The nation is divided into 47 prefectures (within these, one metropolis, one regional prefecture, and two urban 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 shikuchōson (市区町村), where each kanji in the word represents one of the four types of municipalities. In Tokyo, because the wards are at the center, the system is officially referred to as kushichōson (区市町村), with the wards first, and cities second.[2][3][4]
Some designated cities also have further administrative subdivisions, also known as wards, but, unlike the special wards of Tokyo, these wards are not municipalities.
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.
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.
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