After seeing the innovative retirement homes with children, let’s go back to talking about Japan which has recently recounted its islands, discovering that it has 7,000 more than the latest estimates from a few decades ago. How did all these islands “escape”?
The new digital mapping of the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (GSI) recently discovered that there are as many as 14,125 islands in Japanese territory. Nothing strange of course, except for the simple fact that they are more than double the “few” 6,852 that resulted in a 1987 report by the Japanese Coast Guard.
However the GSI recently pointed out that the new figure reflects the advances made in sensing technology over the years has become avant-garde. However, the count did not change the overall area of territory held by Japan.
GSI itself also stated that although there is no international agreement with rules on how to count islands, the same criterion was used as in the previous survey 35 years ago. This involved counting all natural land areas with a circumference of at least 100 square meters.
The islands surrounding Japan are also famous for often being at the center of numerous territorial disputes. They come for example claimed the Russian-controlled Southern Kuril Islands, which Tokyo calls the Northern Territories. This “conflict” dates back to the end of the Second World War, when Soviet troops managed to seize it by force.
As if that weren’t enough, just as Japan gets paid to go and live in the countryside, the land of the Rising Sun and South Korea remain heavily stuck in a more than 70 years of dispute over the sovereignty of a group of islets known as Dokdo da Seoul e Takeshima da Tokyo in the Sea of Japan, which Korea calls the East Sea, thus claiming ownership.