Japan
Just a few nations in the world have had such an extensive history and culture as Japan. this island has been occupied by people of the asian continent since the Paleolithic age.
Japan is a country in the southern part of Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean it lies to the Sea of Japan, China, South Korea and Russia.
The Japanese island are located in the southern part of asia. the country is composed by 6.856 islands. Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku y Kyushu are the biggest islands from north to south. being also the most important islands.
According the web page About.com he population of Japan is around 127.5 million inhabitants. It’s the 10th biggest population. Japan has a very small birth rate. The Yamato Japanese ethnic group is a 98.5% of the population. The other 1.5% includes Koreans (0.5%), Chinese (0.4%), and the Ainu tribe (50,000 people).
Japan uses English as a lingua franca. In part this was due to the second world war and the occupation of United States of America after the surrender of the Japanese army.
The official language spoken in Japan is the nihongo, in the eastern region. It is spoken by 125 million speakers approximately.
However, Japanese has borrowed heavily from Chinese, English, and other languages. In fact, 49% of Japanese words are loanwords from Chinese, and another 9% come from English. On other hand the Japanese have three writing systems; hiragana katakana and kanji into the japanese culture we can find a big number of languages, types of writing, religions, art in general and many features that make their population persons so singular with habits so particular that call the attention of the rest of the world with such rich culture that has been taken plenty of times to the big screen.
Japan has been the witness of the fall of many empires, the tough loyalty of the samurai, the isolation of the rest of the world, and of the numerous massacre happened in the line of time.
Arts & Music
Japan has an incredible range of diferents arts from writing even to folding paper.
Music
Traditional music can be traced to the Nara and Heian era. There is Shomyo also called Buddhist chating. Uses a wide variety of instruments from drums to winds. The western music makes his first appearance after the meji restoration. They are western music in school and military marches.
The wester pop music is called kayokyoku. Make it's first appearing in 1914. But wasn't until the 1950s when had a huge success. From this point foward became part of the music now called JPop.
On other hand, the western classical music has strong presence since prewar. With the past of time Japanese try to make it part of their culture.
Arts
In japan the art is a discipline. As an island, has always been exposed to foreign invasions and it was common for people there to practice their precision of fencing writing into the sand. In fact there was of schools that dedicated their whole lives to write characters in the sand in order to get better symbols and better fighting skills.
The most known Japanese art is the painting, and in a certain period of time, it was all related with the buddhism. As the painting there are plenty of disciplines that can be considered like the cinema, the origamis, calligraphy, and the martial arts.bunraku is the traditional puppet theater of japan. During the Edo Period in Osaka was introduced as popular entertainment for the people without noble rank or title. Calligraphy or shodo is the art of writing beautifully.Unlike Roman letters, the strokes Japanese characters must be done in a correct order.Japanese characters drawn one blow after another. This style is called kanji.
