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The is a geographical area of Honshu, the largest island of Japan.〔Nussbaum, Louis-Frédéric. (2005). "''Kantō''" in 〕 The region includes the Greater Tokyo Area and encompasses seven prefectures: Gunma, Tochigi, Ibaraki, Saitama, Tokyo, Chiba, and Kanagawa. Within its boundaries, slightly more than 45 percent of the land area is the Kantō Plain. The rest consists of the hills and mountains that form the land borders. In official census count on October 1, 2010 by the Japan Statistics Bureau, the population was 42,607,376 amounting to approximately one third of the total population of Japan. == History == The heartland of feudal power during the Kamakura period and again in the Edo period, Kantō became the center of modern development. Within the Greater Tokyo Area and especially the Tokyo-Yokohama metropolitan area, Kantō houses not only Japan's seat of government but also the nation's largest group of universities and cultural institutions, the greatest population, and a large industrial zone. Although most of the Kantō plain is used for residential, commercial, or industrial construction, it is still farmed. Rice is the principal crop, although the zone around Tokyo and Yokohama has been landscaped to grow garden produce for the metropolitan market. A watershed moment of Japan's modern history took place in the late Taisho period: the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923. The quake, which claimed more than 100,000 lives and ravaged the Tokyo and Yokohama areas, occurred at a time when Japan was still reeling from the economic recession in reaction to the high-flying years during World War I. Operation Coronet, the proposed Allied invasion of Japan during World War II, was scheduled to land at the Kantō plain. Most of the United States military bases on the island of Honshū are situated on the Kantō plain. These include Naval Air Facility Atsugi, Yokota Air Base, Yokosuka Naval Base, and Camp Zama. The name Kantō literally means "East of the Barrier". The name ''Kantō'' is nowadays generally considered to mean the region east (東) of the Hakone checkpoint (関所). An antonym of Kantō, "West of the Barrier" means Kansai region, which lies western Honshu and was the center of feudal Japan. After the Great Kantō earthquake many people in Kantō started creating art with different varieties of colors. They made art of earthquake and small towns to symbolize the small towns destroyed in the quake. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Kantō region」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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