Brazil vs Japan

Brazil is 23 times larger than Japan — 8,515,770 against 377,915 km². Brazil is 1.7 times more populous than Japan — 212,812,405 against 123,366,734 people.

Side by side

Population density

Japan is 13 times more densely populated than Brazil — 326 against 25 people per km². Density is where area and population interact, and it often reverses the impression the headline figures give — a large country with a small population can feel emptier than a small crowded one by an enormous margin.

Practical differences

• They drive on opposite sides — Brazil on the right, Japan on the left.
• Different currencies: the Brazilian real and the Japanese yen.
• Brazil spans 4 time zones, so "local time" there is not a single answer.
• Different continents — South America and Asia.

Brazil

The fifth-largest country in the world and the largest in the southern hemisphere. It holds about sixty percent of the Amazon rainforest, and the Amazon River discharges roughly a fifth of all the fresh water that reaches the world's oceans — more than the next seven rivers combined. Brazil borders every South American country except Chile and Ecuador.

Japan

A 2023 government survey using digital mapping counted 14,125 islands, more than double the long-quoted figure of 6,852. About three-quarters of the land is mountain, so nearly everyone lives on a narrow band of coastal plain. Japan sits where four tectonic plates meet and records a fifth of the world's magnitude-6-and-above earthquakes.

Neutral facts only. Nothing here addresses politics, government, economics or which country is preferable in any respect — population is the one figure that dates, and it carries its year.