2007 G8 Summit Magazine - (Page 91) Japan J Facts: with a bicameral legislature, the upper house having 242 members and the lower house 480. Half the seats in the upper house are contested every three years, while elections for the whole of the lower house are held every four years. Parliament elects the Prime Minister, who must be a member of the lower house, and he or she is confirmed in office by the Emperor. The Prime Minister appoints the Cabinet. The Emperor (Tenn_) is not the Japanese Head of State. His functions are only ceremonial. The supreme sovereign is the people, represented by Parliament. Shinzo Abe has been Prime Minister since 2006. The present Tenn_ is His Imperial Majesty Emperor Akihito. Japan is administratively divided into 47 prefectures, comparable to the German Länder but enjoying less autonomy. The prefectures receive directions from central government, on which they are financially dependent. . Gross Domestic Product (GDP): 4,670.7 bn USD . GDP per capita: 36,600 USD . Growth in GDP in 2005 was 2.7%, 0.1% higher than in 2004. . Unemployment is 4.4%, youth unemployment 9% . Budget deficit as percentage of GDP in 2005: 6.5% . Public debt as percentage of GDP in 2004: 157.6 % . Inflation rate in 2005: 0.1% apan is a centralised island state consisting of four main islands, Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu, together with some 6,852 smaller islands. The official language is Japanese. Japan is 377,887 sq. km in area and has around 127 million inhabitants. The Japanese often follow more than one religion, among them Shinto (107 million), Buddhism (91 million), Christianity (1.4 million) and others (11.3 million).The capital of Japan is Tokyo. Japan is a member of most international organisations, including the UN (since 1956) and the OECD (since 1964). G8 Japan took part in the first meeting on the G6 at the Château de Rambouillet in 1975, together with Germany, France, Italy, Great Britain and the USA. Since then, the summit has been held four times under the Japanese presidency: in 1979, 1986 and 1993 in Tokyo, and in 2000 in Okinawa. The next summit in Japan will be in 2008. Economy Japan has a free-market economy. It is the third biggest exporter in the world, after the USA and Germany. Political system Japan is a parliamentary democracy | -91-
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.