Posted by Jess
26 September 2010

A boring weekend at home here for the Woehrles.  Yesterday we didn't head out much at all, except Jason took Ella on a quick bike ride in the morning and found out it was rainy and windy.  After that, they went to the lounge area of our apartment building to watch Toy Story on the big screen.   And that was about it for Saturday.  Today was church and then a trip to the farmer's market and grocery store and watched a random parade go past our apartment building (but we have no idea what it was for).  Like I said, not a lot of excitement!  But after traveling the past few weeks it was really nice to just hang close to home.  So since nothing new is going on, I thought I would post a little information about Japan.  I found a few good sites with info on them.  First, from facts-about-japan.com


Japan is located in the North Pacific off the coast of Russia and the Korean peninsula. The area of Japan is 377,873km², which makes it slightly smaller in land mass than California. 

Japan is over 70% mountainous terrain with approximately 18% of the land mass suitable for settlement. Japanese cities are typically sprawling and densely populated. The islands of Japan are located in an area known as The Ring of Fire in the Pacific. This is an area with many earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Japan is very seismically active with over 1,500 earthquakes per year - Most of which you can't even feel.  I haven't felt one yet, but I do have to keep a hard hat under my desk just in case and we know where to meet Ella and her school class in our designated evacuation zone if there's a big earthquake - but no worries, Mom!

Japanese is the official language of Japan. Many Japanese also have some ability in writing and speaking English as it is a mandatory part of the curriculum in the Japanese educational system. Japanese uses four different writing systems; Kanji (Chinese characters), Hiragana (phonetic alphabet for native words), Katakana (phonetic alphabet for foreign words), and Romaji (western alphabet used to write Japanese).   I want to learn Katakana, as that gets you by in a lot of restaurants and cafes (things like Latte and Pizza are foreign words, so they are written with the katakana alphabet.  Romaji is barely written here, it's just the phonetic spelling for us westerners and the only place its really used is on subway and street signs, which don't get me wrong, is super helpful)

There are over 127,078,679 (July 2009 est.) people living in Japan. For most of Japan's history its borders were closed to foreigners. As a result, Japan's society is very homogeneous, composed of 98.5% ethnic Japanese. The remaining 1.5 percent are mostly Korean, who number around 1 million. There are also considerable numbers of Brazilians, Chinese, and Filipinos residing in Japan. There is also an ethnic minority of indigenous people, called Ainu, who live mostly in northern Hokkaido.

Tokyo, a megalopolis and capital of Japan, is located on Honshu island. Central Tokyo has a population of 12 million people, with the population of the Greater Tokyo Area estimated at over 35 million people.  So even though the country of Japan is the same size as the state of CA, the entire state of CA has a population of about the same as the Greater Tokyo Area. 

In 2009 Tokyo was named the world's most expensive city for expatriate employees, according to the Mercer and Economist Intelligence Unit cost-of-living surveys.  Foreigners are known as gaijin (pronounced guy-gin).   I saw an article that said there are about 320,000 expats in Japan, but I cannot find the article again now to know how old that number was - it said that the American population of that was about 20,000.  We've noticed that there are a lot of Brits and Australians here as well!

Kanpai!
Jess