This is a very simplified political map of Japan showing various prefectures in the northern end of Honshu, the largest of Japan's four main islands. Our area of interest today is the region marked by the bright red pin.
If you zoom into this area, you will notice a very peculiar cartographic oddity. The borders of Fukushima, Niigata and Yamagata doesn’t meet at a tri-point as the zoomed-out map seems to suggest. Instead, you will see a very thin strip of land attached to Fukushima snaking into Niigata. This is called a salient. The Fukushima Prefecture salient —famously called the umbilical cord—extends about 8 km starting from the summit of Mount Mikuni, following the ridge of Mount Kengamine, passing through the summit of Mount Iide, and ending on the summit of Mount Onishi. At its narrowest, it is only about 35 inches across (90 centimetres).
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