BY ARTHUR DIOSY
THE EMPIRE OF THE EASTERN SEAS
Length and Breadth of Great Japan
A
ASIA’S furthest outpost towards the vast waters of the Pacific Ocean, a long, narrow chain of rocky, volcanic islands, extends north-east to south-west along the eastern coast of the mainland, separated from it by the Sea of Japan and the China Seas. A glance at the map shows this long string of more than three thousand islands and islets, stretching from 51°5′, the latitude of Shumo-shu, the most northern of the Kurile group of islands, down to 21°48′, the latitude of the South Cape of Formosa, a total length of nearly thirty degrees. Its component parts extend from 157°10′ east longitude, at Shumo-shu, as far westwards as 119°20′, the position of the extreme western islets of the Pescadores, or Hokoto, archipelago, a distance of nearly thirty-eight degrees, the total breadth of the Empire of Dai Nippon—Great Japan.
The enormous length of the island empire, the configuration of which is likened by the Japanese to the slender body of a dragon-fly, provides a great variety of climate, from the Arctic rigour of the Kurile Islands and the Siberian climate, with its long and terrible winter and its short but fierce summer, obtaining in the larger northern islands, to the sweltering, steamy heat of Formosa, the tropic of Cancer passing through that island and through the Pescadores. These extreme temperatures apart—and they prevail only at the ends of the empire—Japan possesses a temperate climate, similar to that of the northern shores of the Mediterranean, but colder in winter and much damper, the excessive humidity causing both heat and cold to be very trying, though never dangerous. The rainfall is especially heavy in June and in September, but no month is entirely without rain. The hottest period of the year is called dō-yō, corresponding to our “dog-days,” and follows the rainy season of June and early July.
What Japan Owes to its Position
Japan owes its great humidity, the consequent fertility of such parts of its surface as are cultivable—about 84·3 per cent. of the whole area of Japan proper is too rocky to yield food for man—and the luxuriant verdure that clothes the lower slopes of its wooded hills, to its insular position, and, chiefly, to two great factors, a current and a wind. The great warm current known as the Kuro-shio, the Black Brine, or Black Tide, flowing from the tropical region between the Philippines and Formosa, raises the temperature of the east coast, and, where it is in part deflected by contact with the southern coast of Kiū-shū, also of the west coast, acting in the same beneficent manner as the Gulf Stream of the Atlantic. The wind that affects the Japanese climate most strongly is the north-east monsoon, tempered by the action of the dark, warm, ocean current.
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