Japan vs South Korea

Why people mix them up

Japan and South Korea are close neighbours in East Asia, separated by a narrow strait and a sea known in Japan as the Sea of Japan and in Korea as the East Sea. Both are wealthy, technology-driven countries with famous pop culture, both flags are white with a red circle at the centre, and both languages use some Chinese-derived vocabulary. People often compare them and are unsure how to tell the flags and scripts apart.

How to tell them apart

• Japan's flag is a plain red disc on white; South Korea's has a red-and-blue yin-yang circle surrounded by four black trigrams.
• Japan is an island country of four main islands and thousands of smaller ones; South Korea occupies the southern half of the Korean Peninsula.
• Japanese is written with kanji plus two syllabic scripts, hiragana and katakana; Korean is written in Hangul, an alphabet of simple strokes and circles.
• The capitals are Tokyo (Japan) and Seoul (South Korea).
• Japan is the larger country, about 378,000 km², nearly four times South Korea's roughly 100,000 km².
• South Korea's only land border is with North Korea; Japan has no land borders at all.

Memory hook

Japan is the "land of the rising sun", and its flag is just the sun. South Korea's flag adds a blue half and four black bars. If the text has lots of little circles, it is Korean.

On the map

Find the peninsula sticking south from northeast China. The bottom half of that peninsula is South Korea. Japan is the long chain of islands curving to its east, from Hokkaido in the north to Kyushu in the southwest, which lies just across the strait from South Korea's port of Busan. If what you are tapping is attached to the mainland, it is South Korea.