Japanese prefectures, 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 16 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Hokkaido

Hokkaido is about 78,400 square kilometers, more than a fifth of the country, and holds about four percent of its people. It was Ainu land and was only settled from the mainland in earnest after 1869, which is why its towns are on grids and its farms are the size of American ones. It is the one prefecture whose name does not end in ken, fu or to.

Tokyo

The prefecture holds about 14 million people and the built-up area around it about 37 million, which is the largest urban area in the world. It also administers two chains of islands out in the Pacific, the further of which puts a rock of 1.5 square kilometers 1,850 kilometers southeast of the city. Edo was renamed Tokyo, the eastern capital, in 1868.

Osaka

Osaka is the second smallest prefecture by area and the third most populous. It was the merchant city rather than the court city, the place the rice tax of the whole country was traded, and it was called the nation’s kitchen for it. The dialect, the comedy and the reputation for talking about money all come from that.

Kyoto

Kyoto was the imperial capital from 794 to 1868, which is a thousand and seventy-four years in one place. It was on the target list for the atomic bomb and was taken off it, and it came through the war almost undamaged, which is why seventeen separate sites in and around it are on the UNESCO list.

Okinawa

The Ryukyu Islands were an independent kingdom trading with China and Southeast Asia until Japan annexed them in 1879. The battle fought here from April to June 1945 killed something like a quarter of the civilian population. The United States administered the islands until 1972, and about seventy percent of American base land in Japan is still on them.

Hiroshima

The city is built on the delta of the Ota, which is what the name means: a wide island. The bomb dropped on 6 August 1945 killed tens of thousands outright and roughly 140,000 by the end of the year. The floating torii of Itsukushima stands offshore in the same prefecture and was untouched.

Nagasaki

For over two hundred years the only Europeans allowed in Japan lived on Dejima, an artificial fan-shaped island in Nagasaki harbor about 120 meters across, and everything the country learned of the West came through it. The prefecture has around 970 islands, more than any other. The second atomic bomb fell on the city on 9 August 1945.

Aichi

Aichi has the largest industrial output of any prefecture, most of it built around Toyota, whose home town changed its own name to the company’s in 1959. It is also where all three of the men who unified Japan in the sixteenth century were born, which is an unusual thing for one province to be able to say.

Kanagawa

Commodore Perry anchored off its coast in 1853, and the treaty that opened Japan was signed at Kanagawa the following year, which turned a fishing village called Yokohama into the country’s first foreign port. Kamakura, further down the same coast, was the seat of the shoguns from 1185 to 1333.

Fukuoka

Fukuoka is closer to Busan than to Tokyo, and everything that ever arrived in Japan from the mainland arrived roughly here: rice, writing, Buddhism. The Mongol fleets landed on Hakata Bay in 1274 and 1281 and were broken the second time by the storm the Japanese named the divine wind, kamikaze.

Nara

Nara was the capital from 710 to 784, the first fixed one the country had, and the temple built there holds a bronze Buddha of about 500 tonnes in a hall that is among the largest wooden buildings in the world. The deer wandering the park around it are protected as messengers of the local gods.

Niigata

The winter monsoon crosses the warm Sea of Japan, picks up moisture and drops it against these mountains, which makes this one of the snowiest inhabited places on earth: several meters on the ground is a normal winter. The rice grown on the plain below is generally reckoned the best in the country.

Nagano

Nagano holds most of the Japanese Alps and more of the country’s three-thousand-meter peaks than anywhere else. It hosted the Winter Olympics in 1998. It touches eight other prefectures, which is more than any of them, and it is one of only eight with no coast at all.

Fukushima

It is the third largest prefecture and is cut by two mountain ranges into three strips with quite different weather. The earthquake of 11 March 2011, magnitude 9.0, sent a tsunami up to about 15 meters onto this coast; it killed most of the roughly 18,000 who died that day and flooded the reactors at the Daiichi plant.

Shizuoka

Mount Fuji stands on its northern border at 3,776 meters, and the bay below it, Suruga Bay, is about 2,500 meters deep, so the ground drops six kilometers over a horizontal distance of fifty. The prefecture grows around forty percent of Japan’s tea, and the old Tokaido road along its coast is the one in Hiroshige’s prints.

Kagawa

Kagawa is about 1,877 square kilometers, smaller than any other prefecture and smaller than several single cities elsewhere in Japan. It is known nationally for udon, eats more of it per head than anywhere else, and the first of the three bridge routes across the inland sea came ashore here in 1988.

How this one works

The other maps of Japan

All three together on the Japan atlas page, the country itself on the Japan guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.