I’ve been telling my Japanese friends that the entire Tohoku area, the northeastern part of Honshu which includes Fukushima prefecture (but not Niigata), could fit into Lake Michigan. To prove that to myself I took two screen-shots of Google Map, both to scale. You can see the Great Lake if overlapped on top of Tohoku would extend well into the Kanto area.

Later after looking up the areas from Wikipedia, I learned that the land area of Tohoku is 66,890 sq. kilometers or about 13% larger than Lake Michigan’s surface area of 58,000 sq. kilometers. Not quite a fit after all. But Tohoku could fit easily in Lake Superior which has a surface area of 82,100 sq. kilometers.

Only the southern shore of Lake Michigan was my old stompin’ grounds, the area from Evanston, the northern suburb of Chicago to the sand dunes of the state of Michigan. I had never even been to the state of Wisconsin in my childhood, and only once when 27 years old driving to Canada. In contrast there is hardly any place in Northern Japan I haven’t been. That includes the northern island of Hokkaido.

Lake Michigan, the second largest Great Lake, is 86 times larger than the largest lake in Japan, Lake Biwa near Kyoto. It’s the only Great Lake entirely in U.S. borders and the largest large in the world that doesn’t share a border with another country.

The red marker points to Lake Geneva Canopy Tours of which my friend, Mike Goril, is the general manager.

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