Maintained by Harumichi Yamada. The CIA World Factbook Dry but potentially useful information about individual nations. Reads like encyclopedia entries. The CIA World Factbook entry on Japan Has encyclopedia-style information on demographics, major industries, etc. Xerox PARC Map Viewer Click your way from a world map to more detailed maps of the whole world.
Dictionaries Also includes general-interest lexicons, thesauri, encyclopedias, etc.
Another fine resource courtesy of Charles Muller. This is a big online character dictionary, giving each character with its definition, Unicode number, radical number, and pronunciation in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Yomenai Kanji wo shirabetai Attempts to look up mysterious kanji. You enter kanji that resemble the kanji in question, or components of it. It's Software Engineering Institute's Help page for their Web site, but also useful for checking acronyms in software engineering.