Municipalities of Japan

[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.

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.