Cuba vs Japan

Japan is 3.4 times larger than Cuba — 377,915 against 110,860 km². Japan is 11 times more populous than Cuba — 123,366,734 against 10,937,203 people.

Side by side

Population density

Japan is 3.3 times more densely populated than Cuba — 326 against 99 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 — Cuba on the right, Japan on the left.
• Different currencies: the Cuban peso and the Japanese yen.
• Different continents — North America and Asia.

Cuba

The largest island in the Caribbean, roughly 1,250 km long but as little as 31 km wide. The Viñales valley in the west is a karst landscape of mogotes — steep limestone humps left standing when the rock around them dissolved. The bee hummingbird, the smallest bird in the world at about 5 cm, lives only here.

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.