A Touch of Kanji

Theme — This puzzle challenges you to learn the 47 prefectures of Japan.  The Clue Window for each piece flies the prefecture flag, displays its name in Kanji and in English along with a direct translation of the Kanji characters.  The color of each piece (and its Clue Window border) corresponds to the traditional region to which the prefecture belongs.

The population and capital of each prefecture is also provided in the Clue Window.  Clicking or tapping on the prefecture flag will open another browser tab with additional information about that prefecture and its history.  These pages are from www.japanvisitor.com and include many photos and links to related topics.

Point clues are becoming an important PuzzleMap feature and they are especially helpful with this puzzle.  Japan is a country of many rugged islands and its coastline is quite convoluted and the individual prefectures are quite irregular as well.  Finding where they belong by shape alone is hard!  Point clues show you where an intriguing place is located on the puzzle map, but still require you to discover how the piece must be rotated into position.  Once solved, the point clues provide a brief description of their location and a link to learn more about it.

Puzzle Notes — The original spatial data from which this puzzle was created included over half a million vertices.  This has been simplified to about 18% which still provides fairly decent resolution at smaller scales.  All of Japan's thousands of smaller islands have also been retained since they can be important locations.  The prefecture of Okinawa, for example, is composed of many small islands and is not a part of the Japanese mainland.  "Beautiful Japan" therefore loads somewhat slower than most PuzzleMaps, but piece manipulation is not affected.