Japanese prefectures and cities

We just moved from the US to Okinawa. I was curious how they divide up their areas. For example; we moved from Groton (city), New London (county), Connecticut (state), USA (country).

5 comments
  1. There are multiple levels, where I’m living now it’s neighborhood region-block-house, city, prefecture. Where I was living before there was a further division of village/administrative district because smaller villages had been rolled into one big district and put under the governance of the larger city. The cities were in effect equivalent to what you’d think of as counties.

  2. In modern times, it’s usually municipality (-shi, -cho, or -mura), prefecture (-to, -do, -fu, -ken), country (Japan). There are still cases where villages (-mura) and towns (-cho) are superseded by a county-like structure (-gun) under a prefecture. However, these have been drying up in rounds of municipal mergers in recent decades.

    Municipalities are made up of dozens of neighborhoods that don’t have a lot of power, but things like school boundaries are still drawn by those lines, at least where I live.

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