Geography of Japan the population lives on Honshu, 10% on Kyushu, 4.2% on Hokkaido, 3% on Shikoku, 1.1% in Okinawa Prefecture and 0.7% on other Japanese islands such as the Nanpō Islands. Nearly 1 in 3 Japanese people live in the Greater Tokyo Area. is the largest island of Japan. It has a population of 104,000,000 with a population density of (2010) . Honshu is roughly long and ranges from wide, and its total area is . This makes it slightly larger than the island of Great Britain . The Greater Tokyo Area on Honshu is the biggest metropolitan area (megacity) in the
Japan its major contributions to science and modern technology. The Japanese word for Japan is , which is pronounced "Nihon" or "Nippon" and literally means "the origin of the sun". The character means "sun" or "day"; means "base" or "origin". The compound therefore means "origin of the sun" and is the source of the popular Western epithet "Land of the Rising Sun". The earliest record of the name "Nihon" appears in the Chinese historical records of the Tang dynasty, the "Old Book of Tang". At the end of the seventh century, a delegation from Japan requested that "Nihon" be used as