Abstract
The coastline of Japan is about 32,000 km long including the coasts fringing the smaller islands. The coastlines of the 4 major islands total about 18,000 km, 1/6 of which is sandy and/or deltaic, the rest being cliffy, with or without narrow beaches or pocket beaches. Most of the coastal lowlands are now so intensively used that a large proportion of the Japanese coast has been artificially modified. By 1979, only 49% of the coastline of the major islands remained natural (Table 1) (Environmental Agency of Japan 1982).
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© 1988 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Koike, K. (1988). Japan. In: Walker, H.J. (eds) Artificial Structures and Shorelines. The GeoJournal Library, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2999-9_37
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2999-9_37
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