Before reviewing the progress of the health policy in Japan in the past 80 years, this chapter describes what kind of country Japan is, including its geography, climate, population, and anthropological characteristics. The Japanese archipelago is an arc-shaped chain of islands in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, located off the eastern coast of the Eurasian continent in East Asia. Its widest point is approximately 3500 km long and 300 km wide. It has four main islands—Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu—and over 14,000 smaller islands. When we impose the map of the Japanese archipelago on the US East Coast, its total length extends from Maine to Florida