title: Geography of Japan

text: The Kantō Plain, Osaka Plain and Nōbi Plain are the most important economic, political and cultural areas of Japan. These plains had the largest agricultural production and large bays with ports for fishing and trade. This made them the largest population centers. Kyoto and Nara are the ancient capitals and cultural heart of Japan. The Kantō Plain became Japan's center of power, because it is the largest plain with a central location and historically it had the most agricultural production that could be taxed. The Tokugawa Shogunate established a "bakufu" in Edo in 1603. This evolved into the capital of Tokyo by 1868.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Hokkaido has multiple plains such as the Ishikari Plain , Tokachi Plain , the Kushiro Plain is the largest wetland in Japan and Sarobetsu Plain . There are many farms that produce a plethora of agricultural products. The average farm size in Hokkaido is 26 hectares per farmer in 2013. That is nearly 11 times larger than the national average of 2.4 hectares. This made Hokkaido the most agriculturally rich prefecture of Japan. Nearly one fourth of Japan's arable land and 22% of Japan's forests are in Hokkaido.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Another important plain is the Sendai Plain around the city of Sendai in northeastern Honshū. Many of these plains are along the coast, and their areas have been increased by land reclamation throughout recorded history.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Rivers are generally steep and swift, and few are suitable for navigation except in their lower reaches. Although most rivers are less than in length, their rapid flow from the mountains is what provides hydroelectric power. Seasonal variations in flow have led to extensive development of flood control measures. The longest, the Shinano River, which winds through Nagano Prefecture to Niigata Prefecture and flows into the Sea of Japan, is long.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The largest freshwater lake is Lake Biwa , northeast of Kyoto in Shiga Prefecture. Lake Biwa is an ancient lake and estimated to be the 13th oldest lake in the world dating to at least 4 million years ago. It has consistently carried water for millions of years. Lake Biwa was created by plate tectonics in an active rift zone. This created a very deep lake with a maximum depth of . Thus it has not naturally filled with sediment. Over the course of millions of years, a diverse ecosystem evolved in the lake. It has more than 1,000 species and subspecies. There are 46 native fish species and subspecies, including 11 species and 5 subspecies that are endemic or near-endemic. Approximately 5,000 water birds visit the lake each year.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Extensive coastal shipping, especially around the Seto Inland Sea, compensates for the lack of navigable rivers. The Pacific coastline south of Tokyo is characterized by long, narrow, gradually shallowing inlets produced by sedimentation, which has created many natural harbors. The Pacific coastline north of Tokyo, the coast of Hokkaidō, and the Sea of Japan coast are generally unindented, with few natural harbors.


title: Geography of Japan

text: A recent global remote sensing analysis suggested that there were 765 km² of tidal flats in Japan, making it the 35th ranked country in terms of tidal flat extent.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The Japanese archipelago has been transformed by humans into a sort of continuous land, in which the four main islands are entirely reachable and passable by rail and road transportation thanks to the construction of huge bridges and tunnels that connect each other and various islands.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Approximately 0.5% of Japan's total area is reclaimed land ("umetatechi"). It began in the 12th century. Land was reclaimed from the sea and from river deltas by building dikes and drainage and rice paddies on terraces carved into mountainsides. The majority of land reclamation projects occurred after World War II during the Japanese economic miracle. Reclamation of 80% to 90% of all the tidal flatland was done. Large land reclamation projects with landfill were done in coastal areas for maritime and industrial factories, such as Higashi Ogishima in Kawasaki, Osaka Bay and Nagasaki Airport. Port Island, Rokkō Island and Kobe Airport were built in Kobe. Late 20th and early 21st century projects include artificial islands such as Chubu Centrair International Airport in Ise Bay, Kansai International Airport in the middle of Osaka Bay, Yokohama Hakkeijima Sea Paradise and Wakayama Marina City. The village of Ōgata in Akita, was established on land reclaimed from Lake Hachirōgata (Japan's second largest lake at the time) starting in 1957. By 1977, the amount of land reclaimed totaled .


title: Geography of Japan

text: Much reclaimed land is made up of landfill from waste materials, dredged earth, sand, sediment, sludge and soil removed from construction sites. It is used to build man-made islands in harbors and embankments in inland areas. From November 8, 2011, Tokyo City began accepting rubble and waste from the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami region. This rubble was processed, and when it had the appropriate radiation levels it was used as landfill to build new artificial islands in Tokyo Bay. Yamashita Park in Yokohama City was made with rubble from the great Kantō earthquake in 1923.


title: Geography of Japan

text: There is a risk of contamination on artificial islands with landfill and reclaimed land if there was industry that spilled (toxic) chemicals into the ground. For example, the artificial island Toyosu was once occupied by a Tokyo gas factory. Toxic substances were discovered in the soil and groundwater at Toyosu. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government spent an additional 3.8 billion yen ($33.5 million) to pump out groundwater by digging hundreds of wells. In June 2017, plans to move the Tsukiji fish market were restarted but delayed in July to the autumn of 2018. After the new site was declared safe following a cleanup operation, Toyosu Market was opened.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Japan's sea territory is . Japan ranks fourth with its exclusive economic zone ocean water volume from 0 to depth. Japan ranks fifth with sea volume of 2,000–3,000 meters, fourth with 3,000–4,000 meters, third with 4,000–5,000 meters and first with volume of 5,000 to over 6,000 meters. The relief map of the Japanese archipelago shows that 50% of Japan's sea territory has an ocean volume between 0 and depth. The other 50% has a depth of to over . 19% has a depth of 0 to . Thus Japan possesses one of the largest ocean territories with a combination of all depths from shallow to very deep sea. Multiple long undersea mountain ranges stretch from Japan's main islands to the south. They occasionally reach above the sea surface as islands. East of the undersea mountain ranges are three oceanic trenches: the Kuril–Kamchatka Trench (max depth ), Japan Trench (max depth ) and Izu–Ogasawara Trench (max depth ).


title: Geography of Japan

text: There are large quantities of marine life and mineral resources in the ocean and seabed of Japan. At a depth of over there are minerals such as manganese nodules, cobalt in the crust and hydrothermal deposits.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The Japanese archipelago is the result of subducting tectonic plates over several 100 millions of years from the mid-Silurian (443.8 Mya) to the Pleistocene (11,700 years ago). Approximately of oceanic floor has passed under the Japanese archipelago in the last 450 million years, with most being fully subducted. It is considered a mature island arc.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The Pacific Plate and Philippine Sea Plate are subduction plates. They are deeper than the Eurasian plate. The Philippine Sea Plate moves beneath the continental Amurian Plate and Okinawa Plate to the south. The Pacific Plate moves under the Okhotsk Plate to the north. These subduction plates have pulled Japan eastward and opened the Sea of Japan by back-arc spreading around 15 million years ago. The Strait of Tartary and the Korea Strait opened much later. La Pérouse Strait formed about 60,000 to 11,000 years ago closing the path used by mammoths which had earlier moved to northern Hokkaido.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The subduction zone is where the oceanic crust slides beneath the continental crust or other oceanic plates. This is because the oceanic plate's litosphere has a higher density. Subduction zones are sites that usually have a high rate of volcanism and earthquakes. Additionally, subduction zones develop belts of deformation The subduction zones on the east side of the Japanese archipelago cause frequent low intensity earth tremors. Major earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis occur several times per century. It is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Northeastern Japan, north of Tanakura fault, had high volcanic activity 14–17 million years before present.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The Japan Median Tectonic Line (MTL) is Japan's longest fault system. The MTL begins near Ibaraki Prefecture, where it connects with the Itoigawa-Shizuoka Tectonic Line (ISTL) and the Fossa Magna. It runs parallel to Japan's volcanic arc, passing through central Honshū to near Nagoya, through Mikawa Bay, then through the Seto Inland Sea from the Kii Channel and Naruto Strait to Shikoku along the Sadamisaki Peninsula and the Bungo Channel and Hōyo Strait to Kyūshū.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The MTL moves right-lateral strike-slip, at about 5–10 millimeters per year. The sense of motion is consistent with the direction of the Nankai Trough's oblique convergence. The rate of motion on the MTL is much less than the rate of convergence at the plate boundary. This makes it difficult to distinguish the motion on the MTL from interseismic elastic straining in GPS data.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The Japanese islands are formed of the mentioned geological units parallel to the subduction front. The parts of islands facing the Pacific Plate are typically younger and display a larger proportion of volcanic products, while island parts facing the Sea of Japan are mostly heavily faulted and folded sedimentary deposits. In northwest Japan are thick quaternary deposits. This makes determination of the geological history and composition difficult and it is not yet fully understood.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The Japanese island arc system has distributed volcanic series where the volcanic rocks change from tholeiite—calc-alkaline—alkaline with increasing distance from the trench. The geologic province of Japan is mostly basin and a bit extended crust.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The Japanese archipelago grows gradually because of perpetual tectonic plate movements, earthquakes, stratovolcanoes and land reclamation in the Ring of Fire.


title: Geography of Japan

text: For example, during the 20th century several new volcanoes emerged, including Shōwa-shinzan on Hokkaido and Myōjin-shō off the Bayonnaise Rocks in the Pacific. The 1914 Sakurajima eruption produced lava flows which connected the former island with the Ōsumi Peninsula in Kyushu. It is the most active volcano in Japan.


title: Geography of Japan

text: During the 2013 eruption southeast of Nishinoshima, a new unnamed volcanic island emerged from the sea. Erosion and shifting sands caused the new island to merge with Nishinoshima. A 1911 survey determined the caldera was at its deepest.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami caused portions of northeastern Japan to shift by closer to North America. This made some sections of Japan's landmass wider than before. The areas of Japan closest to the epicenter experienced the largest shifts. A stretch of coastline dropped vertically by , allowing the tsunami to travel farther and faster onto land. On 6 April, the Japanese coast guard said that the earthquake shifted the seabed near the epicenter and elevated the seabed off the coast of Miyagi Prefecture by . A report by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, published in "Science" on 2 December 2011, concluded that the seabed in the area between the epicenter and the Japan Trench moved east-southeast and rose about as a result of the quake. The report also stated that the quake caused several major landslides on the seabed in the affected area.


title: Geography of Japan

text: During the Pleistocene (2.58 million years BCE) glacial cycles, the Japanese islands may have occasionally been connected to the Eurasian Continent via the Korea Strait and the Korean Peninsula or Sakhalin. The Sea of Japan was considered to be a frozen inner lake because of the lack of the warm Tsushima Current. Various plants and large animals, such as the "Palaeoloxodon naumanni" migrated into the Japanese archipelago.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The Sea of Japan was a landlocked sea when the land bridge of East Asia existed circa 18,000 BCE. During the glacial maximum the marine elevation was 200 meters lower than present. Thus Tsushima island in the Korea Strait was a land bridge that connected Kyushu and the southern tip of Honshu with the Korean peninsula. There was still several kilometers of sea to the west of the Ryukyu islands, and most of the Sea of Japan was open sea with a mean depth of . Comparatively, most of the Yellow Sea (Yellow Plane) had a semi-arid climate (dry steppe), because it was relatively shallow with a mean depth of . The Korean Peninsula was landlocked on the entire west and south side in the Yellow Plane. The onset of formation of the Japan Arc was in the Early Miocene (23 million years ago). The Early Miocene period was when the Sea of Japan started to open, and the northern and southern parts of the Japanese archipelago separated from each other. The Sea of Japan expanded during the Miocene.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The northern part of the Japanese archipelago was further fragmented until orogenesis of the northeastern Japanese archipelago began in the Late Miocene. The orogenesis of the high mountain ranges in northeastern Japan started in the Late Miocene and lasted in the Pliocene. The south part of the Japanese archipelago remained as a relatively large landmass. The land area expanded northward during the Miocene.


title: Geography of Japan

text: During the advance of the last Ice Age, the world sea level dropped. This dried and closed the exit straits of the Sea of Japan one by one. The deepest, and thus the last to close, was the western channel of the Korea Strait. There is controversy as to whether the Sea of Japan became a huge cold inland lake. The Japanese archipelago had a taiga biome (open boreal woodlands). It was characterized by coniferous forests consisting mostly of pines, spruces and larches. Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kuril islands had mammoth steppe biome (steppe-tundra). The vegetation was dominated by palatable high-productivity grasses, herbs and willow shrubs.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The Sea of Japan has a surface area of , a mean depth of and a maximum depth of . It has a carrot-like shape, with the major axis extending from southwest to northeast and a wide southern part narrowing toward the north. The coastal length is about with the largest part () belonging to Russia. The sea extends from north to south for more than and has a maximum width of about .


title: Geography of Japan

text: There are three major basins: the "Yamato Basin" in the southeast, the "Japan Basin" in the north and the "Tsushima Basin" in the southwest. The Japan Basin has an oceanic crust and it is the deepest part of the sea, whereas the Tsushima Basin is the shallowest with depths below . The Yamato Basin and Tsushima Basin have thick ocean crusts. The continental shelves of the sea are wide on the eastern shores along Japan. On the western shores, they are narrow particularly along the Korean and Russian coast, averaging about .


title: Geography of Japan

text: The geographical location of the Japanese archipelago has defined the Sea of Japan for millions of years. Without the Japanese archipelago it would just be the Pacific Ocean. The term has been the international standard since at least the early 19th century. The International Hydrographic Organization, the international governing body for the naming bodies of water around the world, in 2012 recognized the term "Sea of Japan" as the only title for the sea.


title: Geography of Japan

text: There are small deposits of coal, oil, iron and minerals in the Japanese archipelago. Japan is scarce in critical natural resources and has long been heavily dependent on imported energy and raw materials. The oil crisis in 1973 encouraged the efficient use of energy. Japan has therefore aimed to diversify its sources and maintain high levels of energy efficiency. In regards to agricultural products, the self-sufficiency rate of most items is less than 100% except for rice. Rice has a 100% food self-sufficiency. This makes it difficult to meet Japan's food demand without imports.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The Exclusive economic zone of Japan has an estimated large quantities of mineral resources such as methane clathrate, natural gas, metallic minerals and rare-earth mineral reserves. Seabed mineral resources such as manganese nodules, cobalt-rich crust and submarine hydrothermal deposits are located at depths over . Most of these deep sea resources are unexplored at the seabed. Japan's mining law restricts offshore oil and gas production. There are technological hurdles to mine at such extreme depths and to limit the ecological impact. There are no successful commercial ventures that mine the deep sea yet. So currently there are few deep sea mining projects to retrieve minerals or deepwater drilling on the ocean floor.


title: Geography of Japan

text: It is estimated that there are approximately 40 trillion cubic feet of methane clathrate in the eastern Nankai Trough of Japan. As of 2019, the methane clathrate in the deep sea remains unexploited, because the necessary technology is not established yet. This is why currently Japan has very limited proven reserves like crude oil.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The Kantō region alone is estimated to have over 400 billion cubic meters of natural gas reserves. It forms a Minami Kantō gas field in the area spanning Saitama, Tokyo, Kanagawa, Ibaraki, and Chiba prefectures. However, mining is strictly regulated in many areas because it is directly below Tokyo, and is only slightly mined in the Bōsō Peninsula. In Tokyo and Chiba Prefecture, there have been frequent accidents with natural gas that was released naturally from the Minami Kantō gas field.


title: Geography of Japan

text: In 2018, south of Minami-Tori-shima at deep, approximately 16 million tons of rare-earth minerals were discovered by JAMSTEC in collaboration with Waseda University and the University of Tokyo.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Japan maintains one of the world's largest fishing fleets and accounts for nearly 15% of the global catch (2014). In 2005, Japan ranked sixth in the world in tonnage of fish caught. Japan captured 4,074,580 metric tons of fish in 2005, down from 4,987,703 tons in 2000 and 9,864,422 tons in 1980. In 2003, the total aquaculture production was predicted at 1,301,437 tonnes. In 2010, Japan's total fisheries production was 4,762,469 fish. Offshore fisheries accounted for an average of 50% of the nation's total fish catches in the late 1980s although they experienced repeated ups and downs during that period.


title: Geography of Japan

text: , 46.1% of energy in Japan was produced from petroleum, 21.3% from coal, 21.4% from natural gas, 4.0% from nuclear power and 3.3% from hydropower. Nuclear power is a major domestic source of energy and produced 9.2 percent of Japan's electricity, , down from 24.9 percent the previous year. Following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami disaster in 2011, the nuclear reactors were shut down. Thus Japan's industrial sector became even more dependent than before on imported fossil fuels. By May 2012 all of the country's nuclear power plants were taken offline because of ongoing public opposition following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in March 2011, though government officials continued to try to sway public opinion in favor of returning at least some of Japan's 50 nuclear reactors to service. Shinzo Abe's government seeks to restart the nuclear power plants that meet strict new safety standards and is emphasizing nuclear energy's importance as a base-load electricity source. In 2015, Japan successfully restarted one nuclear reactor at the Sendai Nuclear Power Plant in Kagoshima prefecture, and several other reactors around the country have since resumed operations. Opposition from local governments has delayed several restarts that remain pending.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Reforms of the electricity and gas sectors, including full liberalization of Japan's energy market in April 2016 and gas market in April 2017, constitute an important part of Prime Minister Abe's economic program.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Japan has the third largest geothermal reserves in the world. Geothermal energy is being heavily focused on as a source of power following the Fukushima disaster. The Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry is exploring over 40 locations for potential geothermal energy plants.


title: Geography of Japan

text: On 3 July 2018, Japan's government pledged to increase renewable energy sources from 15% to 22–24% including wind and solar by 2030. Nuclear energy will provide 20% of the country's energy needs as an emissions-free energy source. This will help Japan meet climate change commitments.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Japan has 34 and 56 in 2019. These are designated and managed for protection and sustainable usage by the Ministry of the Environment under the of 1957. The Quasi-National Parks have slightly less beauty, size, diversity, or preservation. They are recommended for ministerial designation and managed by the prefectures under the supervision of the Ministry of the Environment.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The Japanese archipelago has diverse landscapes. For example, the northern part of Hokkaido has a taiga biome. Hokkaido has 22% of Japan's forestland with coniferous trees (Sakhalin fir and Sakhalin spruce) and broad-leaved trees (Japanese oak, birch and Painted maple). The seasonal views change throughout the year. In the south, the Yaeyama Islands are in the subtropics with numerous species of subtropical and tropical plants, and mangrove forests. Most natural islands have mountain ranges in the center with coastal plains.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The Places of Scenic Beauty and Natural Monuments are selected by the government via the Agency for Cultural Affairs in order to protect Japan's cultural heritage. As of 2017, there are 1,027 and 410 . The highest classification are 75 and 36 .


title: Geography of Japan

text: The is the canonical list of Japan's three most celebrated scenic sights, attributed to 1643 and scholar Hayashi Gahō. These are traditionally the pine-clad islands of Matsushima in Miyagi Prefecture, the pine-clad sandbar of Amanohashidate in Kyoto Prefecture, and Itsukushima Shrine in Hiroshima Prefecture. In 1915, the New Three Views of Japan were selected with a national election by the Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha (株式会社実業之日本社). In 2003, the Three Major Night Views of Japan were selected by the "New Three Major Night Views of Japan and the 100 Night Views of Japan Club" (新日本三大夜景・夜景100選事務局).


title: Geography of Japan

text: Most regions of Japan, such as much of Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu, belong to the temperate zone with humid subtropical climate (Köppen climate classification "Cfa") characterized by four distinct seasons. However, its climate varies from cool humid continental climate (Köppen climate classification "Dfb") in the north such as northern Hokkaido, to warm tropical rainforest climate (Köppen climate classification "Af") in the south such as the Yaeyama Islands and Minami-Tori-shima.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Japan is generally a rainy country with high humidity. Because of its wide range of latitude, seasonal winds and different types of ocean currents, Japan has a variety of climates, with a latitude range of the inhabited islands from 24°N – 46°N, which is comparable to the range between Nova Scotia and The Bahamas in the east coast of North America. Tokyo is between 35°N – 36°N, which is comparable to that of Tehran, Athens, or Las Vegas.


title: Geography of Japan

text: As Mount Fuji and the coastal Japanese Alps provide a rain shadow, Nagano and Yamanashi Prefectures receive the least precipitation in Honshu, though it still exceeds annually. A similar effect is found in Hokkaido, where Okhotsk Subprefecture receives as little as per year. All other prefectures have coasts on the Pacific Ocean, Sea of Japan, Seto Inland Sea or have a body of salt water connected to them. Two prefectures—Hokkaido and Okinawa—are composed entirely of islands.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The climate from June to September is marked by hot, wet weather brought by tropical airflows from the Pacific Ocean and Southeast Asia. These air flows are full of moisture and deposit substantial amounts of rain when they reach land. There is a marked rainy season, beginning in early June and continuing for about a month. It is followed by hot, sticky weather. Five or six typhoons pass over or near Japan every year from early August to early October, sometimes resulting in significant damage. Annual precipitation averages between except for the areas such as Kii Peninsula and Yakushima Island which is Japan's wettest place with the annual precipitation being one of the world's highest at 4,000 to 10,000 mm.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Maximum precipitation, like the rest of East Asia, occurs in the summer months except on the Sea of Japan coast where strong northerly winds produce a maximum in late autumn and early winter. Except for a few sheltered inland valleys during December and January, precipitation in Japan is above of rainfall equivalent in all months of the year, and in the wettest coastal areas it is above per month throughout the year.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Mid June to mid July is generally the rainy season in Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu, excluding Hokkaidō since the seasonal rain front or dissipates in northern Honshu before reaching Hokkaido. In Okinawa, the rainy season starts early in May and continues until mid June. Unlike the rainy season in mainland Japan, it rains neither everyday nor all day long during the rainy season in Okinawa. Between July and October, typhoons, grown from tropical depressions generated near the equator, can attack Japan with furious rainstorms.


title: Geography of Japan

text: In winter, the Siberian High develops over the Eurasian land mass and the Aleutian Low develops over the northern Pacific Ocean. The result is a flow of cold air southeastward across Japan that brings freezing temperatures and heavy snowfalls to the central mountain ranges facing the Sea of Japan, but clear skies to areas fronting on the Pacific.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The warmest winter temperatures are found in the Nanpō and Bonin Islands, which enjoy a tropical climate due to the combination of latitude, distance from the Asian continent, and warming effect of winds from the Kuroshio, as well as the Volcano Islands (at the latitude of the southernmost of the Ryukyu Islands, 24° N). The coolest summer temperatures are found on the northeastern coast of Hokkaidō in Kushiro and Nemuro Subprefectures.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Sunshine, in accordance with Japan's uniformly heavy rainfall, is generally modest in quantity, though no part of Japan receives the consistently gloomy fogs that envelope the Sichuan Basin or Taipei. Amounts range from about six hours per day in the Inland Sea coast and sheltered parts of the Pacific Coast and Kantō Plain to four hours per day on the Sea of Japan coast of Hokkaidō. In December there is a very pronounced sunshine gradient between the Sea of Japan and Pacific coasts, as the former side can receive less than 30 hours and the Pacific side as much as 180 hours. In summer, however, sunshine hours are lowest on exposed parts of the Pacific coast where fogs from the Oyashio current create persistent cloud cover similar to that found on the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The highest recorded temperature in Japan was 41.1 °C (106.0 °F) on 23 July 2018, an unverified record of 42.7 °C was taken in Adachi, Tokyo on 20 July 2004. The high humidity and the maritime influence make temperatures in the 40s rare, with summers dominated by a more stable subtropical monsoon pattern through most of Japan. The lowest was −41.0 °C (−41.8 °F) in Asahikawa on 25 January 1902. However an unofficial −41.5 °C was taken in Bifuka on 27 January 1931. Mount Fuji broke the Japanese record lows for each month except January, February, March, and December. Record lows for any month were taken as recent as 1984.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Minami-Tori-shima has a tropical savanna climate (Köppen climate classification "Aw") and the highest average temperature in Japan of 25 degrees Celsius.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Japan has a population of 126.3 million in 2019. It is the eleventh most populous country and second most populous island country in the world. The population is clustered in urban areas on the coast, plains and valleys. In 2010, 90.7% of the total Japanese population lived in cities. Japan is an urban society with about only 5% of the labor force working in agriculture. About 80 million of the urban population is heavily concentrated on the Pacific coast of Honshu.


title: Geography of Japan

text: 81% of 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, and over half live in the Kanto, Kinki, and Chukyo metropolitan areas.


title: Geography of Japan

text: is the largest island of Japan and the second most populous island in the world. It has a population of 104,000,000 with a population density of (2010). Honshu is roughly long and ranges from wide, and the total area is . It is the 7th largest island in the world. This makes it slightly larger than the island of Great Britain .


title: Geography of Japan

text: The Greater Tokyo Area on Honshu is the largest metropolitan area (megacity) in the world with people (2016). The area is and has a population density of 2,642 persons/km.


title: Geography of Japan

text: is the third largest island of Japan of the five main islands. , Kyushu has a population of 12,970,479 and covers . It has the second highest population density of 307.13 persons/km (2016).


title: Geography of Japan

text: is the second smallest of the five main islands (after Okinawa island), . It is located south of Honshu and northeast of Kyushu. It has the second smallest population of 3,845,534 million (2015) and the third highest population density of 204.55 persons/km.


title: Geography of Japan

text: is the second largest island of Japan, and the largest and northernmost prefecture. The Tsugaru Strait separates Hokkaido from Honshu. It has the third largest population of the five main islands with 5,383,579 (2015) and the lowest population density with just 64.5 persons/km (2016). The island area ranks 21st in the world by area. It is 3.6% smaller than the island of Ireland.


title: Geography of Japan

text: is the southernmost prefecture of Japan. It encompasses two thirds of the Ryukyu Islands over long. It has a population of 1,445,812 (2017) and a density of 662 persons/km. is the smallest and most southwestern of the five main islands, . It has the smallest population of 1,301,462 (2014) and the highest population density of 1083.6 persons/km.


title: Geography of Japan

text: are the groups of islands that are located to the south and east of the main islands of the Japanese archipelago. They extend from the Izu Peninsula west of Tokyo Bay southward for about , to within of the Mariana Islands. The Nanpō Islands are all administered by Tokyo Metropolis.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The Taiheiyō Belt is a megalopolis that includes the Greater Tokyo Area and Keihanshin megapoles. It is almost long from Ibaraki Prefecture in the northeast to Fukuoka Prefecture in the southwest. Satellite images at night show a dense and continuous strip of light (demarcating urban zones) that delineates the region with overlapping metropolitan areas in Japan. It has a total population of approximately 81,859,345 (2016).


title: Geography of Japan

text: There are plans to build underwater habitats in Japan's Exclusive Economic Zone. Currently no underwater city is constructed yet. For example, the Ocean Spiral by Shimizu Corporation would have a floating dome 500 meters in diameter with hotels, residential and commercial complexes. It could be 15 km long. This allows mining of the seabed, research and production of methane from carbon dioxide with micro-organisms. The Ocean Spiral was co-developed with JAMSTEC and Tokyo University.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Japan extends from 20° to 45° north latitude (Okinotorishima to Benten-jima) and from 122° to 153° east longitude (Yonaguni to Minami Torishima). These are the points that are farther north, south, east or west than any other location in Japan.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The five main islands of Japan are Hokkaidō, Honshū, Kyūshū, Shikoku and Okinawa. These are also called the mainland. All of these points are accessible to the public.


title: Geography of Japan

text: These are the 50 largest islands of Japan. It excludes the disputed Kuril islands known as the northern territories.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Japan has a longstanding claim of the Southern Kuril Islands (Etorofu, Kunashiri, Shikotan, and the Habomai Islands). These islands were occupied by the Soviet Union in 1945. The Kuril Islands historically belong to Japan. The Kuril Islands were first inhabited by the Ainu people and then controlled by the Japanese Matsumae clan in the Edo Period. The Soviet Union did not sign the San Francisco Treaty in 1951. The U.S. Senate Resolution of April 28, 1952, ratifying of the San Francisco Treaty, explicitly stated that the USSR had no title to the Kurils. This dispute has prevented the signing of a peace treaty between Japan and Russia.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Geographically the Kuril Islands are a northeastern extension of Hokkaido. Kunashiri and the Habomai Islands are visible from the northeastern coast of Hokkaido. Japan considers the northern territories (aka Southern Chishima) part of Nemuro Subprefecture of Hokkaido Prefecture.


title: Geography of Japan

text: There is one time zone in the whole Japanese archipelago. It is 9 hours ahead of UTC. There is no daylight saving time. The easternmost Japanese island Minami-Tori-shima also uses Japan Standard Time while it is geographically southeast of Tokyo and in the time zone.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Sakhalin uses even though it is located directly north of Hokkaido. The Northern Territories and the Kuril islands use although they are geographically in


title: Geography of Japan

text: Japan is substantially prone to earthquakes, tsunami and volcanoes because of its location along the Pacific Ring of Fire. It has the 15th highest natural disaster risk as measured in the 2013 World Risk Index.


title: Geography of Japan

text: As many as 1,500 earthquakes are recorded yearly, and magnitudes of 4 to 6 are common. Minor tremors occur almost daily in one part of the country or another, causing slight shaking of buildings. Undersea earthquakes also expose the Japanese coastline to danger from .


title: Geography of Japan

text: Destructive earthquakes, often resulting in tsunami, occur several times each century. The 1923 Tokyo earthquake killed over 140,000 people. More recent major quakes are the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake and the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, a 9.1-magnitude quake which hit Japan on March 11, 2011. It triggered a large tsunami and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, one of the worst disasters in the history of nuclear power.


title: Geography of Japan

text: The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake was the largest ever recorded in Japan and is the world's fourth largest earthquake to strike since 1900, according to the U.S. Geological Service. It struck offshore about northeast of Tokyo and east of the city of Sendai, and created a massive tsunami that devastated Japan's northeastern coastal areas. At least 100 aftershocks registering a 6.0 magnitude or higher have followed the main shock. At least 15,000 people died as a result.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Researchers found the source of great thrust earthquakes and associated tsunamis in the Greater Tokyo Area at the Izu-Ogasawara Trench. There is a 'trench-trench triple junction' of the oceanic Philippine Sea Plate that underthrusts a continental plate and is being subducted by the Pacific Plate.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Reclaimed land and man-made islands are particularly susceptible to liquefaction during an earthquake. As a result, there are specific earthquake resistance standards and ground reform work that applies to all construction in these areas. In an area that was possibly reclaimed in the past, old maps and land condition drawings are checked and drilling is carried out to determine the strength of the ground. However this can be very costly, so for a private residential block of land, a Swedish weight sounding test is more common.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Japan has become a world leader in research on causes and prediction of earthquakes. The development of advanced technology has permitted the construction of skyscrapers even in earthquake-prone areas. Extensive civil defence efforts focus on training in protection against earthquakes, in particular against accompanying fire, which represents the greatest danger.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Japan has 108 active volcanoes. That's 10% of all active volcanoes in the world. Japan has stratovolcanoes near the subduction zones of the tectonic plates. During the 20th century several new volcanoes emerged, including Shōwa-shinzan on Hokkaido and Myōjin-shō off the Bayonnaise Rocks in the Pacific. In 1991, Japan's Unzen Volcano on Kyushu about east of Nagasaki, awakened from its 200-year slumber to produce a new lava dome at its summit. Beginning in June, repeated collapse of this erupting dome generated ash flows that swept down the mountain's slopes at speeds as high as . Unzen erupted in 1792 and killed more than 15,000 people. It is the worst volcanic disaster in the country's recorded history.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Mount Fuji is a dormant stratovolcano that last erupted on 16 December 1707 till about 1 January 1708. The Hōei eruption of Mount Fuji did not have a lava flow, but it did release some of volcanic ash. It spread over vast areas around the volcano and reached Edo almost away. Cinders and ash fell like rain in Izu, Kai, Sagami, and Musashi provinces. In Edo, the volcanic ash was several centimeters thick. The eruption is rated a 5 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index.


title: Geography of Japan

text: There are three VEI-7 volcanoes in Japan. These are the Aira Caldera, Kikai Caldera and Aso Caldera. These giant caldera are remnants of past eruptions. Mount Aso is the largest active volcano in Japan. 300,000 to 90,000 years ago there were four eruptions of Mount Aso which emitted huge amounts of volcanic ash that covered all of Kyushu and up to Yamaguchi Prefecture.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Surveys by KOBEC (Kobe Ocean-Bottom Exploration Center) confirm that a giant lava dome of 23 cubic kilometers formed after the Kikai Caldera erupted in 4,300 BC. There is a 1% chance of a giant caldera eruption in the Japanese archipelago within the next 100 years. Appropriately 40 cubic kilometers of magma would be released in one burst and cause enormous damage.


title: Geography of Japan

text: According to a 2014 study by KOBEC of Kobe University, in a worst-case scenario if there is a VEI-7 eruption of the Aso Caldera and if the volcanic ash is carried by westerly winds, then pyroclastic flows would cover the 7 million population near the Aso Caldera within two hours. The pyroclastic flows could reach much of Kyushu. Beyond the pyroclastic area is volcanic ash that falls from the sky. If the volcanic ash continuously flows northward, then the ash fall would make it impossible to live normally in large parts of the main islands of Japan, due to paralysis of traffic and lifelines for a limited period (a few days to 2 weeks) until the eruption subsides. In this scenario, the exception would be eastern and northern Hokkaido (the Ryukyu Islands and southern Nanpo Islands would also be excepted). Professor Yoshiyuki Tatsumi, head of KOBEC told the Mainichi Shimbun "the probability of a gigantic caldera eruption hitting the Japanese archipelago is 1 percent in the next 100 years" with a death toll of many 10s of millions of people and wildlife. The potential exists for tens of millions of humans and other living beings to die during a VEI-7 volcanic eruption with significant short-term effects on the global climate. Most casualties would occur in Kyushu by the pyroclastic flows. The potential damage of the volcanic ash depends on the Wind direction. If in another scenario, the wind blows in a western or southern direction then the Volcanic ash could affect the East Asian continent or South-East Asia. If the ash flows eastward then it will spread over the Pacific Ocean. Since the Kikai Caldera is submerged, it is unclear how much damage the hot ash clouds would cause if large quantities of volcanic ash stays beneath the ocean surface. The underwater ash would be swept away by ocean currents.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Paektu Mountain on the Chinese–North Korean border had a VEI-7 eruption in 946. Paektu Mountain is mainly a threat to the surrounding area in North Korea and Manchuria. The west coast of Hokkaido is about away. However, a temple in Japan reported "white ash falling like snow" on 3 November 946 AD. So strong winds carried the volcanic ash eastward across the Sea of Japan. An average of of ashfall covered about of the Sea of Japan and northern Japan (Hokkaido and Aomori Prefecture). It took the ash clouds 1 day or so to reach Hokkaido. The total eruption duration was 4 and half to 14 days (111–333 hours).


title: Geography of Japan

text: In October 2021, large quantities of pumice pebbles from the submarine volcano Fukutoku-Okanoba damaged fisheries, tourism, the environment, 11 ports in Okinawa and 19 ports in Kagoshima prefecture. Clean-up operations took 2–3 weeks.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Improving technology and methods to predict volcano and giant caldera eruptions would help to prepare and evacuate people earlier. Technology is needed to accurately capture the state of the magma chamber that spreads thinly with a thickness of less than several kilometers around the middle of the crust. The underground area of Kyushu must be monitored, because it is a dangerous area with a potential caldera eruption. The most protective measure is to stop the hot ash clouds from spreading and devastating areas near the eruption so that people don't need to evacuate. There are currently no protective measures to minimize the spread of millions of tons of deadly hot ash during a VEI-7 eruption.


title: Geography of Japan

text: In 2018 NASA published a theoretical plan to prevent a volcanic eruption by pumping large quantities of cold water down a borehole into the hydrothermal system of a supervolcano. The water would cool the huge body of magma in the chambers below the volcano so that the liquid magma becomes semi-solid. Thus enough heat could be extracted to prevent an eruption. The heat could be used by a geothermal plant to generate geothermal energy and electricity.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Since recording started in 1951, an average of 2.6 typhoons reached the main islands of Kyushu, Shikoku, Honshu and Hokkaido per year. Approximately 10.3 typhoons approach within the 300 kilometer range near the coast of Japan. Okinawa is, due to its geographic location, most vulnerable to typhoons with an average of 7 storms per year. The most destructive was Isewan Typhoon with 5,000 casualties in the Tokai region in September 1959. In October 2004, Typhoon Tokage caused heavy rain in Kyushu and central Japan with 98 casualties. Until the 1960s the death toll was hundreds of people per typhoon. Since the 1960s improvements in construction, flood prevention, high tides detection and early warnings substantially reduced the death toll which rarely exceeds a dozen people per typhoon. Japan also has special search and rescue units to save people in distress.


title: Geography of Japan

text: Heavy snowfall during the winter in the snow country regions cause landslides, flooding, and avalanches.


title: Geography of Japan

text: In the 2006 environment annual report, the Ministry of Environment reported that current major issues are: global warming and preservation of the ozone layer, conservation of the atmospheric environment, water and soil, waste management and recycling, measures for chemical substances, conservation of the natural environment and the participation in the international cooperation.


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: Samuel Phillips Huntington (April 18, 1927December 24, 2008) was an American political scientist, adviser, and academic. He spent more than half a century at Harvard University, where he was director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs and the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor.


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: During the presidency of Jimmy Carter, Huntington was the White House Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security Council. During the 1980s Apartheid era in South Africa, he served as an adviser to P. W. Botha's Security Services.


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: Huntington is best known for his 1993 theory, the "Clash of Civilizations", of a post–Cold War new world order. He argued that future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures, and that Islamic extremism would become the biggest threat to Western domination of the world. Huntington is credited with helping to shape American views on civilian-military relations, political development, and comparative government. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Huntington is the second most frequently cited author on college syllabi for political science courses.


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: Huntington was born on April 18, 1927, in New York City, the son of Dorothy Sanborn (née Phillips), a short-story writer, and Richard Thomas Huntington, a publisher of hotel trade journals. His grandfather was publisher John Sanborn Phillips. He graduated with distinction from Yale University at age 18, served in the U.S. Army for a brief period, earned his master's degree from the University of Chicago, and completed his PhD at Harvard University, where he began teaching at age 23.


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: Huntington was a member of Harvard's department of government from 1950 until he was denied tenure in 1959. Along with Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had also been denied tenure, he moved to Columbia University in New York. From 1959 to 1962 he was an associate professor of government at Columbia, where he was also associate director of their Institute of War and Peace Studies. Huntington was invited to return to Harvard with tenure in 1963 and remained there until his death. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965. Huntington and Warren Demian Manshel co-founded and co-edited "Foreign Policy". Huntington stayed as co-editor until 1977.


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: Huntington's first major book was "" (1957), which was highly controversial when it was published, but at present is regarded as the most influential book on American civil-military relations. He became prominent with his "Political Order in Changing Societies" (1968), a work that challenged the conventional opinion of modernization theorists, that economic and social progress would produce stable democracies in recently decolonized countries. He also was co-author of "", a report issued by the Trilateral Commission in 1976. In 1977, his friend Brzezinski – who had been appointed National Security Adviser in the administration of Jimmy Carter – invited Huntington to become White House Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security Council. He served in this position until the end of 1978.


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: Huntington met his wife, Nancy Arkelyan, when they were working together on a speech for 1956 presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. They had two sons, Nicholas and Timothy.


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: After several years of declining health, Huntington died on December 24, 2008, at age 81 in Martha's Vineyard.


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: In "The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations" (1957), Huntington presents a general theory of civil–military relations. Huntington proposes a theory of objective civilian control, according to which the optimal means of asserting control over the armed forces is to professionalize them.


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: In 1968, just as the United States' war in Vietnam was becoming most intense, Huntington published "Political Order in Changing Societies", which was a critique of the modernization theory which had affected much US policy regarding the developing world during the prior decade.


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: Huntington argued that as societies modernize, they become more complex and disordered. If the process of social modernization that produces this disorder is not matched by a process of political and institutional modernization—a process which produces political institutions capable of managing the stress of modernization—the result may be violence.


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: During the 1970s, Huntington was an advisor to governments, both democratic and dictatorial. During 1972, he met with Medici government representatives in Brazil; a year later he published the report "Approaches to Political Decompression", warning against the risks of a too-rapid political liberalization, proposing gradual liberalization, and a strong party state modeled upon the image of the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party. After a prolonged transition, Brazil became democratic during 1985.


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: During the 1980s, he became a valued adviser to the South African regime, which used his ideas on political order to craft its "total strategy" to reform apartheid and suppress growing resistance. He assured South Africa's rulers that increasing the repressive power of the state (which at that time included police violence, detention without trial, and torture) can be necessary to effect reform. The reform process, he told his South African audience, often requires "duplicity, deceit, faulty assumptions and purposeful blindness." He thus gave his imprimatur to his hosts' project of "reforming" apartheid rather than eliminating it.


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: Huntington frequently cited Brazil as a success, alluding to his role in his 1988 presidential address to the American Political Science Association, commenting that political science "played a modest role in this process". Critics, such as British political scientist Alan Hooper, note that contemporary Brazil has an especially unstable party system, wherein the best institutionalized party, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's Workers' Party, emerged in opposition to controlled transition. Moreover, Hooper claims that the lack of civil participation in contemporary Brazil results from that top-down process of political participation transitions.


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: In his 1991 book "The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century", Huntington made the argument that beginning with Portugal's revolution during 1974, there has been a third wave of democratization which describes a global trend which includes more than 60 countries throughout Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa which have undergone some form of democratic transition. Huntington won the 1992 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for this book.


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: In 1993, Huntington provoked great debate among international relations theorists with the interrogatively titled "The Clash of Civilizations?", an influential, oft-cited article published in "Foreign Affairs" magazine. In the article, he argued that, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Islam would become the biggest obstacle to Western domination of the world. The West's next big war therefore, he said, would inevitably be with Islam. Its description of post-Cold War geopolitics and the "inevitability of instability" contrasted with the influential "End of History" thesis advocated by Francis Fukuyama.


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: Huntington expanded "The Clash of Civilizations?" to book length and published it as "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" in 1996. The article and the book posit that post-Cold War conflict would most frequently and violently occur because of cultural rather than ideological differences. That, whilst in the Cold War, conflict occurred between the Capitalist West and the Communist Bloc East, it now was most likely to occur between the world's major civilizations—identifying seven, and a possible eighth: (i) Western, (ii) Latin American, (iii) Islamic, (iv) Sinic (Chinese), (v) Hindu, (vi) Orthodox, (vii) Japanese, and (viii) African. This cultural organization contrasts the contemporary world with the classical notion of sovereign states. To understand current and future conflict, cultural rifts must be understood, and culture—rather than the State—must be accepted as the reason for war. Thus, Western nations will lose predominance if they fail to recognize the irreconcilable nature of cultural tensions. Huntington argued that this post-Cold War shift in geopolitical organization and structure requires the West to strengthen itself culturally, by abandoning the imposition of its ideal of democratic universalism and its incessant military interventionism. Underscoring this point, Huntington wrote in the 1996 expansion, "In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous."


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: The identification of Western Civilization with Western Christianity (Catholic-Protestant) was not Huntington's original idea, it was rather the traditional Western opinion and subdivision before the Cold War era. Critics (for example articles in "Le Monde Diplomatique") call "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" the theoretical legitimization of American-caused Western aggression against China and the world's Islamic and Orthodox cultures. Other critics argue that Huntington's taxonomy is simplistic and arbitrary, and does not take account of the internal dynamics and partisan tensions within civilizations. Furthermore, critics argue that Huntington neglects ideological mobilization by elites and unfulfilled socioeconomic needs of the population as the real causal factors driving conflict, that he ignores conflicts that do not fit well with the civilizational borders identified by him, and they charge that his new paradigm is nothing but realist thinking in which "states" became replaced by "civilizations". Huntington's influence upon US policy has been likened to that of historian Arnold Toynbee's controversial religious theories about Asian leaders during the early twentieth century. The "New York Times" obituary on Huntington states that his "emphasis on ancient religious empires, as opposed to states or ethnicities, [as sources of global conflict] gained ... more cachet after the Sept. 11 attacks."


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: Huntington wrote that Ukraine might divide along the cultural line between the more Catholic western Ukraine and Orthodox eastern Ukraine, even though both western "and" eastern Ukraine have large Orthodox majorities:


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: While a statist approach highlights the possibility of a Russian-Ukrainian war, a civilizational approach minimizes that and instead highlights the possibility of Ukraine splitting in half, a separation which cultural factors would lead one to predict might be more violent than that of Czechoslovakia but far less bloody than that of Yugoslavia.


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: Huntington's last book, "Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity", was published in May 2004. Its subject is the meaning of American national identity and what he describes as a cultural threat from large-scale immigration by Latinos, which Huntington says could "divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages". In this book, he called for America to force immigrants to "adopt English" and the US to turn to "Protestant religions" to "save itself against the threats" of Latino and Islamic immigrants. In a book review for the academic journal Perspectives on Politics, Gary M. Segura, Dean of the UCLA School of Public Affairs, asserted that the book should not be considered social science because of its divisive views and rhetoric. Segura also called Huntington's writing of the book unforgivable on account of Huntington's academic position, saying that the work was a polemic rather than a work of scholarship.


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: Huntington is credited with inventing the phrase "Davos Man", referring to global elites who "have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite's global operations". The phrase refers to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where leaders of the global economy meet.


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: During the 1980s, the South African apartheid government of P. W. Botha became increasingly preoccupied with security. On Huntington's advice, Botha's government established a powerful state security apparatus to "protect" the state against an anticipated upsurge in political violence that the reforms were expected to cause. The 1980s became a period of considerable political unrest, with the government becoming increasingly dominated by Botha's circle of generals and police chiefs (known as securocrats), who managed the various States of Emergencies.


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: In 1986, Huntington was nominated for membership to the National Academy of Sciences. The nomination was opposed by Serge Lang, a Yale University mathematician inspired by the writings of mathematician Neal Koblitz, who had accused Huntington of misusing mathematics and engaging in pseudo-science. Lang claimed that Huntington distorted the historical record and used pseudo-mathematics to make his conclusions seem convincing. Lang's campaign succeeded; Huntington was twice nominated and twice rejected. A detailed description of these events was published by Lang in "Academia, Journalism, and Politics: A Case Study: The Huntington Case" which occupies the first 222 pages of his 1998 book "Challenges".


title: Samuel P. Huntington

text: Huntington's prominence as a Harvard professor and director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs led to significant media coverage of his defeated nomination to the NAS, including by "The New York Times" and "The New Republic". His supporters included Herbert A. Simon, a 1978 laureate of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Simon and Koblitz debated in multiple issues of "Mathematical Intelligencer", with other mathematicians joining in through "Letters to the Editors" column.


title: High Fidelity (TV series)

text: High Fidelity is an American romantic comedy television series, based on the 1995 novel "High Fidelity" by Nick Hornby and the 2000 "High Fidelity" film. It premiered on the Hulu streaming service on February 14, 2020. The series starred Zoë Kravitz, whose mother Lisa Bonet appeared in the original film. Although favorably reviewed, the series was canceled in August 2020 after one season.


title: High Fidelity (TV series)

text: "High Fidelity" follows "the ultimate music fan, a record store owner who's obsessed with pop culture and Top Five lists" in the neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn.


title: High Fidelity (TV series)

text: On April 5, 2018, Disney announced it was developing a television series adaptation of their 2000 Touchstone film "High Fidelity" to be written by Veronica West and Sarah Kucserka with the intention of distributing it through their then-unnamed upcoming streaming service, now known as Disney+. Production companies involved with the series were slated to consist of Midnight Radio and ABC Signature Studios. On September 24, 2018, it was announced that Disney had given the production a series order for a first season consisting of ten episodes. Executive producers were expected to include West, Kucserka, Josh Appelbaum, Andre Nemec, Jeff Pinkner, Scott Rosenberg, and Zoë Kravitz. On April 9, 2019, it was announced that the series has been moved from Disney+ to Hulu. In July 2019, during an interview, Natasha Lyonne revealed that she was directing an episode of "High Fidelity". On August 5, 2020, Hulu canceled the series after one season.


title: High Fidelity (TV series)

text: Alongside the series order announcement, it was confirmed that Zoë Kravitz, whose mother Lisa Bonet appeared in the 2000 film adaptation, is set to star in the series. On April 22, 2019, it was announced that Jake Lacy had been cast as a series regular. On May 17, 2019, it was reported that Da'Vine Joy Randolph and David Holmes had joined the main cast. In the same month, Kingsley Ben-Adir was cast in a guest starring role.


title: High Fidelity (TV series)

text: "High Fidelity" premiered on February 14, 2020. The first three episodes were also aired on March 16, 2020, on Freeform. Internationally, the series premiered on February 21, 2020, in Canada on Starz and on May 1, 2020, in Australia on ABC iview and ABC Comedy. It was also released in select territories like Australia, the UK and Canada on Disney+ under the Star content hub and on Star+ in Latin America.


title: High Fidelity (TV series)

text: The first set of images were released in late October 2019 with the announcement of series premiere date. The teaser trailer for the series was released on December 20, 2019


title: High Fidelity (TV series)

text: On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the series holds an 86% approval rating with 70 reviews, with an average rating of 7.79/10. The website's critical consensus states, "Though it skips the occasional beat, "High Fidelity" fresh take on a familiar track is as witty as it is emotionally charged, giving the charming and curmudgeonly Zoe Kravitz plenty of room to shine." On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 70 out of 100, based on 28 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


title: Coronation

text: A coronation is the act of placement or bestowal of a crown upon a monarch's head. The term also generally refers not only to the physical crowning but to the whole ceremony wherein the act of crowning occurs, along with the presentation of other items of regalia, marking the formal investiture of a monarch with regal power. Aside from the crowning, a coronation ceremony may comprise many other rituals such as the taking of special vows by the monarch, the investing and presentation of regalia to the monarch, and acts of homage by the new ruler's subjects and the performance of other ritual deeds of special significance to the particular nation. Western-style coronations have often included anointing the monarch with holy oil, or chrism as it is often called; the anointing ritual's religious significance follows examples found in the Bible. The monarch's consort may also be crowned, either simultaneously with the monarch or as a separate event.


title: Coronation

text: Once a vital ritual among the world's monarchies, coronations have changed over time for a variety of socio-political and religious factors; most modern monarchies have dispensed with them altogether, preferring simpler ceremonies to mark a monarch's accession to the throne. In the past, concepts of royalty, coronation and deity were often inexorably linked. In some ancient cultures, rulers were considered to be divine or partially divine: the Egyptian pharaoh was believed to be the son of Ra, the sun god, while in Japan, the emperor was believed to be a descendant of Amaterasu, the sun goddess. Rome promulgated the practice of emperor worship; in Medieval Europe, monarchs claimed to have a divine right to rule (analogous to the Mandate of Heaven in dynastic China). Coronations were once a direct visual expression of these alleged connections, but recent centuries have seen the lessening of such beliefs.


title: Coronation

text: Coronations are still observed in the United Kingdom, Tonga, and several Asian and African countries. In Europe, most monarchs are required to take a simple oath in the presence of the country's legislature. Besides a coronation, a monarch's accession may be marked in many ways: some nations may retain a religious dimension to their accession rituals while others have adopted simpler inauguration ceremonies, or even no ceremony at all. Some cultures use bathing or cleansing rites, the drinking of a sacred beverage, or other religious practices to achieve a comparable effect. Such acts symbolise the granting of divine favour to the monarch within the relevant spiritual-religious paradigm of the country.


title: Coronation

text: "Coronation" in common parlance today may also, in a broader sense, refer to any formal ceremony in relation to the accession of a monarch, whether or not an actual crown is bestowed, such ceremonies may otherwise be referred to as investitures, inaugurations, or enthronements. The date of the act of "accession", however, usually precedes the date of the ceremony of "coronation". For example, the Coronation of Elizabeth II took place on 2 June 1953, almost sixteen months after her accession to the throne on 6 February 1952 on the death of her father George VI.


title: Coronation

text: The coronation ceremonies in medieval Christendom, both Western and Eastern, are influenced by the practice of the Roman Emperors as it developed during Late Antiquity, indirectly influenced by Biblical accounts of kings being crowned and anointed. The European coronation ceremonies, perhaps best known in the form they have taken in Great Britain (the most recent of which occurred in 1953), descend from rites initially created in Byzantium, Visigothic Spain, Carolingian France and the Holy Roman Empire and brought to their apogee during the Medieval era.


title: Coronation

text: In non-Christian states, coronation rites evolved from a variety of sources, often related to the religious beliefs of that particular nation. Buddhism, for instance, influenced the coronation rituals of Thailand, Cambodia and Bhutan, while Hindu elements played a significant role in Nepalese rites. The ceremonies used in modern Egypt, Malaysia, Brunei and Iran were shaped by Islam, while Tonga's ritual combines ancient Polynesian influences with more modern Anglican ones.


title: Coronation

text: Coronations, in one form or another, have existed since ancient times, like in Ancient Egypt. The Hebrew Bible testifies to particular rites associated with the conferring of kingship, the most detailed accounts of which are found in 2 Kings 11:12 and 2 Chronicles 23:11.


title: Coronation

text: The , the "radiant crown" known best on the Statue of Liberty, and perhaps worn by the Helios that was the Colossus of Rhodes, was worn by Roman emperors as part of the cult of Sol Invictus, part of the imperial cult as it developed during the 3rd century. The origin of the crown is thus religious, comparable to the significance of a halo, marking the sacral nature of kingship, expressing that either the king is himself divine, or ruling by divine right.


title: Coronation

text: The precursor to the crown was the browband called the diadem, which had been worn by the Achaemenid rulers, was adopted by Constantine I, and was worn by all subsequent rulers of the later Roman Empire.


title: Coronation

text: Following the assumption of the diadem by Constantine, Roman and Byzantine emperors continued to wear it as the supreme symbol of their authority. Although no specific coronation ceremony was observed at first, one gradually evolved over the following century. Emperor Julian the Apostate was hoisted upon a shield and crowned with a gold necklace provided by one of his standard-bearers; he later wore a jewel-studded diadem. Later emperors were crowned and acclaimed in a similar manner, until the momentous decision was taken to permit the patriarch of Constantinople to physically place the crown on the emperor's head.


title: Coronation

text: The first imperial coronation was organized by Leo I, who was crowned by Patriarch Anatolius of Constantinople in 457. This Christian coronation ritual was performed by almost all future emperors, and was later imitated by courts all over Europe. This ritual included recitation of prayers by the Byzantine prelate over the crown, a further—and extremely vital—development in the liturgical of crowning. After this event, according to the "Catholic Encyclopedia", "the ecclesiastical element in the coronation ceremonial rapidly develop[ed]".


title: Coronation

text: In some European Celtic or Germanic countries prior to the adoption of Christianity, the ruler upon his election was raised on a shield and, while standing upon it, was borne on the shoulders of several chief men of the nation (or tribe) in a procession around his assembled subjects. This was usually performed three times. Following this, the king was given a spear, and a diadem wrought of silk or linen (not to be confused with a crown) was bound around his forehead as a token of regal authority.


title: Coronation

text: According to Adomnan of Iona, the king of Dal Riata, Áedán mac Gabráin, came to the monastery at Iona in 574 to be crowned by St Columba. In Spain, the Visigothic king Sisenand was crowned in 631, and in 672, Wamba was the first occidental king to be anointed as well, by the archbishop of Toledo. In England, the Anglo-Saxon king Eardwulf of Northumbria was "consecrated and enthroned" in 796, and Æthelstan was crowned and anointed in 925. These practices were nevertheless irregularly used or occurred some considerable time after the rulers had become kings, until their regular adoption by the Carolingian dynasty in France. To legitimate his deposition of the last of the Merovingian kings, Pepin the Short was twice crowned and anointed, at the beginning of his reign in 752, and for the first time by a pope in 754 in Saint-Denis. The anointing served as a reminder of the baptism of Clovis I in Reims in 496, where the ceremony was finally transferred in 816. His son Charlemagne, who was crowned emperor in Rome in 800, passed as well the ceremony to the Holy Roman Empire, and this tradition acquired a newly constitutive function in England too, with the kings Harold Godwinson and William the Conqueror immediately crowned in Westminster Abbey in 1066.


title: Coronation

text: The European coronation ceremonies of the Middle Ages were essentially a combination of the Christian rite of anointing with additional elements. Following Europe's conversion to Christianity, crowning ceremonies became more and more ornate, depending on the country in question, and their Christian elements—especially anointing—became the paramount concern. Crowns and sceptres, used in coronations since ancient times, took on a Christian significance together with the orb as symbols of the purported divine order of things, with the monarch as the divinely ordained overlord and protector of his dominion. During the Middle Ages, this rite was considered so vital in some European kingdoms that it was sometimes referred to as an "eighth sacrament". The anointed ruler was viewed as a , part priest and part layman, but never wholly either. This notion persisted into the twentieth century in Imperial Russia, where the Tsar was considered to be "wedded" to his subjects through the Orthodox coronation service. Coronation stones marked the site of some medieval ceremonies, though some alleged stones are later inventions.


title: Coronation

text: As reported by the jurisconsult Tancredus, initially only four monarchs were crowned and anointed, they were the Kings of Jerusalem, France, England and Sicily:


title: Coronation

text: Crowning ceremonies arose from a worldview in which monarchs were seen as ordained by God to serve not merely as political or military leaders, nor as figureheads, but rather to occupy a vital "spiritual" place in their dominions as well. Coronations were created to reflect and enable these alleged connections; however, the belief systems that gave birth to them have been radically altered in recent centuries by secularism, egalitarianism and the rise of constitutionalism and democracy. During the Protestant Reformation, the idea of divinely ordained monarchs began to be challenged.


title: Coronation

text: The Age of Enlightenment and various revolutions of the last three centuries all helped to further this trend. Hence, many monarchies – especially in Europe – have dispensed with coronations altogether, or transformed them into simpler inauguration or benediction rites. A majority of contemporary European monarchies today have either long abandoned coronation ceremonies (e.g. Spain, last practiced in 1494) or have never practiced coronations (e.g. Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg). Of all European monarchies today, only the United Kingdom still retains its coronation rite. Other nations still crowning their rulers include Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, Lesotho, Swaziland, Thailand, and Tonga, as well as several subnational entities such as the Toro Kingdom. The Papacy retains the option of a coronation, but no pope has used it since 1963 after Pope John Paul I opted for a papal inauguration in 1978.


title: Coronation

text: A canonical coronation (Latin: ) is a pious institutional act of the Pope, on behalf of a devotion. This tradition still stands ; in 2014 Pope Francis crowned Our Lady of Immaculate Conception of Juquila. Since 1989, the act has been carried out through the authorised decree by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.


title: Coronation

text: In most kingdoms, a monarch succeeding hereditarily does not have to undergo a coronation to ascend the throne or exercise the prerogatives of their office. King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom, for example, did not reign long enough to be crowned before he abdicated, yet he was unquestionably the King of the United Kingdom and Emperor of India during his brief reign. This is because in Britain, the law stipulates that in the moment one monarch dies, the new one assumes automatically and immediately the throne; thus, there is no interregnum.


title: Coronation

text: France likewise followed automatic succession, though by tradition the new king ascended the throne when the coffin of the previous monarch descended into the vault at Saint Denis Basilica, and the Duke of Uzès proclaimed ("The King is dead, long live the King!"). In Hungary, on the other hand, no ruler was regarded as being truly legitimate until he was physically crowned with St. Stephen's Crown performed by the archbishop of Esztergom in Székesfehérvár Cathedral (during the Ottoman Empire's invasion of Hungary in Pozsony, then Budapest), while monarchs of Albania were not allowed to succeed or exercise any of their prerogatives until swearing a formal constitutional oath before their respective nations' parliaments. The same still applies in Belgium. Following their election, the kings of Poland were permitted to perform a variety of political acts prior to their coronation, but were not allowed to exercise any of their judicial powers prior to being crowned.


title: Coronation

text: In the Holy Roman Empire an individual became King of the Romans, thus gained governance of the Empire unless he was elected during his predecessor's lifetime, upon his acceptance of the election capitulation, not his coronation. However, prior to Maximilian I he could not style himself "Emperor" until his coronation by the Pope, resulting in many individuals being "Kings of the Romans" or "Kings of Germany", but not "Emperor". Maximilian received Papal permission to call himself "Elected Emperor of the Romans" when he was unable to travel for his coronation. His successors likewise adopted the title with the last Emperor crowned by the Pope being Maxmilian's grandson Charles V.


title: Coronation

text: The official coronation gifts, Royal or Imperial, commencing in the 19th century were commissioned by the coronation commission,


title: Coronation

text: intended for the incoming monarch, as personal mementomom of the coronation event. Personal coronation gifts presented at the coronation festivities directly by the newly crowned monarch to the official coronation guest were similar or identical to the official coronation gift all according to the Royal or Imperial protocol and court status of the recipient. Presentation of coronation gifts was major anticipated reviling function of the incoming monarch.


title: Coronation

text: The custom of crowning heirs apparent also originates from the Roman Empire. Many emperors chose to elevate their children directly to "augustus" (emperor) instead of leaving them as "caesar" (heir apparent). These co-emperors didn't exercise real power and are often excluded from the numbering of emperors, as their proclamations only served to settle the succession. The first known coronation of a co-emperor occurred in 367, when Valentinian I crowned his 8-years old son Gratian. After the reign of Leo I, heirs apparent —nominal co-rulers titled "augustus" and later "basileus"— were also crowned by the Patriarch of Constantinople, as in the case of his 6-years old son Leo II in 473.


title: Coronation

text: During the Middle Ages, the Capetian Kings of France chose to have their heirs apparent crowned during their own lifetime to avoid succession disputes. This practice was later adopted by Angevin Kings of England, Kings of Hungary and other European monarchs. From the moment of their coronation, the heirs were regarded as junior kings (), but they exercised little power and historically were not included in the numbering of monarchs if they predeceased their fathers. The nobility disliked this custom, as it reduced their chances to benefit from a possible succession dispute.


title: Coronation

text: The last heir apparent to the French throne to be crowned during his father's lifetime was the future Philip II. The only crowned heir apparent to the English throne was Henry the Young King, who was first crowned alone and then with his wife, Margaret of France. It is worth noting that King Stephen attempted to have his son Eustace IV of Boulogne crowned in his lifetime but faced serious papal opposition as the Church did not want to be seen as intervening in the Anarchy. The practice was eventually abandoned by all kingdoms that had adopted it, as the rules of primogeniture became stronger. The last coronation of an heir apparent, with the exception of that of the Prince of Wales in 1969, was the coronation of the future Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria as junior King of Hungary in 1830.


title: Coronation

text: "Coronations: Medieval and Early Modern Monarchic Ritual". ed. Janos M. Bak. University of California Press 1990. .


title: Coronation

text: Zupka, Dušan: "Power of rituals and rituals of power: Religious and secular rituals in the political culture of medieval Kingdom of Hungary". IN: Historiography in Motion. Bratislava – Banská Bystrica, 2010, pp. 29–42. .


title: Nordicism

text: Nordicism is an ideology of racism which views the historical race concept of the "Nordic race" as an endangered and superior racial group. Some notable and seminal Nordicist works include Madison Grant's book "The Passing of the Great Race" (1916); Arthur de Gobineau's "An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races" (1853); the various writings of Lothrop Stoddard; Houston Stewart Chamberlain's "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century" (1899); and, to a lesser extent, William Z. Ripley’s "The Races of Europe" (1899). The ideology became popular in the late-19th and 20th centuries among Germanic-speaking people of Northwestern, Central and Northern Europe, as well as in North America and Australia.


title: Nordicism

text: The belief that the Nordic phenotype is superior to all others was originally embraced as "Anglo-Saxonism" in England and the United States, "Teutonicism" in Germany, and "Frankisism" in Northern France. The notion of the superiority of the "Nordic race" and the superiority of the Northwestern European nations that were associated with this supposed race influenced the United States' Immigration Act of 1924 (which effectively banned or severely limited the immigration of Italians, Jews, and other Southern and Eastern Europeans) and the later Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, and it was also present in other countries outside Northwestern Europe and the United States, such as Australia, Canada, and South Africa. By the 1930s, the Nazis claimed that the Nordic race was the most superior branch of the "Aryan race" and constituted a master race ("Herrenvolk"). The full application of this belief system—the invasion of Poland and further conquest in the pursuit of "Lebensraum", 'living space'—was the immediate catalyst for World War II and led directly to the industrial mass murder of six million Jews and eleven million other victims in what is now known as the Holocaust.


title: Nordicism

text: The Russian-born French anthropologist Joseph Deniker initially proposed "nordique" (meaning simply "northern") as an "ethnic group" (a term that he coined).


title: Nordicism

text: He defined "nordique" by a set of physical characteristics: the concurrence of somewhat wavy hair, light eyes, reddish skin, tall stature and a dolichocephalic skull.


title: Nordicism

text: In the mid-19th century, scientific racism developed the theory of Aryanism, holding that Europeans ("Aryans") were an innately superior branch of humanity , responsible for most of its greatest achievements. Aryanism was derived from the idea that the original speakers of the Indo-European languages constituted a distinctive race or subrace of the larger Caucasian race.


title: Nordicism

text: Its principal proponent was Arthur de Gobineau in his "Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races" (1855). Though Gobineau did not equate Nordic people with Aryans, he argued that Germanic people were the best modern representatives of the Aryan race. Adapting the comments of Tacitus and other Roman writers, he argued that "pure" Northerners regenerated Europe after the Roman Empire declined due to racial "dilution" of its leadership.


title: Nordicism

text: By the 1880s a number of linguists and anthropologists argued that the Aryans themselves had originated somewhere in northern Europe. Theodor Poesche proposed that the Aryans originated in the vast Rokitno, or Pinsk Marshes, then in the Russian Empire, now covering much of the southern part of Belarus and the north-west of the Ukraine, but it was Karl Penka who popularised the idea that the Aryans had emerged in Scandinavia and could be identified by the distinctive Nordic characteristics of light hair and blue eyes.


title: Nordicism

text: The biologist Thomas Henry Huxley agreed with him, coining the term "Xanthochroi" to refer to fair-skinned Europeans, as opposed to darker Mediterranean people, whom Huxley called "Melanochroi". It was Huxley who also concluded that the Melanochroi, who he described as "dark whites", are of a mixture of the Xanthochroi and Australioids.


title: Nordicism

text: This distinction was repeated by Charles Morris in his book "The Aryan Race" (1888), which argued that the original Aryans could be identified by their blond hair and other Nordic features, such as dolichocephaly (long skull). The argument was given extra impetus by the French anthropologist Vacher de Lapouge in his book "L’Aryen", in which he argued that the "dolichocephalic-blond" people were natural leaders, destined to rule over more brachycephalic (short-skulled) people.


title: Nordicism

text: The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche also referred in his writings to "blond beasts": lion-like amoral adventurers who were supposed to be the progenitors of creative cultures. In "On the Genealogy of Morals" (1887), he wrote, "In Latin malus ... could indicate the vulgar man as the dark one, especially as the black-haired one, as the pre-Aryan dweller of the Italian soil which distinguished itself most clearly through his colour from the blonds who became their masters, namely the Aryan conquering race." However, Nietzsche thought of these "blond beasts" not as a racial type, but as the ideal aristocratic personality, which can appear in any society: "the Roman, Arabic, German, and Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings, are all alike in this need."


title: Nordicism

text: By the early 20th century the concept of a "masterly" Nordic race had become familiar enough that the British psychologist William McDougall, writing in 1920, stated:


title: Nordicism

text: Among all the disputes and uncertainties of the ethnographers about the races of Europe, one fact stands out clearly—namely, that we can distinguish a race of northerly distribution and origin, characterised physically by fair colour of hair and skin and eyes, by tall stature and dolichocephaly (i.e. long shape of head), and mentally by great independence of character, individual initiative and tenacity of will. Many names have been used to denote this type, ... . It is also called the Nordic type.


title: Nordicism

text: Nordicists claimed that Nordics had formed upper tiers of ancient civilisations, even in the Mediterranean civilisations of antiquity, which had declined once this dominant race had been assimilated. Thus they argued that ancient evidence suggested that leading Romans like Nero, Sulla and Cato were blond or red-haired.


title: Nordicism

text: Some Nordicists admitted the Mediterranean race was superior to the Nordic in terms of artistic ability. However, the Nordic race was regarded as superior on the basis that, although Mediterranean peoples were culturally sophisticated, it was the Nordics who were alleged to be the innovators and conquerors, having an adventurous spirit that no other race could match.


title: Nordicism

text: The Alpine race was usually regarded as inferior to both the Nordic and Mediterranean races, making up the traditional peasant class of Europe while Nordics occupied the aristocracy and led the world in technology, and Mediterraneans were regarded as more imaginative.


title: Nordicism

text: Opponents of Nordicism rejected these arguments. The anti-Nordicist writer Giuseppe Sergi argued in his influential book "The Mediterranean Race" (1901) that there was no evidence that the upper tiers of ancient societies were Nordic, insisting that historical and anthropological evidence contradicted such claims. Sergi argued that Mediterraneans constituted "the greatest race in the world", with a creative edge absent in the Nordic race. According to him, Mediterraneans were the creators of all the major ancient civilisations, from Mesopotamia to Rome.


title: Nordicism

text: This argument was later repeated by C. G. Seligman, who wrote that "it must, I think, be recognised that the Mediterranean race has actually more achievement to its credit than any other". Even Carleton Coon insisted that among Greeks "the Nordic element is weak, as it probably has been since the days of Homer ... It is my personal reaction to the living Greeks that their continuity with their ancestors of the ancient world is remarkable, rather than the opposite."


title: Nordicism

text: In the United States, the primary spokesman for Nordicism was the eugenicist Madison Grant. His 1916 book, "The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History" about Nordicism was highly influential among racial thinking and government policy making.


title: Nordicism

text: Grant used the theory as justification for immigration policies of the 1920s, arguing that the immigrants from certain areas of Europe, such as Italians and other Southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans, represented a lesser type of European and their numbers in the United States should not be increased. Grant and others urged this as well as the complete restriction of non-Europeans, such as the Chinese and Japanese.


title: Nordicism

text: Grant argued the Nordic race had been responsible for most of humanity's great achievements (he lists Dante, Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci as examples of Nordics). Admixture was "race suicide" and unless eugenic policies were enacted, the Nordic race would be supplanted by inferior races. Future president Calvin Coolidge agreed, stating "Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides." Grant argues that Nordics founded the United States and the English "language", and formed the ruling classes of ancient Greece and Rome. An analysis performed by Grant alleges that Northwestern Europeans are less criminal than Southern and Eastern Europeans (see also Race and crime).


title: Nordicism

text: The Immigration Act of 1924 was signed into law by President Coolidge. This was designed to reduce the number of immigrants from Southern Europe, Southeast Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia, exclude Asian immigrants altogether, and favour immigration from Great Britain, Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia, while also permitting immigration from Latin America.


title: Nordicism

text: The spread of these ideas also affected popular culture. F. Scott Fitzgerald invokes Grant's ideas through a character in part of "The Great Gatsby", and Hilaire Belloc jokingly rhapsodized the "Nordic man" in a poem and essay in which he satirised the stereotypes of Nordics, Alpines and Mediterraneans.


title: Nordicism

text: In Germany the influence of Nordicism remained powerful - it became known there as "Nordischer Gedanke" ("Nordic thought").


title: Nordicism

text: This phrase, coined by the German eugenicists Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz, appeared in their 1921 work "Human Heredity", which insisted on the innate superiority of the Nordic race.


title: Nordicism

text: Adapting the arguments of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and others to Darwinian theory, they argued that the "Nordic" qualities of initiative and will-power identified by earlier writers had arisen from natural selection, because of the tough landscape in which Nordic peoples evolved. This had ensured that weaker individuals had not survived.


title: Nordicism

text: By the early 19th century, Nordicism was attached to emerging theories of racial hierarchy. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer attributed cultural primacy to the white race:The eugenicist Madison Grant argued in his 1916 book, "The Passing of the Great Race", that the Nordic race had been responsible for most of humanity's great achievements, and that admixture was "race suicide". In this book, Europeans who are not of Germanic origin but have Nordic characteristics such as blonde/red hair and blue/green/gray eyes, were considered to be a Nordic admixture and suitable for Aryanization.


title: Nordicism

text: This argument derived from earlier eugenicist and Social Darwinist ideas. According to the authors, the Nordic race arose in the ice age, from:


title: Nordicism

text: They went on to argue that "the original Indo-Germanic civilisation" was carried by Nordic migrants to India, and that the physiognomies of upper-caste Indians "disclose a Nordic origin".


title: Nordicism

text: By this time, Germany was well-accustomed to theories of race and racial superiority due to the long-standing influence of the Völkisch movement, with its philosophy that Germans constituted a unique people, or "Volk", linked by common blood. While Volkism was popular mainly among Germany's lower classes and offered a romanticised version of ethnic nationalism, Nordicism attracted German anthropologists and eugenicists.


title: Nordicism

text: Hans F. K. Günther, one of Fischer's students, first defined "Nordic thought" in his programmatic book "Der Nordische Gedanke unter den Deutschen" (1927). He became the most influential German in this field, his "Short Ethnology of the German People" (1929) was very widely circulated.


title: Nordicism

text: In his "Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes" ("Race-Lore of the German Volk"), published 1922, Günther identified five principal European races instead of three, adding the East Baltic race and Dinaric race to Ripley's categories. He used the term "Ostic"instead of "Alpine". He focused on the races' supposedly distinct mental attributes.


title: Nordicism

text: Günther criticised the Völkish idea, stating that the Germans were not racially unified, but were actually one of the most racially diverse peoples in Europe. Despite this, many Völkists who merged Völkism and Nordicism, most notably the Nazis, embraced Günther's ideas.


title: Nordicism

text: Nazi Germany promulgated Nordicism based on the idea of a superior Germanic people or Aryan race in Germany during the early 20th century. These notions of Aryan racial superiority ("Aryanism") were developed in the 19th century, maintaining the belief that white people were members of an Aryan "master race" that was superior to other races, particularly the Jews, who were described as the "Semitic race", Slavs, and Gypsies, who they associated with "cultural sterility".


title: Nordicism

text: To preserve the Aryan race or Nordic race, the Nazis introduced the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which forbade sexual relations and marriages between Germans and Jews, and later additionally forbidding Slavs and Romani. The Nazis used the Mendelian inheritance theory to argue that social traits were innate, claiming that there was a racial nature associated with certain general traits such as inventiveness or criminal behavior. Nazi ideals were combined with a eugenics program that aimed for racial hygiene through compulsory sterilization of sick individuals and extermination of "Untermenschen" ("subhumans"): Jews, Slavs, and Romani, which eventually culminated in the Holocaust.


title: Nordicism

text: According to the 2012 annual report of Germany's interior intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, at the time there were 26,000 right-wing extremists living in Germany, including 6,000 neo-Nazis.


title: Nordicism

text: Arthur de Gobineau, a French racial theorist and aristocrat, blamed the fall of the "ancien régime" in France on racial degeneracy caused by racial intermixing, which he argued had destroyed the "purity" of the Nordic or Germanic race. Gobineau's theories, which attracted a strong following in Germany and later attracted a strong following in the "Reich", emphasized the existence of an irreconcilable polarity between Aryan or Germanic peoples and Jewish culture.


title: Nordicism

text: The pessimism of Gobineau's message did not lend itself to political action because he did not believe that humanity could be saved from racial degeneration. However, writing in April 1939, Rowbotham declared: "So after nearly a hundred years, the fantastic pessimistic philosophy of the brilliant French diplomat is seized upon and twisted to the use of a mystic demagogue who finds in the idea of the pure Aryan an excuse for thrusting civilization dangerously near back to the Dark Ages."


title: Nordicism

text: As Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party's chief racial theorist, oversaw the construction of a human racial "ladder" that justified Hitler's racial and ethnic policies, promoting the Nordic theory that regarded Nordics as the "master race" superior to all others, including other Aryans (Indo-Europeans), he used the racial term "Untermensch" from the title of Klansman Lothrop Stoddard's "The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man" (1922). An advocate of the U.S. immigration laws that favored Northern Europeans, Stoddard wrote primarily on the alleged dangers posed by "colored" peoples to white civilization, and wrote "The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy" in 1920.


title: Nordicism

text: In establishing a restrictive entry system for Germany in 1925, Hitler wrote of his admiration for America's immigration laws: "The American Union categorically refuses the immigration of physically unhealthy elements, and simply excludes the immigration of certain races." German praise for America's institutional racism, previously found in Hitler's "Mein Kampf", was continuous throughout the early 1930s. Nazi lawyers were advocates of the use of American models; race-based U.S. citizenship and anti-miscegenation laws directly inspired the Nazis' two principal Nuremberg Laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law.


title: Nordicism

text: Adolf Hitler read "Human Heredity" shortly before he wrote "Mein Kampf" (published 1925–1926); he regarded it as scientific proof of the racial basis of civilisation. The Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg also repeated "Human Heredity"'s arguments in his book "The Myth of the Twentieth Century" (1930).