Chubu (central Honshu)

The mountainous middle, and the region that decided the country twice. Chubu occupies central Honshu between Kanto and Kansai, containing the Japanese Alps, the highest mountains in the country, and a coastline on both the Pacific and the Sea of Japan. That position made it the corridor through which armies moved, and consequently the ground on which the unification wars were settled. Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu both came from the Nagoya area, and the battle of Sekigahara in 1600, which decided who would rule Japan for the next two and a half centuries, was fought at a pass in the region's western hills. Nagoya became a castle town under the Tokugawa and then, in the twentieth century, the industrial capital of the country. Toyota grew there out of a loom manufacturer, and the surrounding prefectures hold the densest concentration of precision manufacturing in Japan. The mountains produced their own economies. Silk reeling dominated Nagano into the twentieth century, hydroelectric dams were built through the valleys, and remote villages such as Shirakawa-go developed a distinctive steep-roofed architecture for the snow. The Sea of Japan side, Hokuriku, gets some of the heaviest snowfall of any inhabited place on earth. It is also the region that gave Japan its most recognisable image: Mount Fuji sits on the Chubu boundary. The Shinkansen from Tokyo to Osaka runs the length of it, and the region's fortunes track that line closely. Nagoya is Japan's fourth city. The Kurobe dam, finished in 1963, is the tallest in the country. Wajima lacquer and Seki blades are still made in the region's old craft towns.

• Existed: 700 CE – present
• Type: Entity