Another way of looking at Japan is from the sea. Japan has five main islands, Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu, and Okinawa. However, all told, Japan is made up of 6852 islands, and this island economy is part of what makes up Japan as a nation. In terms of habitation, 700,000 people live on 320 of these islands.
So why is this significant? Well if you look at Japan from the perspective of the Exclusive Economic Zone which surrounds Japanese territory, Japan is the sixth largest ocean territory in the world.
A recent editorial in the JA Shimbun by Yamada Yoshihiko of Tokai University points out that these islands are important not only because of fishing and tourism. Let's talk sugar and beef for example. The islands are important production bases for sugar cane and brown sugar and a lot of wagyu beef is grown in these islands as well as the suitable geography for both industries tends to be similar. The islands and the ocean territory cannot easily be separated: it is all connected with tourism, agriculture, fishing being part of the same economy.
The problem is that a significant liberalization of trade is likely to kill off sugar production in Japan, and there are many other areas of the world that can produce sugar much cheaper than Japan. Such a change would begin the final depopulations of the Japanese islands which have been struggling economically for decades.
Let their economies collapse if they can't compete, we might say. Well, Japan's islands which are home to only 0.6 percent of Japan's population play another function. Move the people off the islands, and you suddenly have major security issues as the Japan Self Defence Forces have no way or realistically protecting Japan's islands on a patrol basis.
The editorial also comments that the rolling blackouts in Tokyo were big trauma, but it is a regular thing for people on the outlying islands to have their power knocked out for 2 or 3 days by typhoons and to watch all the food disappear from their shelves. In a way, this group of people is protecting Japan, and they have played this function for thousands of years.
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