Municipalities of Japan

Types of Municipalities

Status

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, Hokkaidō, has a population of merely four thousand, while a town in the same prefecture, Otofuke, Hokkaidō, 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 municipal status, but metropolitan (都, to), equivalent to prefectural level status. The Tokyo Metropolis now encompasses the 23 special wards, as well as 26 cities, 6 towns and 8 villages on the Tama Area and Insular Area. Each of the 23 special wards of Tokyo, which even though they are wards (区, ku), and not cities (市, shi), have near municipal level status. Sometimes the 23 special wards area (東京都区部, Tōkyō-to kubu) as a whole is regarded as one city (都内, Tonai). For information on the former city of Tokyo, see Tokyo City; for information about present-day Tokyo Metropolis, see Tokyo.

Examples

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 Kyūshū region
• Hiroshima, the busy manufacturing city in the Chūgoku region of Honshū
• Kobe, a major port on the Inland Sea, located in the center of Honshū near Osaka
• Kitakyūshū, a city of just under one million inhabitants in Kyūshū
• Kyoto, former capital, historic center and thriving modern city
• Nagoya, center of a major automobile-manufacturing region on the eastern seaboard of Honshū
• Osaka, a vast manufacturing city on the Inland Sea coast of Honshū
• Sapporo, the largest city in Hokkaidō
• Sendai, the principal center of northeast Honshū (also known as the Tōhoku region)
• Yokohama, a port city just south of Tokyo

Non-municipality

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.

References

References

1. "総務省｜市町村合併資料集｜市町村数の変遷と明治・昭和の大合併の特徴".
2. [https://www.reiki.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/reiki_menu.html 東京都例規集]第1編第7章 区市町村行政
3. 政治山. (2016-07-26). "区市町村と市区町村、呼び方の違いは都政の習熟度か".
4. (2021-05-02). "「市区町村」と「区市町村」　用語の違いが生まれた背景". NEWSポストセブン.