Japan vs Mexico

Mexico is 5.2 times larger than Japan — 1,964,375 against 377,915 km². Mexico is slightly more populous, by 7.0% — 131,946,900 against 123,366,734 people.

Side by side

Population density

Japan is 4.9 times more densely populated than Mexico — 326 against 67 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 — Japan on the left, Mexico on the right.
• Different currencies: the Japanese yen and the Mexican peso.
• Mexico spans 4 time zones, so "local time" there is not a single answer.
• Different continents — Asia and North America.

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.

Mexico

Mexico has the fourth-highest count of vertebrate and plant species of any country, and more reptile species than anywhere else. Chicxulub, under the northern Yucatán, is the roughly 180 km crater left by the asteroid impact 66 million years ago. The Sistema Sac Actun beneath the same peninsula is the longest known underwater cave system in the world, over 370 km surveyed.

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.