>Japan is nowhere near the most densely populated country on earth. It's the 40th. Less dense than Belgium, Israel, India, Singapore, and South Korea, just to n

>Japan is nowhere near the most densely populated country on earth. It's the 40th. Less dense than Belgium, Israel, India, Singapore, and South Korea, just to name a few. Calling Japan cramped for space is a stretch. But relatively little of Japan is actually livable: if you look at Honshu, most of the population is in plains on the coast, and most of the inland area mountainous and hardly inhabited. For example, about a third of the population of Japan lives on the Kanto plain which represents just 4.5% of the land area.