Japan is a country in situated in the east of Asia, a handful of island situated in the Japan Sea and the Pacific  Ocean. Its original name, Nipponkoku, means in the Japanese language the House of the Rising Sun. The actual country is formed from four main islands and a lot of little ones, and the legend says that the gods have stuck a sword into the water, and when they got it out the four big water drops that appeared transformed in the four big islands.

Japan is a monarchy reigned by the Imperial House of Japan, and its organization resembles very much the one of the United Kingdom. They are very conservative people when it comes to tradition, maybe the most conservative people from Asia, and this comes in contrast with the fact that they have the most evolved research and science teams from the world. They do not accept gladly foreign intervention, and if you want to move to Japan it will be very hard for you, that is why the Japan phone number directory contains mostly Japan names.



The Japanese scientists are very smart and inventive, and you can always read new things that have been discovered or made up there. Together with the rest of Asia they have the best electronics plants and their cars seem to be more and more appreciated due to their low price and high quality. The Japanese scientists do a lot of research; I was reading a newspaper article the other day which said that the Japanese researchers have created in the lab a mouse that is not afraid of cats, by ejecting some gland that is found in the mouse’s nose. Another interesting example is the robot baby, which has been made up in order to get parents used to the “job” of being mom and dad. He acts just like a normal baby, wakes up in the night and cries, he may be cheerful or upset, depending on how much he is kept in the arms and caressed.



Besides tourists, there are people that come to Japan to learn in their universities and work with the Japanese scientists. These are the only foreign names that you will find in the Japan phone number directory. The extraordinary scientific boom and the industrialization have their reverse, too. Japan is one of the most polluted countries in the world, and they make desperate efforts to clean it. One of the projects is planting trees and other vegetation forms, but there is little space for that because Japan is a very crowded country. Unfortunately this usually goes hand in hand with industrial progress, and we have not yet found a balance between it and respecting nature. But we are working on it.