The Distribution and Number of the Speakers of Japanese
Japanese is spoken by approximately 126 million people within Japan. This includes some 800 thousand people whose mother tongues are languages other than Japanese, such as Korean and Chinese. Externally, Japanese is spoken by Japanese descendants in Hawaii, North and South Americas, as well as the people in Taiwan, Korea and Micronesia, who were educated in Japanese during the Japanese occupancy in the former half of the 20th century.