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INTRODUCTION

A Land Apart: Japan’s Spectacular, Diverse Geography

Geography isn’t just destiny, as the old saying points out; it can also be culture, cuisine, and worldview.

Witness Japan.

Japan is a shimaguni, or “island country,” of 6,852 islands, a mountainous, lush-but-rugged land that stretches from a subtropical south to a largely temperate north. It lies east of the Koreas and Russia, at latitudes roughly similar to the United States. Tokyo sits at about the same latitude as Las Vegas, Nevada, and Tangier, Morocco.

Despite the abundance of islands, four of which dominate and fewer than five hundred of which are inhabited, Japan is not a large place; it ranks 61st in size among the nations of the world, the same as Germany. It is roughly comparable in square kilometers to California and Italy.

Japan is defined by several crucial geographic features: It is more than 73% mountain and, with urban encroachment, less than 12% of its land is now arable. The islands are surrounded by, and permeated by, the sea. No spot in Japan is more than 150 kilometers from its coast, which stretches nearly 30,000 kilometers; and the country gets a tremendous amount of rainfall, which causes most of those mountainous areas to be heavily forested.

There is a fourth feature, perhaps the most dramatic and famous, and certainly the deadliest: Japan is one of the world’s most unstable geologic areas, with fully 10% of the active volcanoes in the world—forty in total. A visitor can be in Japan for weeks without feeling an earthquake, but this seismically active land can experience anywhere from one thousand to fifteen hundred measurable earthquakes a year, or roughly three to four a day.

The 1923 Kanto Earthquake was the deadliest on record, killing more than one hundred thousand people in Tokyo. But more recently, earthquakes in Kobe (in 1995) and Tohoku (internationally known as the Fukushima Quake, in 2011) were disastrous events for the densely populated country. The latter brought on a second disaster: The nation’s largest-ever quake at magnitude 9.0, it occurred offshore and created an enormous tsunami that damaged or destroyed more than a million buildings, killed nearly sixteen thousand people, and caused a nuclear reactor to melt down, releasing enormous amounts of radioactive water into the all-important sea.

Japan’s seismic instability has also given the country its highest point: Mount Fuji, or as the Japanese call it, Fuji-san, a dormant volcano of 3,776 meters that is Japan’s national symbol. The mountain is yet another natural threat: Fuji-san last exploded in 1707, but given its proximity to the Tokyo metropolitan area and its tens of millions of residents, Fuji-san is a sleeping giant.

Another element in Japan’s geography is its wet, monsoonal climate, contributing rain, snow, and a constant high humidity through all seasons. Only 1% of Japan’s surface is composed of lakes, and the biggest lake, Biwa, just north of Kyoto, is one of the country’s major sources of potable water. More important, though, are the archipelago’s rivers. None are very long—the longest is the Shinano, which stretches 367 kilometers—but their steepness means there are often cascades that make them perfect for generating hydroelectric power.

The highest mountains in Japan are the three ranges that run north-south across the islands, centered on the biggest island, Honshu. They are generally called the Japanese Alps (or, in Japan, the Nihon Arupusu). Due to the volcanic nature of the land, many of these mountains feature hot springs, or onsen, which are of major appeal to both the Japanese and visitors.

Given the rugged, mountainous land, the Japanese have always turned to the sea for sustenance and inspiration; it plays an outsized role in the country’s cuisine, its art, and its long isolation from the rest of the world. The sea provides much of the country’s food—whether fish or sea vegetables, especially kelp—thanks to the confluence of the warm Oyashio Current coming up from the tropics and the colder Tsushima Current coming down from the Arctic. Where these currents meet, at around the 36th parallel, just north of Tokyo, is one of the world’s great fisheries.

Just as importantly, the sea has for centuries insulated and isolated Japan from the Asian continent—even at its closest point to the mainland, it is still 193 kilometers from Russia, its closest neighbor. By contrast, at its closest point, Britain is only 34 kilometers from Europe. Much of Japan’s character can be attributed to this one geographical fact. Living in a rugged, turbulent, but exceptionally lush land, ringed by bountiful but isolating seas, Japan’s destiny has been, and continues to be, determined largely by its remarkable geography.

And nowhere does Japan’s geography, and in particular its intimate, literally all-encompassing relationship to the sea, inform Japan more than in its cuisine. So that is where we begin.