Random Japanese Prefecture

How this random Japanese prefecture generator works

Press Generate and you get a prefecture. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Ask for 47 and you get all of them.

Aichi, Akita, Aomori, Chiba, Ehime, and so on to Yamanashi.

Forty-seven, exactly, and one of them is not what you think it is: Tokyo.

Tokyo is not a city

Tokyo is the largest urban area on Earth and it has not been a city since 1943.

There is no mayor of Tokyo. There is no city hall of Tokyo. There is no municipal corporation called the City of Tokyo, no city council, no city limits. If you look for the local authority that governs the place, you find twenty-three of them.

Those twenty-three are the special wards. In Japanese, tokubetsu-ku. Every one of them calls itself a city in English, because that is functionally what it is.

Above them sits the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, which is a prefectural government. It is the same tier as Aomori or Okinawa. It has a governor, not a mayor.

So when a foreigner says "Tokyo", they mean an urban area with no legal existence. When a Japanese administrator says Tokyo, they mean a prefecture. The city in between was abolished, and nobody put it back.

What happened in 1943

Tokyo City was created on 1 May 1889. By 1932 it had absorbed the surrounding districts, reaching thirty-five wards and nearly five million people, which made it one of the largest cities in the world.

It sat inside Tokyo Prefecture, and there were therefore two governments stacked on the same ground: the prefecture and the city.

On 1 July 1943, in the middle of the war, the central government abolished Tokyo City. The prefecture and the city were fused into a single entity, Tokyo Metropolis. The stated purpose was to remove duplication and concentrate wartime authority in one place.

The city's thirty-five wards survived it. After the war, in 1947, they were reorganised into twenty-three, because so many residents had been killed in the bombing, had fled, or had been conscripted and not returned.

A wartime administrative measure, taken to concentrate power, produced the arrangement that governs thirty-odd million people today. Nobody has reversed it.

Japan has four words for prefecture. English has one.

All forty-seven are translated as "prefecture". In Japanese they are four different words.

• Ken (県). Forty-three of them. The ordinary prefecture. The character carries a rural or provincial sense, and the same character names the counties of China and Taiwan.
• Fu (府). Two: Osaka and Kyoto. The character implies a core urban zone of national importance.
• Dō (道). One: Hokkaidō. The word means circuit, and originally described a region containing several provinces. It is already inside the name, which is why "Hokkaido Prefecture" is a small redundancy.
• To (都). One: Tokyo. Usually rendered as metropolis. The Japanese government translates Tōkyō-to as Tokyo Metropolis in almost every official context.

Collectively they are the todōfuken (都道府県), which is just the four words in a row.

The names are fossils

Here is the part that matters, and it is the reason this is not merely trivia.

Under the Local Autonomy Act of 1947, all forty-seven are defined as the same kind of body, with the same rank, the same authority, and the same role. Each has a directly elected governor and a directly elected assembly.

The four words are almost entirely historical. In 1868 the new Meiji government designated ten former shogunate territories as fu, including Edo, Osaka, Kyoto, Nagasaki, Nara and Hakodate. The others were reduced to ken over the following years.

Before the war, different laws applied to fu and ken. That distinction was abolished afterwards.

The only functional difference left is that Tokyo administers wards as well as cities, and the special wards now have nearly the independence of ordinary cities anyway. Osaka is called fu because it was called fu in 1868.

Four words, one thing. English calls them all prefectures and is, on the law as it stands, entirely right.

The macron is not decoration

Written carefully, six of the names carry a bar over a vowel. Hokkaidō. Hyōgo. Kōchi. Ōita. Tōkyō. Kyōto.

That bar is a macron, and it marks a long vowel. In Japanese, vowel length is not an accent or an emphasis. It is part of the word, the way a consonant is part of a word.

Ojisan is an uncle. Ojiisan is a grandfather. Same letters, different length, different relative.

So Tōkyō has four beats and Tokyo has three, and the three-beat version is not a shortening. It is a different arrangement of sound that happens to be spelled the same way in Latin letters.

English writing drops the macrons almost universally, and the world has agreed to live with it. Which is fine for a signpost and not fine for a database, because the two spellings are two different strings, and a computer sorting Japanese place names will happily file them as two different places.

Every romanisation is a translation. The macron is the part of the translation that most people throw away first.

Ways people actually use this

• Travel planning. Forty-seven, and most itineraries touch three. Generate ten and you will not recognise seven.
• Quizzes. Show the prefecture, ask for the capital. A good number share a name with their capital, which makes the ones that do not the interesting half.
• Address forms and test data. This is the complete and correct set of forty-seven.
• Teaching. Ask a class what Tokyo is. Almost nobody gets it right.
• Writing. The prefecture is the unit of Japanese regional identity, the way a county is in England.

Getting more out of the filters

• Entries are bare names with no country attached, so Contains is a pure substring search. Type yama, which means mountain.
• Type shima, which means island. Japanese place names are assembled from a small set of pieces, and the filter lets you take them apart.
• Try saki for a cape, kawa for a river, ta for a paddy field. The map is a description.
• Starts with and Ends with compare one character. Ends with a catches about half of them.

Questions people ask

How many prefectures does Japan have?

Forty-seven. One to (Tokyo), one dō (Hokkaidō), two fu (Osaka and Kyoto), and forty-three ken. Under the Local Autonomy Act of 1947 all of them have the same status.

Is Tokyo a city?

No. Tokyo City existed from 1889 until 1 July 1943, when it was abolished and merged with Tokyo Prefecture to form Tokyo Metropolis. The area of the old city is now covered by twenty-three special wards.

What are the special wards?

The twenty-three municipalities that occupy the former area of Tokyo City. They have directly elected mayors and assemblies, and they all render their names as "city" in English.

Is there any real difference between a to, a dō, a fu and a ken?

Essentially no. The names are historical. The only functional difference is that Tokyo administers special wards in addition to cities.

Why is it wrong to say "Hokkaido Prefecture"?

Because the dō at the end of Hokkaidō already carries the sense of the administrative division. It is not a serious error, and it is very widely written, but it does repeat itself.

References

1. A prefecture by any other name, Nippon.com
2. Prefectures of Japan
3. Tokyo City