I’ve been watching a number of WW2 films and I realized that Japan is such a tiny country, so it baffles me how they had so many troops. Did they require all the males healthy or not to join the war?
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Tiny in a geographic way but very, very densely populated. At the start of the war there were over 70 million people living there. Almost as much as Germany. USA had only 2x more people. France without colonies 1.5x *less*.
Well they did have conscription, but for a little context, Japan had a population of 70 million at the time. They mobilized a [similar percentage](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1342462/wwii-share-male-mobilization-by-country/) of their male population as the US and the UK, but far less than Germany or the Soviet Union
In Imperial Japan, all able-bodied men aged 17 to 40 were liable to serve in the military. Of a population of some 72 million people, they raised a military force of around 6 million during WWII. Compare this to the 16 million in the US military, 13.5 in the German and 34 million in the USSR and it doesn’t seem quite so huge.
Simple: It’s not a tiny country. They had a population of 70 million at the time. That is larger than Germany, the UK, or France. It was more than half the population of the United States. But yes, there was massive conscription, especially later on in the war as they became more and more desperate.
[How small do you think Japan is?](https://www.thetruesize.com/)
Japan has almost as much land area as California, and like 3x the population of California.
Not exactly small. Just looks small when sitting next to the rest of Asia.
Japan is not as small as you think, in terms of square miles Japan is larger than England. You can argue though that a lot of it is mountainous but so is most of Scotland.
At the start of WW2 the population of Japan was 72 million people
For comparison England was around 50 million, and the USA was 132 million.
So for a *small country* they had a pretty big population.
Japan also had active conscription so they were drafting large numbers of people.
Japan is bigger than Germany. They aren’t a small country in the grand scheme of things so much as they were stereotyped that way first so that the west could dismiss them as a real threat, then again after the war to claim a small core of warmongers took over a small and quaint country and essentially absolve the japanese populace of any blame for WWII.
Japan isn’t small, the United States is big. We are not the standard for how large a country “should” be.
“Japan is tiny” is actually a holdover perception mostly from wartime propaganda, to make the enemy seem smaller and weaker and thus keep western ally morale up.
In actually, if lined up on a US map, Japan stretches from Maine to Florida. It’s larger than every country in “main” continental Europe. About 50% more population than Germany, twice the UK or France, etc.
And remember, this wasn’t just the Japan of today. By the time the West entered the war, the Japanese Empire already included Korea, large sections of northern China, Taiwan…
Whatever makes you think Japan is tiny?
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