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Believe it or not, this isn’t a map of Japan (though it sort of is)

Casey Baseel Apr 12, 2018
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Twitter user makes mind-blowing discovery playing around with puzzle pieces of Japan’s 47 prefectures.

Japan is primarily made up of four islands. The largest, Honshu, is where most of the country’s largest cities, like Tokyo, Yokohama, and Kyoto, are located. Head up north, and you’ll come to Hokkaido, while out west you’ll find Shikoku, the smallest of the four main islands, as well as Kyushu, off the southwest tip of Honshu.

So when you first see this photo shared by Japanese Twitter user @40mP, which is of pieces of a puzzle recreating the map of Japan, you might think it’s the easiest puzzle ever, since each island is only one piece.

とんでもないことに気がついてしまった... pic.twitter.com/UwGWSz9TH4

— 40mP (@40mP) April 10, 2018

But look a little more carefully, and you you’ll notice that the coastlines are a little unusual in @40mP’s photo. That’s because the puzzle pieces don’t actually represent Honshu, Hokkaido, Shikoku, and Kyushu, but a mere four prefectures out of the 46 that the four islands actually contain.

Serving as Honshu is a rotated Niigata Prefecture, while Gunma Prefecture subs for Hokkaido.

▼ Niigata (left) and Gunma (right), marked in red

And filling in for Shikoku and Kyushu are Kanagawa and Oita Prefectures.

▼ Kanagawa (left) and Oita (right)

▼ A side-by-side comparison of the actual map of Japan and @40mP’s four-prefecture version.

ちなみに本物と比べてみた。 pic.twitter.com/b8tpiRHc7F

— LEXUS-UX-hiro-250h (@LEXUS_UX_hiro) April 12, 2018

@40mP’s clever repurposing of the puzzle pieces blew the minds of Japanese Twitter users, who rapidly retweeted it tens of thousands of times. A common question, though, is why he didn’t include Okinawa, which is far enough away from Japan’s main islands that it usually appears as an inset on maps of the nation (it’s in the lower right corner of the map in the tweet directly above). So to appease those critics, @40mP revised his puzzle map, this time using Tokyo as a substitute.

沖縄の皆さんごめんなさい。忘れてたわけではないんですがどう表現するか悩んでました。
ちょうどいいのが見つかりました。 pic.twitter.com/W6KpfEbpIp

— 40mP (@40mP) April 11, 2018

▼ Tokyo

Of course, geography buffs will no doubt point out that Hokkaido and Okinawa are single prefectures themselves, and so @40mP could have just used their pieces as-is. That would have thrown off the scale relative to his single-prefecture substitutes for Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu, though, and besides, once you start thinking outside the box, it can be hard to get your brain to go back in.

Source: Twitter/@40mP via Jin
Featured image: Twitter/@40mP
Insert images: Frameillust (edited by SoraNews24), Wikipedia/Lincun (1, 2, 3, 4), Wikipedia/TUBS

Follow Casey on Twitter, where he used to spend way too long in his friend’s bathroom since it had a map of Japan hanging on the wall.