Because the Earth is a sphere. The term you’re looking for is called a “Great Circle”.
Imagine you took a sharpie and drew a black line from Texas to Tokyo, and then took a rubber band and wrapped it around the Earth connecting both Texas and Tokyo (it would be like a weird equator). Now measure the length of the lines, the rubber band distance is much shorter than the sharpie line distance. This only works a globe though because it’s 3D geometry, it wouldn’t work on a flat map.
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