Quote Originally Posted by Maciamo View Post
These parks may be packed, but it would be because the Japanese go to the same places justly because there are so few big national parks.
Is it really so?
I learnt from the internet source that the number of national parks in Japan is 28, total 2,051,179ha.
It is 5.43% of the total land (37,768,366ha). But I don't know about other countries. I'm very much interested, and searched further on the net and found interesting data.

http://earthtrends.wri.org
Biodiversity and Protected Areas > Data Tables


Note:
(1)-(3) Number of area (Total size in 1,000ha)
(4)(5) Number
*It seems that National Parks in Japan are not categorized as (1) by UNEP-WCMC.
I think that there are various way to measure the status of nature in each country and the above data is not everything.
There are many different ways to appreciate nature.
But at least the above data is some indication, and Japan is not so bad.
There are 7 national parks which are over 100,000ha - it is less than UK or Germany but not so astonishingly few either.



Note:
Number of Total Know Species, 2004 (Number of threatened species, 2003)

*It's sad to see that the number of threatened species increaseced rapidly, especially birds in Japan.
Biodiversity and Protected Areas > Country Profile shows more details, though the data is older than the above.

Biodiversity in Japan is far better than I expected from a post in this forum in the past which states as if there were far less botanical diversity in Japan than other European countries.