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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Japan isn’t *that* small. It might look that way on the map compared to, say, Great Britain because of the way the Mercator projection, which Google Maps displays, distorts higher-latitude landmasses (like Britain) compared to lower-latitude ones (like Japan). The distance from Sapporo in northern Japan to Nagasaki in southern Japan is 947 miles as the crow flies. By comparison, the distance from Plymouth in southern England to Thurso at the northern tip of Scotland is only 569 miles as the crow flies.
More to the point, [the population of Japan in 1940](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Empire_of_Japan#Japan_proper) was 73 million. Keep in mind, this figure is for the Japanese islands themselves; it does not include any of its imperial possessions. The UK proper in 1939 (again, just the UK itself) [had 47.8 million](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_in_1939), about two-thirds of Japan’s.
If you take that 73 million figure: Half of those will be women, leaving you with 36.5 million men. Of those, estimate half are either children, elderly, infirm, or otherwise unavailable, leaving you with more than 18 million able-bodied men to potentially draft.
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