Japanese cities, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 8 learning regions, matching the rounds on the Japan guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 17 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Tokyo

Tokyo is not a city in the legal sense: it is a metropolis of twenty-three special wards, each of which runs itself, and the thing people mean by Tokyo has had no mayor since 1943. It burned down in 1657, in 1923 after the earthquake, and again in the firebombing of March 1945, and it is on the map three times over as a result.

Yokohama

Yokohama was a village of a few hundred people when it was opened to foreign trade in 1859, and it is now the largest city in Japan after Tokyo with about 3.8 million people. It is where the country first got a railway, a daily newspaper and gas street lighting, and it has the largest Chinatown in Japan.

Osaka

Osaka was cut through with canals and called the city of water, and most of them are now roads. Its castle, built by Hideyoshi in the 1580s, was the largest in Japan and was besieged and destroyed in 1615; what stands there now is a concrete reconstruction of 1931 with a lift in it.

Nagoya

Nagoya is the fourth largest city and the center of Japanese manufacturing: Toyota, and most of what supplies it, is within an hour of it. It was flattened in 1945 and rebuilt on hundred-meter-wide boulevards, which is why it has more room and less charm than the cities either side of it.

Sapporo

Sapporo was laid out on a grid in 1869 by planners who had American advisers, so it has numbered blocks rather than the Japanese address system and looks like nowhere else in the country. It hosted the Winter Olympics in 1972 and gets about five meters of snow a year, more than any other city of its size in the world.

Fukuoka

Fukuoka is the fastest growing large city in Japan and the closest to the Asian mainland, about 200 kilometers from Busan. It is two towns that merged in 1889, the samurai one and the merchant one either side of a river, and it is where Japan says it first tasted ramen from a street stall.

Kobe

Kobe is squeezed onto a strip about three kilometers wide between the mountains and the sea, so it built islands to grow onto. The earthquake of 17 January 1995 killed more than 6,400 people and knocked over an elevated expressway that had been designed not to fall, which changed how Japan builds.

Kyoto

Kyoto was laid out in 794 on a Chinese grid copied from Chang’an, and the streets in the middle of it still run on it: the numbered avenues are the original ones. It has about 1,600 Buddhist temples and 400 Shinto shrines, and a rule that keeps almost everything in the basin below about 30 meters tall.

Hiroshima

The bomb went off about 600 meters above the middle of the city at 8:15 on the morning of 6 August 1945. One domed building almost directly underneath stayed standing and was kept as it was; the park around it is on the delta between two arms of the Ota. The city is now larger than it was in 1945.

Sendai

Sendai was founded in 1600 by Date Masamune, a warlord who lost an eye to smallpox and wore a crescent moon on his helmet, and it is still laid out to his plan. It is called the city of trees for the zelkovas along its avenues. The 2011 tsunami came ashore across its airport and the flat farmland behind the coast.

Niigata

Niigata is at the mouth of the Shinano, the longest river in Japan, on a plain so flat and so waterlogged that farmers worked the paddies from boats until it was drained in the twentieth century. It was one of the five ports opened to foreign trade in 1858 and the only one on this coast.

Kanazawa

Kanazawa was the seat of the Maeda, the richest lords in Japan after the shogun, who spent their money on craft rather than on armies in order to look harmless. It was never bombed, so the samurai and geisha districts are still standing, and it still makes almost all of Japan’s gold leaf.

Nagasaki

Nagasaki is built up the sides of a narrow harbor, and the hills are the reason the second atomic bomb, which was more powerful than the first, killed fewer people: the blast on 9 August 1945 was largely confined to one valley. The Dutch trading post of Dejima sat in this harbor for over two centuries.

Kitakyushu

Kitakyushu is five towns that merged in 1963, built around the first modern steelworks in Japan, opened in 1901. Its air and water were so bad by the 1960s that the bay was called the sea of death; the cleanup that followed is the one Japanese cities point at. The strait beside it is 700 meters across.

Matsuyama

Matsuyama is the biggest city on Shikoku and has one of the twelve castles in Japan whose keep is the original wooden one. Dogo Onsen, in the same town, is claimed as the oldest hot spring in the country and appears in a chronicle of the eighth century.

Hakodate

Hakodate was one of the first two Japanese ports opened to foreigners, in 1854, which is why it has Russian churches and Western wooden houses on its hillside. The tunnel under the strait beside it runs 53.85 kilometers, 23 of them under the seabed, and carried the first train in 1988.

Naha

Naha is the capital of Okinawa and was the port of the Ryukyu Kingdom, whose castle above it, Shuri, was destroyed in 1945, rebuilt in 1992 and burned down again in 2019. Its people live longer than almost anyone else, which is a fact that has launched a large number of diet books.

How this one works

The other maps of Japan

Sweden has the same map in Swedish cities. Denmark has the same map in Danish cities. India has the same map in Indian cities. Mexico has the same map in Mexican cities. United States has the same map in American cities. China has the same map in Chinese cities. Turkey has the same map in Turkish cities. France has the same map in French cities. Germany has the same map in German cities. Spain has the same map in Spanish cities. Brazil has the same map in Brazilian cities. United Kingdom has the same map in British cities. Italy has the same map in Italian cities. South Korea has the same map in Korean cities. All three together on the Japan atlas page, the country itself on the Japan guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.