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To the Japanese it is Dai (great) Nihon or Nippon (origin of the sun), the "Land of the Rising Sun." Japan is a nation built upon islands  that stretch across the northwest Pacific Ocean east of the Korean Peninsula like a strategic bulwark of Asia.
From northeast to southwest, Japan spans a distance roughly equal to that between New York City and Mexico City. This great island complex is surrounded by the East Sea, the Korea Strait, and the East China Sea to the west, the Pacific Ocean to the east, and the La Perouse Strait to the north.
At their closest points, Japan is less than 45 km (28 mi) from Russia's Sakhalin Island to the north and about 193 km (120 mi) across the Korea Strait (Tsushima Strait) from the Korean seaport of Pusan. Surrounded by water, no part of Japan is more than 150 km (93 mi) from the sea.
The island nation of Japan, which includes the four main islands of Hokkaido, Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku, along with Tsushima Island, the Ryuku Islands, the Bonin Islands, the Volcano Islands, the Daito Islands, and Minami Island cover 374,835 sq km (144,724 sq mi) of the earth's surface, slightly less than the area covered by the State of Montana (381,089 sq km / 147,138 sq mi).
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HIGHEST ELEVATION |
LOWEST ELEVATION |
| Honshu |
MT FUJI
3,776 m (12,388 ft) |
HACHIRO-GATA
-4 m (-13 ft) |
The island nation of Japan has no land boundaries with any other country.
The four principal islands and large number of smaller islands that comprise the Japanese homeland yield a coastline of 29,751 km (18,486 mi). This island complex is bound by the La Perouse Strait and the East Sea to the north, the Tsushima Strait (Korea Strait) and the East China Sea to the west, the Philippine Sea to the south, and the Pacific Ocean to the east. Japan claims a territorial limit of 22 km (12 nm) except in the internaitonal straits - La Perouse or Soya, Tsugaru, Osumi, and the Eastern and Western Channels of the Tsushima Strait - where it claims only 6 km (3 nm).
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