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Honshu
Japan's main island, heartland of a nation and home to Tokyo
The beating heart of Japan is a single long, mountainous island. Honshu is the country's largest and most populous island, a curving spine of volcanoes and forested ranges along which more than a hundred million people live, including the vast metropolis of Tokyo, the largest urban area on the planet. From the snow country of the north to the ancient capitals of Kyoto and Nara and the industrial belts of the south, Honshu contains the great majority of Japan's people, history and economic might within its crowded confines.
Honshu stretches roughly 1,300 kilometres and covers about 227,900 square kilometres, making it the seventh-largest island in the world. A rugged backbone of mountains, the Japanese Alps among them, runs down its length, leaving habitable land concentrated on narrow coastal plains. Its highest point and national symbol is Mount Fuji, an active volcano of near-perfect symmetry rising to 3,776 metres. The island sits atop the collision of several tectonic plates, making it intensely seismic and volcanic, and its position guarantees frequent earthquakes, occasional tsunamis and a chain of hot springs that the Japanese have prized for centuries.
Honshu has been the centre of Japanese civilisation for most of recorded history, the seat of emperors at Nara and Kyoto, of the shoguns at Kamakura and Edo, and of the modern state at Tokyo. Its dense rail network, anchored by the pioneering Shinkansen bullet trains, knits together a population that lives at remarkable density. The island has endured catastrophe, from the firebombing and atomic attacks of the Second World War to the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and each time rebuilt, embodying the resilience of a nation perched on one of the most geologically restless islands on Earth.