Marshall Islands to Wake Island. While Wake has been administered by the United States since 1899, the Marshallese government refers to it by the name "Enen-kio". The climate has a dry season from December to April and a wet season from May to November. Many Pacific typhoons begin as tropical storms in the Marshall Islands region, and grow stronger as they move west toward the Mariana Islands and the Philippines. Due to its very low elevation, the Marshall Islands are threatened by the potential effects of sea level rise. According to the president of Nauru, the Marshall Islands are the most endangered
Japanese settlement in the Marshall Islands closer cultural and economic ties with Japan. Japanese firms that were based on the Marshall Islands since the 1960s actively sought joint ventures with local companies from the 1980s onwards, mainly in the fishery sector. Expatriates usually consisted of Okinawan fishermen based at Majuro, where Japanese companies have built smoking and canning facilities to facilitate the processing of tuna catches. The Marshall Islands remained sparsely populated by Japanese settlers, relative to the other mandated Micronesian islands. The first pre-war census of the Marshall Islands counted 490 Japanese among 10,000 Marshallese, and the number of Japanese settlers increased to 680 scattered