Which country's islands include Hokkaido and Kyushu?

Japan, which has four main islands and, by a 2023 recount using digital mapping, around 14,000 in total - more than double the previously official figure of about 6,800, because the old count had been done by hand in 1987 with a coarser definition.

Hokkaido is the one that complicates the national story. It was not fully incorporated until the Meiji period, and it is the homeland of the Ainu - a people with a distinct language, religion and appearance who were subjected to assimilation policies that banned their language and practices. Japan officially recognised them as an indigenous people only in 2008, and the Ainu language has a handful of fluent speakers left.

The country is also the most seismically punished large economy on Earth, sitting where four plates meet, and its building standards reflect it - the 2011 earthquake was magnitude 9.0 and most modern buildings survived it. What killed nearly 20,000 people was the tsunami, which overtopped sea walls built for a smaller worst case, and the Fukushima meltdown that followed - an accident caused not by the shaking but by backup generators sited where a wave could reach them.