The first wave, known as "the great Meiji mergers" (明治の大合併, meiji-no-daigappei), occurred in the period from 1888 to 1889, when the modern municipal system was established.
Before the mergers, existing municipalities were the direct successors of spontaneous hamlets called hanseison (藩政村), or villages under the han system.
It reduced the number of cities, towns and villages by over half, from 9,868 to 3,472 with purposes of the establishment of a National Treasury Subsidy System.
[2] The declining birthrate of Japan and very poor fiscal state led the Japanese central government to promote national consolidation reform from the late 20th century onwards.
[8] The main motivation of the reform was stated as to support small local governments that would become unstable in the event of poor fiscal periods.
For example, the Ōta (大田) ward of Tokyo is a portmanteau of Ōmori (大森) and Kamata (蒲田); Ōkama was not chosen because of its likeness to 'okama', a derogatory word for homosexual.
Other towns sometimes use nouns with pleasant connotations, such as peace (平和, heiwa), green (緑, midori), or future (未来, mirai).
The number of place names using hiragana reached 45 by April 2006, including Tsukuba (つくば), Kahoku (かほく), Sanuki (さぬき), Tsukubamirai (つくばみらい), and Saitama (さいたま), which was upgraded to a designated city in 2003.
[citation needed] The central government, which is itself running budget deficits, has a policy of encouraging mergers to make the municipal system more efficient.
[citation needed] Some people see it as a form of federalism; they consider that the ultimate goal is to change Japan into a union consisting of more autonomous states.
[12] Suzuki and Ha's empirical research found that municipal merger in Japan during 2008 to 2014 discourages performance of legislative activity and bylaw proposals, using a dataset of 754 Japanese city-level governments.