Marshall Islands Marshall Islands The Marshall Islands, officially the Republic of the Marshall Islands (), are an island country and a United States associated state near the equator in the Pacific Ocean, slightly west of the International Date Line. Geographically, the country is part of the larger island group of Micronesia. The country's population of 53,158 people (at the 2011 Census) is spread out over 29 coral atolls, comprising 1,156 individual islands and islets. The islands share maritime boundaries with the Federated States of Micronesia to the west, Wake Island to the north, Kiribati to the southeast, and Nauru to the south.
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