Place profile
Area, population and population density of Hokkaido, with reference dates, geographic scope, official sources and an outline preview.
Compare this placeReference date:
Reference date:
Calculated from the population and area above; their reference dates may differ.
The closest rung on the Taiwan reference ladder; see the sources below.
The inverse of population density, from the same area and population figures.
Hokkaido excluding the Northern Territories. Japan's published prefectural area of 83,422.27 km² includes the four disputed island groups (5,003.05 km²), which have been administered by Russia since 1945; this page subtracts them so that the area, the outline and the population all describe the same ground. Japan's own Statistics Bureau makes the same subtraction before computing Hokkaido's population density, and no census is conducted in the disputed islands. Population is a prefectural estimate published only to the nearest thousand.
Average administrative density does not describe population distribution in every neighborhood. Compare population definitions and reference dates alongside the numbers.
Place guide
The area on this page is 78,419.22 km², which excludes the Northern Territories. Japan’s published prefectural area for Hokkaido is 83,422.27 km² and includes them.
The four disputed island groups account for 5,003.05 km² and have been administered by Russia since 1945. The rendered outline, derived from Natural Earth and OSM, also excludes them, and no census is conducted there.
Japan’s own Statistics Bureau subtracts them before computing Hokkaido’s population density. Excluding them here keeps the area, the outline and the population all describing the same ground.
The population of 5,043,000 as of 2024-10-01 is published only to the nearest thousand, so it should not be quoted as an exact head count. Against the area used here, density works out at roughly 64 people per km².
For scale, Hokkaido is roughly 2.2 times Taiwan’s administrative land area, while Japan’s national total is 377,975.64 km². A single prefecture can therefore be larger than the whole reference readers are used to.
Outline source: Natural Earth · Public domain
Read the methodology and data notes