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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Several things here:
1. Japan is not a small country. Today, it’s the eleventh-most-populous country on Earth, substantially larger than the UK, France, or Germany today. Even by land area it is not small; it is larger than both Germany and Poland.
2. Before World War II Japan had the second-most-populous colonial empire on Earth after Britain. Even just looking at the “home islands,” its population of ~72 million still made it larger than contemporary Germany, France, or the UK.
Japan was/is a big country. At 70 million people, it had the same population as Nazi Germany, and only fielded 6 million troops vs 10+ million by the Germans. Mostly because a lot of their fighting was done on islands in the Pacific, where troop numbers were naturally limited by island size and spy lines.
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.
In 1940:
Japan: 70 million people
USA: 130 million
India: 320 million
world: 2.3 billion
today:
Japan: 120 million
USA: 330 million
India: 1.4 billion
world: 8.1 billion
Japan has always been densely populated, with deceptively more people than its land area suggests.
But back then, Japan had about half of the US population, and a fifth of India’s. It had, by 1940 standards, tons of people … and with a pretty young and healthy population.
Today Japan has about a third of the US population, and less than a tenth of India’s. Japan’s population is a lot more elderly today too.
Japan had about 70 million citizens in Japan.
In addition, they controlled a large part of what is present day China (Taiwan + Japanese manchuria or Manchuoko or a bunch of other terms for it) and Korea, give or take that’s 70-80 million imperial subjects close at hand. Within a couple of years of the start of the war they occupied a couple of hundred million chinese people.
Back then, countries (including Japan) also tended to have population pyramids rather than more modern poles or whatever shape you want to describe, so they had much wider available pools of young men to conscript as a fraction of the population.
Also, the Japanese, partially due to imperialism and partially due to their plan to attack China and eventually the British, French and Americans had a huge fraction of their economy devoted to the military. A large part of that was to keep machuria/manchuoko in line and the soviets out, but then also enough people to attack China and then everyone else.
Rice produces a lot more food per acre than wheat or corn, even though it takes a lot of work. So Japan (which isn’t tiny, but is very mountainous) could feed a population not much smaller than Germany’s on less farmland.
Other countries in that part of the world also have surprisingly large populations.
japan has 125 million people? 11th in the world?
Land size does not matter as much as size of the population.
Russia, the biggest country in the world by land area, has less people than Bangladesh. But Bangladesh has more people than Russia- it has as many people as the entire eastern seaboard of the US, but only the size of Illinois.
Barring industrial output and technological advances which do you think would win? And WWII Japan had superior industry & technology.
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