• Japanese is a relative of the Altaic language family. Other languages in this group include Mongolian, and Turkish. Evidence for this theory lies in the fact that like Turkish and Korean, Japanese is an agglutinative language. Japanese also has two (phonologically distinctive) tones, similar to Serbian/Croatian and Swedish. This tonal system is often referred to as a pitch accent in linguistics. Additionally, there are a suggestive number of apparently regular correspondences in basic vocabulary, such as ishi "stone" to Turkic daş, yottsu "four" to Turkic dört.
• Japanese is a relative of other Asian languages. This theory maintains that Japanese split from - or had large influences from - other East Asian languages such as Korean (and possibly the Sino-Tibetan languages). Phonological and lexical similarities to Malayo-Polynesian languages have been noted.
• Japanese is related to southern Asian languages. Some researchers have suggested a possible relationship between Japanese and Tamil, a member of the Dravidian language family spoken in southern India.
• Japanese is a kind of creole, with an Altaic grammatical substructure, and core Austronesian vocabulary.
• Japanese is a language isolate, unrelated to any other known language except other Japonic languages (notably Okinawan).

Geographic Distribution:

Although Japanese is spoken almost exclusively in Japan, it has been and is still sometimes spoken in countries besides Japan. When Japan occupied Korea, Taiwan and parts of China, locals in those countries were forced to learn Japanese. As a result, there are still many people in these countries who speak Japanese instead of or as well as the local languages. In addition, emigrants from Japan, the majority of whom are found in the United States (notably California and Hawaii), and Brazil also frequently speak Japanese. There is also a small community in Davao, Philippines. Their descendants (known as nikkei 日系, literally Japanese descendants), however, rarely speak Japanese fluently. There are estimated to be several million non-Japanese studying the language as well.

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Did You Know? statistics come from Infoplease, "All the knowledge you need" and Ethnologue, "Languages of the world, and a whole lot more!"
Overview, Classification and Geographic Distribution information comes directly from Wikipedia, "The free encyclopedia"