Japan vs China
Japan's writing system, early governance and much of its classical culture were adapted from China over more than a thousand years of contact, yet the twentieth century made the two countries bitter wartime enemies, and the relationship remains complicated today.
| 🇯🇵 Japan | 🇨🇳 China | |
|---|---|---|
| Capital | Tokyo | Beijing |
| Continent | Asia | Asia |
| Population | 123,300,000 | 1,425,700,000 |
| Area | 377,975 km² | 9,596,961 km² |
| Currency | Japanese Yen | Renminbi |
| Main language | Japanese | Mandarin Chinese |
China's population is roughly 12× Japan's.
China's population is more than ten times Japan's, and mainland China's land area dwarfs the Japanese archipelago — but Japan built the world's third-largest economy on a fraction of the people and almost none of China's natural resources, largely through manufacturing and technology exports.
Both use characters derived from the same Chinese writing system, though Japanese mixes them with two phonetic scripts of its own, and a literate speaker of one language still cannot generally read the other despite the shared characters.