Municipalities of Japan

designated cities

also have further administrative subdivisions, also known as wards. But, unlike the special wards of Tokyo, these wards are not 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,

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

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

:

Kyūshū
region
Honshū
Kobe, a major port on the Inland Sea, located in the center of Honshū near Osaka
Kitakyūshū
, a city of just over 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

^ "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".

External links

Local Government in Japan Council of Local Authorities for International Relations 2010 (Retrieved on February 4, 2013)
"Large City System of Japan"; graphic shows Japanese city types at p. 1 [PDF 7 of 40]

[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".