Japanese geography has quite a lot of influence on the history of Japan and Japanese culture. Firstly, the mountainous regions of Japan makes communication across the archipelago very difficult, which shaped the clans system in ancient Japan so that society could still function even without a central authority. This is also seen through the Polynesian islands in which the cultures are very segregated and the original tribe had some members return to being hunter-gatherers while some developed irrigation and an organizational system.

Furthermore, Japan is scarce in natural resources like oil and iron, this leads them to have to colonize or invade other regions of the world in order to expand, and that is what we do see in history. In the Sengoku Period, Toyotomi Hideyoshi attempted to invade Korea, the Japanese also colonized a lot of islands that are near them. The opposite appears in China, China is very abundant in resources and is mostly united. This leads to them not being very keen on expanding.

The geography of the region had a major impact on the climate of the region, which influenced some decisive moments in Japanese history. In both invasions of Japan from the Yuan, large storms sank the invading ships. Although it is still very lucky for Japan, below the chances there are still patterns, the geography of the region leads to a lot of storms, even today storms strike Japan at an almost biweekly occasion, which plays a part in making the storms more likely. A similar situation can be found in Russia, which had the climate, in the latter's case the blizzards, help defend against invasions, twice, in Russia's case, the invasions are by France and Germany respectively.

Geography affects other civilizations and cultures majorly as well, for example, in Northern Europe, people with relatively advanced technology had moved there but the climate is unavailable for agriculture. This led to the development of a culture based on fishing and raiding, which was also influenced by the harsh environment they lived in. In the Americas, especially in modern day Peru, where it is very mountainous, the Inca empire arose, different from the Japanese, the Inca managed to traverse the mountains instead of being impeded. There were innovations related to surmounting such an obstacle, especially the Qhapac Nan, an Incan road network that spread throughout their empire through mountians.