1.
Cities of Japan
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A city is a local administrative unit in Japan. Cities are ranked on the level as towns and villages. Like other contemporary administrative units, they are defined by the Local Autonomy Law of 1947, a city can theoretically be demoted to a town or village when it fails to meet any of these conditions, but such a demotion has not happened to date. The least populous city, Utashinai, Hokkaido, has a population of six thousand, while a town in the prefecture, Otofuke. Many municipalities gained city status under this eased standard, the Cabinet of Japan can designate cities of at least 200,000 inhabitants to have the status of special city, core city, or designated city. These statuses expand the scope of authority delegated from the prefectural government to the city government. Tokyo, Japan’s capital, existed as a city until 1943, the 23 special wards of Tokyo, which constitute the core of the Tokyo metropolitan area, each have an administrative status analogous to that of cities. Tokyo also has several other incorporated cities, towns and villages within its jurisdiction. J, jacobs at Urban Studies Research, Vol.2011, doi,10. 1155/2011/692764 Large City System of Japan, graphic shows Japanese city types at p.1
2.
Saitama Prefecture
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Saitama Prefecture is a landlocked prefecture of Japan located in the Kantō region of the island of Honshu. The capital is the city of Saitama and this prefecture is part of the Greater Tokyo Area, and most of Saitamas cities can be described as suburbs of Tokyo, to which a large number of residents commute each day. According to Sendai Kuji Hongi, Chichibu was one of 137 provinces during the reign of Emperor Sujin, Chichibu Province was in Saitamas western part. Saitama Prefecture was formerly part of the old Musashi Province, in the fifth year of the Keiun era, deposits of copper were reported to have been found in the Chichibu District of what is now Saitama Prefecture. The Saitama area was known as a fertile agricultural region which produced much of the food for the Kantō region. During the Edo period, many fudai daimyōs ruled small domains within the Saitama area, most of the cities in the prefecture are closely connected to downtown Tokyo by metropolitan rail, and operate largely as residential and commercial suburbs of Tokyo. Saitama Prefecture is bordered by Tokyo, Chiba, Ibaraki, Tochigi, Gunma, Nagano and it is located central-west of the Kanto region, measuring 103 km from east to west and 52 km from north to south. At 3,798 km2, it ranks as the ninth-smallest prefecture, the eastern border with Chiba Prefecture is defined by the Edo River. The northern and north-western border lines with Gunma Prefecture are marked by the Tone River and the Kanagawa River, the southwestern border is defined by the drainage divides of the Arakawa River, Tama River, and Fuefuki River. The eastern section of the border line, however, does not overlap with any geological feature. The topography of Saitama Prefecture is largely divided by the Hachiōji Tectonic Line, which runs through Kodama, Ogawa, and Hannō, into the mountain area. The altitude, highest on the side, gradually lowers eastward from mountain ranges to hills to plateaus to lowlands. The eastern lowlands and plateaus occupy 67. 3% of the area, the eastern side, part of the Kantō Plain, can be further divided into nine separate expanses of hills and ten plateaus. The former occupy small areas neighboring the Kantō Mount Range, including the Hiki Hills, the latter are mainly surrounded by alluvial flood plains. In the southeastern portion of the prefecture, the Ōmiya Plateau stands in a direction, sandwiched by the Furutone River to the east. The western side of the prefecture belongs to the Kantō Mountain Range with Chichibu Basin located in its center, the area to the west of the basin features high peaks such as Mount Sanpō and Mount Kōbushi, in which the Arakawa River has its source. Most of the land is contained in Chichibu Tama Kai National Park, the area to east of the basin consists of relatively low mountains. Forty cities are located in Saitama Prefecture, These are the towns and villages in district, Radial transportation to
3.
Geographic coordinate system
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A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system used in geography that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation, to specify a location on a two-dimensional map requires a map projection. The invention of a coordinate system is generally credited to Eratosthenes of Cyrene. Ptolemy credited him with the adoption of longitude and latitude. Ptolemys 2nd-century Geography used the prime meridian but measured latitude from the equator instead. Mathematical cartography resumed in Europe following Maximus Planudes recovery of Ptolemys text a little before 1300, in 1884, the United States hosted the International Meridian Conference, attended by representatives from twenty-five nations. Twenty-two of them agreed to adopt the longitude of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the Dominican Republic voted against the motion, while France and Brazil abstained. France adopted Greenwich Mean Time in place of local determinations by the Paris Observatory in 1911, the latitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle between the equatorial plane and the straight line that passes through that point and through the center of the Earth. Lines joining points of the same latitude trace circles on the surface of Earth called parallels, as they are parallel to the equator, the north pole is 90° N, the south pole is 90° S. The 0° parallel of latitude is designated the equator, the plane of all geographic coordinate systems. The equator divides the globe into Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the longitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle east or west of a reference meridian to another meridian that passes through that point. All meridians are halves of great ellipses, which converge at the north and south poles, the prime meridian determines the proper Eastern and Western Hemispheres, although maps often divide these hemispheres further west in order to keep the Old World on a single side. The antipodal meridian of Greenwich is both 180°W and 180°E, the combination of these two components specifies the position of any location on the surface of Earth, without consideration of altitude or depth. The grid formed by lines of latitude and longitude is known as a graticule, the origin/zero point of this system is located in the Gulf of Guinea about 625 km south of Tema, Ghana. To completely specify a location of a feature on, in, or above Earth. Earth is not a sphere, but a shape approximating a biaxial ellipsoid. It is nearly spherical, but has an equatorial bulge making the radius at the equator about 0. 3% larger than the radius measured through the poles, the shorter axis approximately coincides with the axis of rotation
4.
Japan
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Japan is a sovereign island nation in Eastern Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies off the eastern coast of the Asia Mainland and stretches from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea, the kanji that make up Japans name mean sun origin. 日 can be read as ni and means sun while 本 can be read as hon, or pon, Japan is often referred to by the famous epithet Land of the Rising Sun in reference to its Japanese name. Japan is an archipelago consisting of about 6,852 islands. The four largest are Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku, the country is divided into 47 prefectures in eight regions. Hokkaido being the northernmost prefecture and Okinawa being the southernmost one, the population of 127 million is the worlds tenth largest. Japanese people make up 98. 5% of Japans total population, approximately 9.1 million people live in the city of Tokyo, the capital of Japan. Archaeological research indicates that Japan was inhabited as early as the Upper Paleolithic period, the first written mention of Japan is in Chinese history texts from the 1st century AD. Influence from other regions, mainly China, followed by periods of isolation, from the 12th century until 1868, Japan was ruled by successive feudal military shoguns who ruled in the name of the Emperor. Japan entered into a period of isolation in the early 17th century. The Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 expanded into part of World War II in 1941, which came to an end in 1945 following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan is a member of the UN, the OECD, the G7, the G8, the country has the worlds third-largest economy by nominal GDP and the worlds fourth-largest economy by purchasing power parity. It is also the worlds fourth-largest exporter and fourth-largest importer, although Japan has officially renounced its right to declare war, it maintains a modern military with the worlds eighth-largest military budget, used for self-defense and peacekeeping roles. Japan is a country with a very high standard of living. Its population enjoys the highest life expectancy and the third lowest infant mortality rate in the world, in ancient China, Japan was called Wo 倭. It was mentioned in the third century Chinese historical text Records of the Three Kingdoms in the section for the Wei kingdom, Wa became disliked because it has the connotation of the character 矮, meaning dwarf. The 倭 kanji has been replaced with the homophone Wa, meaning harmony, the Japanese word for Japan is 日本, which is pronounced Nippon or Nihon and literally means the origin of the sun. The earliest record of the name Nihon appears in the Chinese historical records of the Tang dynasty, at the start of the seventh century, a delegation from Japan introduced their country as Nihon
5.
Prefectures of Japan
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The Prefectures of Japan consist of 47 prefectures. They form the first level of jurisdiction and administrative division of Japan and they consist of 43 prefectures proper, two urban prefectures, one circuit or territory and one metropolis. The Meiji Fuhanken sanchisei administration created the first prefectures to replace the provinces of Japan in 1868, each prefectures chief executive is a directly-elected governor. Ordinances and budgets are enacted by an assembly whose members are elected for four-year terms. Under the current Local Autonomy Law, each prefecture is subdivided into cities and districts and each district into towns, for example, Hokkaido has 14 subprefectures that act as branch offices of the prefecture. Some other prefectures also have offices that carry out prefectural administrative functions outside the capital. Tokyo, the capital of Japan, is a merged city-prefecture, the Wests use of prefecture to label these Japanese regions stems from 16th-century Portuguese explorers and traders use of prefeitura to describe the fiefdoms they encountered there. Its original sense in Portuguese, however, was closer to municipality than province and those fiefs were headed by a local warlord or family. Though the fiefs have long since been dismantled, merged, and reorganized multiple times, and been granted legislative governance and oversight, the Meiji government established the current system in July 1871 with the abolition of the Han system and establishment of the prefecture system. Although there were initially over 300 prefectures, many of them being former Han territories, this number was reduced to 72 in the part of 1871. The Local Autonomy Law of 1947 gave more power to prefectures. In 2003, then-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi proposed that the government consolidate the current prefectures into about 10 regional states, the plan called for each region to have greater autonomy than existing prefectures. This process would reduce the number of administrative regions and cut administrative costs. As of August 2012, no reorganization has been scheduled, the central government delegates many functions to the prefectures and municipalities, but retains the overall right to control them. Although local government expenditure accounts for 70 percent of government expenditure, the central government controls local budgets, tax rates. Historically, during the Edo period, the Tokugawa shogunate established bugyō-ruled zones around the nine largest cities in Japan, and 302 township-ruled zones elsewhere. When the Meiji government began to create the system in 1868, the nine bugyō-ruled zones became fu, while the township-ruled zones. Later, in 1871, the government designated Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto as fu, during World War II, in 1943, Tokyo became a to, a new type of pseudo-prefecture
6.
Japan Standard Time
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Japan Standard Time or JST is the standard timezone in Japan, and is 9 hours ahead of UTC, i. e. it is UTC+09,00. There is no daylight saving time, though its introduction has been debated several times, during World War II, it was often called Tokyo Standard Time. Japan Standard Time is the same as Korean Standard Time, Indonesian Eastern Standard Time, before the Meiji era, each local region had its own timezone in which noon was when the sun was exactly at its zenith. As modern transportation methods, such as trains, were adopted, in 1886, Ordinance 51 was issued in response to this problem, which stated, Ordinance 51 - July 13,1886 The prime meridian passes through Englands Greenwich Observatory. Longitudes are calculated using the prime meridian, counting 180 degrees either east or west, positive degrees are east, negative degrees are west. On January 1,1888,135 degrees east longitude will be set as the meridian for all of Japan. According to this, the time was set 9 hours ahead of GMT. In the ordinance, the first clause mentions GMT, the second defines east longitude and west longitude, the city of Akashi in Hyōgo Prefecture is located exactly on 135 degrees east longitude and subsequently became known as Toki no machi. While Korea came under Japanese rule in 1910, Korea Standard Time of UTC+8,30 continued to be used until 1912, when it was changed to Central Standard Time. Western Standard Time, which was used in Taiwan and some parts of Okinawa, was abolished by Ordinance 529 in 1937 and replaced by Central Standard Time in those areas. Territories occupied by Japan during World War II, including Singapore and Malaya, adopted Japan Standard Time for the duration of their occupation, more recently there have been efforts to bring back DST in Japan, but so far this has not happened. The two-time-zone system was implemented in Japan between January 1896 and September 1937, From October 1937, Central Standard Time was also used in western Okinawa, the IANA time zone database contains one zone for Japan in the file zone. tab, named Asia/Tokyo. From 1948–51, Japan observed DST between May and September every year under an initiative of the U. S. -led occupation army, since then, DST has never been officially implemented nationwide in Japan. Starting in the late 1990s, a movement to reinstate DST in Japan gained some popularity, aiming at saving energy, in the early 2000s, a few local governments and commerce departments promoted unmandated hour-earlier work schedule experiments during the summer without officially resetting clocks. The Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy is expected to propose that the Japanese government begin studying DST in an attempt to combat global warming. Japanese PM Shinzo Abe made a significant effort to introduce daylight saving time, however, it is not clear that DST would conserve energy in Japan. JJY Japanese calendar UTC+09,00 Japanese clock
7.
Zelkova serrata
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Zelkova serrata is a species of the genus Zelkova native to Japan, Korea, eastern China and Taiwan. It is often grown as a tree, and used in bonsai. Zelkova serrata is a deciduous tree usually growing to 30 m tall. It is characterized by a short trunk dividing into many upright and erect spreading stems forming a broad, the tree grows rapidly when young though the growth rate slows to medium upon middle age and maturity. It has alternately arranged leaves growing to 5 cm long and broad, the leaves themselves are simple and ovate to oblong-ovate with serrated or crenate margins, to which the tree owes its specific epithet serrata. The leaves are acuminate or apiculate, rounded or subcordate at the base, the leaves are rough on top and glabrous or nearly glabrous on the underside. They are green to green in spring and throughout the summer, changing to yellows, oranges. The petioles are 2–5 mm long, Z. serrata develops monoecious flowers in spring with the leaves. Buds are ovoid, acutish, with imbricate, dark brown scales. They diverge at a 45 degree angle from the stem, the staminate flowers are shortly pedicellate and approximately 3mm in diameter, clustered in the axils of the lower leaves. The pistillate flowers are solitary or few in axils of the leaves, sessile. The flowers are yellow-green, not showy, and occur in groups along new stems. They give rise to small, ovate, wingless drupes that ripen in summer to autumn. The drupe is green maturing to brown, subsessile and 2.5 to 3.5 mm in diameter, to identify Zelkova serrata, one would look for a short main trunk, low branching and a vase-shaped habit. The twigs are slender with small, dark conical buds in a zigzag pattern, the bark is grayish white to grayish brown and either smooth with lenticels or exfoliating in patches to reveal orange inner bark. The branchlets are brownish-purple to brown and this tree requires full to partial sun and prefers moist, well drained soils. A fertilizer rich in potassium and nitrogen encourages new vegetation and floral buds and it is adaptable and tolerant of heat, little water, nutrient poor soils and various pH. It should be thinned to allow light into the inner canopy
