In 1874, Ernst Haeckel divided the animal kingdom into the multicellular Metazoa (now synonymous with Animalia) and the Protozoa, single-celled organisms no longer considered animals. The animal kingdom is divided into five major clades, namely Porifera, Ctenophora, Placozoa, Cnidaria and Bilateria. Animals consume organic material, breathe oxygen, have muscle cells, can reproduce sexually, and grow from a hollow sphere of cells, the blastula, during embryonic development.
The country hosted the official 2006 Basketball World Championship and co-hosted the 2023 Basketball World Championship. Super GT is the most popular national racing series in Japan, while Super Formula is the top-level domestic open-wheel series. Green tea is produced in Japan and prepared in forms such as matcha, used in the Japanese tea ceremony.
The culture of Japan is well known around the world, particularly its popular culture as expressed in animation, art, comics, cuisine, fashion, films, music, television, theater, and video games. Widely considered a great power and the only Asian member of the G7, it maintains one of the world’s strongest militaries but has constitutionally renounced its right to declare war. Since the collapse of the Japanese asset price bubble in the early 1990s, it has experienced a prolonged period of economic stagnation referred to as the Lost Decades. It underwent rapid economic growth in the following decades and became one of the first major non-NATO allies of the U.S.

• It is thought to be one of the earliest predators, catching small prey with its nematocysts as modern cnidarians do.
• In sponges, blastula larvae swim to a new location, attach to the seabed, and develop into a new sponge.
• As the host and signatory of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, Japan is under treaty obligation to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions and to take other steps to curb climate change.
• The Japonic-speaking Yayoi people later entered the archipelago from the Korean Peninsula, intermingling with the Jōmon people.
• Species estimates shown here are based on numbers described scientifically; much larger estimates have been calculated based on various means of prediction, and these can vary wildly.
• They also have a gut that extends through the basically cylindrical body from mouth to anus.

Life styles

Animals such as the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster serve a major role in science as experimental models. Working animals including cattle and horses have been used for work and transport from the first days of agriculture. The human population exploits basswin a large number of other animal species for food, both of domesticated livestock species in animal husbandry and, mainly at sea, by hunting wild species. Since then, the last four have all been subsumed into a single phylum, the Chordata, while his Insecta (which included the crustaceans and arachnids) and Vermes have been renamed or broken up.

Numbers and habitats of major phyla

The Japanese archipelago consists of four major islands alongside over 14,000 smaller islands. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asian mainland, it is bordered to the west by the Sea of Japan, the Sea of Okhotsk in the north, and the East China Sea in the south. A fish is adapted to its life in water and a crab is adapted to a life catching and eating insects.
In the classical era, Aristotle divided animals,d based on his own observations, into those with blood (roughly, the vertebrates) and those without. The chordates are dominated by the vertebrates (animals with backbones), which consist of fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Most protostomes have schizocoelous development, where cells simply fill in the interior of the gastrula to form the mesoderm. Most appear to belong to two major lineages, the protostomes and the deuterostomes.

Modern era

Japan ranked seventh in the world in tonnage of fish caught and captured 3,167,610 metric tons of fish in 2016, down from an annual average of 4,000,000 tons over the previous decade. As the central coordinating body for the Prefectural Police Departments, the National Police Agency is administered by the National Public Safety Commission. The deployment of troops to Iraq and Afghanistan marked the first overseas use of Japan’s military since World War II. The country’s military, the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF), is restricted by Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, which renounces Japan’s right to declare war or use military force in international disputes. Japan is widely considered to be a great power due to its economic power and political, cultural, and military influence. The broadly conservative Liberal Democratic Party has been the dominant party in the country since the 1950s, often called the 1955 System.
The country attracted 36.9 million international tourists in 2024, and was ranked eleventh in the world in 2019 for inbound tourism. Other human rights issues include the treatment of marginalized groups, such as ethnic minorities, refugees and asylum seekers. However, it lacks any laws against discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity and does not have a national human rights institution. Japan’s constitution prohibits racial and religious discrimination, and the country is a signatory to numerous international human rights treaties. The military is governed by the Ministry of Defense, and primarily consists of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, and the Japan Air Self-Defense Force. It spent 1.4% of its total GDP on its defense budget and maintained the tenth-largest military budget in the world in 2025.
Japanese animated films and television series, known as anime, were largely influenced by Japanese manga and have become highly popular globally. Japanese comics, known as manga, developed in the mid-20th century and have become popular worldwide. Many Japanese media franchises have gained considerable global popularity and are among the world’s highest-grossing media franchises.

Bluetick Coonhound

The earliest works of Japanese literature include the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki chronicles and the Man’yōshū poetry anthology, all from the 8th century and written in Chinese characters. Japan has the lowest rate of heart disease in the OECD, and the lowest level of dementia among developed countries. Since 1981, the principal cause of death in Japan is cancer, which accounted for 27% of the total deaths in 2018—followed by cardiovascular diseases, which led to 15% of the deaths.

• After being defeated in the Pacific War and suffering the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrendered in 1945 and came under Allied occupation until 1952.
• The chordates are dominated by the vertebrates (animals with backbones), which consist of fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
• Many bilaterian phyla have primary larvae which swim with cilia and have an apical organ containing sensory cells.
• The country has produced twenty-two Nobel laureates in either physics, chemistry or medicine, and three Fields medalists.
• Japan ranks 20th in the 2018 Environmental Performance Index, which measures a country’s commitment to environmental sustainability.
• Throughout the latest century, Western customs originally related to Christianity, including Western style weddings, Valentine’s Day and Christmas, have become popular as secular customs among many Japanese.

It consists of a lower House of Representatives with 465 seats, elected by popular vote every four years or when dissolved, and an upper Senate with 248 seats, whose popularly elected members serve six-year terms. More recent major quakes are the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake and the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, which triggered a large tsunami. From the 12th century, actual power was held by military aristocrats known as shōgun and feudal lords called daimyō, enforced by warrior nobility named samurai.