that Japan periodically claims belong to Japan. At issue are the fishing waters and mineral rights around the islands. If South Korea creates an exclusive economic zone around them, Japanese fishermen will be blocked from those waters. [p. 405]
     

161. 
     South Korea, with 48 million, has twice the population of North Korea, and is very different in its economy. North Korea’s economy is an estimated 7 percent the size of its more industrious neighbor to the south. North Korea is also more mineral-rich, and if not for its decision to isolate itself from the rest of the world it would likely be a bigger industrial power than South Korea. The South developed a free-market diversified economy in the 1970s, and later became a prosperous, democratic society. The North remains an oppressive Communist dictatorship, poor and wracked by famines, hugely reliant upon food imports from Russia and China. South Korea is rapidly becoming a more developed country, high-tech and urban. North Korea uses its possession of nuclear weapons technology as its only bargaining chip in order to get the food and other resources it so desperately needs. [pp. 406-409]
     

162. 
     Despite the so-called “Sunshine Policy” of 2000, which resulted in significant negotiations between North and South Korea and even permitted citizens of both countries to visit long-separated family members on the opposite side of the DMZ, prospects for reunification remain doubtful. For its part, North Korea would almost certainly lose its dynastic and dictatorial regime. South Korea is worried that it would have to absorb millions of poor North Koreans placing a considerable strain on their national economy and quality of life. After all, they have German reunification as a model. Outside the Korean Peninsula, rival economic powers China and Japan currently enjoy the buffer that these two states provide and fear that a reunified Korea – with North Korea’s resource base and South Korea’s business acumen – may offer competition in the regional and global economies. [p. 409]
     

This chapter should enable you to…

• 
  Recognize the role of seasonal monsoon winds and rains in people’s livelihoods and perceptions
  
• 
  Appreciate China and India as the demographic giants and surging economies of early-21st-century Asia
  
• 
  Learn how unique spatial and spiritual considerations have influenced the traditional layout of Asian settlements
  
• 
  Know the basic beliefs of Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and
  
• 
  Daoism
  
• 
  Become familiar with the pros and cons of the Green Revolution
  
• 
  Understand the geopolitical dimensions of the tensions between
  
• 
  India and Pakistan, North Korea and the West, and Islamists and governments in Pakistan and Indonesia
  

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