A couple years ago, after moving to Ikijima, I introduced you all to the idea of ritō, or “remote island”.

Being a “stratovolcanic archipelago” Japan has a lot more islands than you can likely name. In fact, there are 6,852 at the last official count.

A few days ago, the Japan Times reported that the official count of Japanese islands will increase significantly:

The number of listed Japanese islands is expected to more than double from 6,852 to 14,125 after the government recounted them for the first time in 35 years, according to a source familiar with the matter. The huge increase resulting from improved accuracy with the digitalization of maps is unlikely to change the size of Japanese territory or territorial waters, the source told Kyodo News on Monday.

This brings Japan up in the ranking of archipelagic nations:

1. Indonesia at 17,508 islands
2. Japan now at 14,125 islands
3. Philippines (the former Number 2) at 7,641 islands
4. The UK at 6,346 islands (not counting overseas dependencies)

Indonesia is legendary for its number of islands. I’ve heard that “nobody really knows” how many islands Indonesia has. To my knowledge the mapping technique that Japan just used has not been applied to any of the other countries listed above, so I am not too confident Japan will retain its ranking.

Even more surprising to me, when I looked up the island counts of countries even the massive Indonesia was outranked by a few non-archipelagic countries! Here is the top 10: