Japan ("Nihon" or "Nippon" in Japanese) is a very small country, and yet has the worlds largest city (metropolitan area) in the world; Tokyo.
with over 30 million people living there.
 Japan actually has over 6,800 islands,
however the largest islands are Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu.
LANGUAGE
More than 99 percent of the population speaks Japanese as their first language. The language is usually very difficult for people from western countries to learn because
not only is the sentence structure almost opposite from English and other European based languages, but also the Japanese writing system uses three different types of characters.
1. The first is Hiragana (ひらがな).
Hiragana is phonetic and is comprised of 49 rounded-edged characters (in comparison, English has only 26 letters). It is easy to learn Hiragana so this is the writing style
first learned between Kindergarten and elementary first grade. Most children's books are written only in Hiragana.
2. The second writing system is Katakana (カタカナ).
Katakana is also phonetic and is comprised of 49 sharp-edged characters (now we have 98). Katakana is also to learn, especially since many of the characters
are slightly similar in writing to Hiragana. Katakana is mainly used for words that are not considered originally from Japan, as well as technical terms and often company names.
3. The third and by far the most difficult is Kanji (漢字).
Kanji are actually Chinese characters. Some have the same meaning as they do in Chinese language, though many do not. It is said that a student in Japan must learn at least 2,000 Kanji to be able to read a newspaper in Japan,
and most students in Japan study to learn all of these characters before entering high school.
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