Japan vs UK size comparison

Every way to compare Japan and UK

Size depends on what you count. Total area includes lakes, rivers and coastal water; land area leaves them out. Every row below uses the same published sources.

How much bigger is Japan than the UK?

Japan covers 145,914 sq mi (377,915 sq km). The UK covers 94,058 sq mi (243,610 sq km). That makes Japan 1.55 times the size of the UK, or 55 percent larger. Put the other way, the UK is 64 percent of the size of Japan.

The difference is 134,305 sq km (51,855 sq mi), about the size of Louisiana (135,659 sq km). For a US reference point, the UK is closest in total area to Michigan, at 250,487 sq km.

Population: Japan vs UK

Japan has more people: 123,201,945 against 68,751,311 for the UK, 79 percent more. Per square kilometer of total area, Japan has 326.0 people and the UK 282.2.

Why the two look different on most world maps

Web maps and many classroom maps use the Mercator projection, which keeps shapes and directions true but enlarges areas away from the equator. The enlargement grows with latitude: an area at latitude φ is drawn about 1 / cos²(φ) times its size compared with the same area at the equator.

Japan is centered near 38° N, where Mercator inflates areas about 1.6 times. The UK is centered near 54° N, where the factor is about 2.9. So on a Mercator map Japan looks roughly 0.9 times the size of the UK, against 1.55 in reality. This uses each shape's center, so treat it as a rough guide.

The outlines at the top of this page use a Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection centered on each shape, so their drawn areas compare the same way as the published figures. To drag any country across a map yourself, use the country size comparison tool.

More about Japan and UK

Japan's total includes outlying islands such as the Ryukyu and Bonin Islands. It is slightly smaller than California.

Japan has about 1.8 times as many people as the UK.

Sources and definitions

Japan: 377,915 sq km total, 364,485 sq km land, from the CIA World Factbook.

UK: 243,610 sq km total, 241,930 sq km land, from the CIA World Factbook. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, including Shetland and Rockall.

The CIA stopped publishing the World Factbook in February 2026. Figures here come from its final edition, read from a public mirror of the data, and will not change unless another official source replaces them. Outlines come from Natural Earth (via world-atlas) and Census cartographic boundary files, and are simplified for drawing; the numbers never come from the outlines.