Administrative divisions of Japan
Map of all Municipalities of Japan including disputed territories
Japan
has three levels of governments:
national
,
prefectural
, and
municipal
. The nation is divided into 47 prefectures. Each prefecture consists of numerous municipalities, with 1,719 in total as of January 2014.
[1]
There are four types of municipalities in Japan:
cities
,
towns
,
villages
and
special wards of Tokyo
(
ku
). In
Japanese
, this system is known as
shikuch?son
(
市?町村
)
, where each
kanji
in the word represents one of the four types of municipalities. Some
designated cities
also have further administrative subdivisions, also known as wards. But, unlike the special wards of Tokyo, these wards are not municipalities.
Status
[
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]
The status of a municipality, if it is a village, town or city, is decided by the prefectural government. Generally, a village or town can be promoted to a city when its population increases above fifty thousand, and a city can (but need not) be demoted to a town or village when its population decreases below fifty thousand. The least-populated city,
Utashinai, Hokkaid?
, has a population of merely four thousand, while a town in the same prefecture,
Otofuke, Hokkaid?
, has nearly forty thousand residents, and the country's largest village
Yomitan, Okinawa
has a population of 40,517.
The capital city, Tokyo, no longer has city status. Tokyo Prefecture now encompasses 23 special wards, each a city unto itself, as well as many other cities, towns and even villages on the Japanese mainland and outlying islands. Each of the
23 special wards
of
Tokyo
is legally equivalent to a city, though sometimes the 23 special wards as a whole are regarded as one city. For information on the former city of Tokyo, see
Tokyo City
; for information about present-day Tokyo Prefecture, see
Tokyo
.
Examples
[
edit
]
See
List of cities in Japan
for a complete list of cities.
See also
:
Core cities of Japan
The following are examples of the 20
designated cities
:
- Fukuoka
, the most populous city in the
Ky?sh?
region
- Hiroshima
, the busy manufacturing city in the
Ch?goku region
of
Honsh?
- Kobe
, a major port on the
Inland Sea
, located in the center of Honsh? near Osaka
- Kitaky?sh?
, a city of just over one million inhabitants in Ky?sh?
- Kyoto
, former capital, historic center and thriving modern city
- Nagoya
, center of a major automobile-manufacturing region on the eastern seaboard of Honsh?
- Osaka
, a vast manufacturing city on the Inland Sea coast of Honsh?
- Sapporo
, the largest city in Hokkaid?
- Sendai
, the principal center of northeast Honsh? (also known as the
T?hoku region
)
- Yokohama
, a port city just south of Tokyo
Non-municipality
[
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]
The same kanji which designates a town (町) is also sometimes used for addresses of sections of an urban area. In rare cases, a municipal village might even contain a section with the same type of designation. Although the kanji is the same, neither of these individual sections are municipalities unto themselves. Sometimes, the section name is a remnant from
gappei
, a system where several adjacent communities merge to form a larger municipality, where the old town names are kept for a section of the new city, even though the resulting new city may have a completely different name.
- Subprefectures
are branch offices of the prefectures and not municipalities by themselves.
- Districts
are not current municipalities but names of groups of towns and villages.
- Provinces
are not current municipalities but (almost obsolete) names of geographical regions similar to prefectures.
See also
[
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]
References
[
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]
External links
[
edit
]