Prefectures of Japan
is divided into 47 prefectures, which rank immediately below the national government and form the country's first level of jurisdiction and administrative division. They include 43 prefectures proper, two urban prefectures, one regional prefecture and one metropolis.
In 1868, the Meiji Fuhanken sanchisei administration created the first prefectures [|to] replace the urban and rural administrators in the parts of the country previously controlled directly by the shogunate and a few territories of rebels/shogunate loyalists who had not submitted to the new government such as Aizu/Wakamatsu. In 1871, all remaining feudal domains were also transformed into prefectures, so that prefectures subdivided the whole country. In several waves of territorial consolidation, today's 47 prefectures were formed by the turn of the century. In many instances, these are contiguous with the ancient ritsuryō provinces of Japan.
Each prefecture's chief executive is a directly elected Governor. Ordinances and budgets are enacted by a unicameral assembly whose members are elected for four-year terms.
Under a set of 1888–1890 laws on local government until the 1920s, each prefecture was subdivided into cities and districts and each district into towns and villages. Hokkaidō has 14 subprefectures that act as General Subprefectural Bureaus and Subprefectural Bureaus of the prefecture. Some other prefectures also have branch offices that carry out prefectural administrative functions outside the capital. Tokyo, the capital of Japan, is a merged city-prefecture; a metropolis, it has features of both cities and prefectures.
Each prefecture has its own mon for identification, the equivalent of a coat of arms in the West.
Background
The West's use of "prefecture" to label these Japanese regions stems from 16th-century Portuguese explorers and traders use of "prefeitura" to describe the fiefdoms they encountered there. Its original sense in Portuguese, however, was closer to "municipality" than "province". Today, in turn, Japan uses its word ken, meaning "prefecture", to identify Portuguese districts while in Brazil the word "Prefeitura" is used to refer to a city hall.Those fiefs were headed by a local warlord or family. Though the fiefs have long since been dismantled, merged, and reorganized multiple times, and been granted legislative governance and oversight, the rough translation stuck.
The Meiji government established the current system in July 1871 with the abolition of the han system and establishment of the prefecture system. Although there were initially over 300 prefectures, many of them being former han territories, this number was reduced to 72 in the latter part of 1871, and 47 in 1888. The Local Autonomy Law of 1947 gave more political power to prefectures, and installed prefectural governors and parliaments.
In 2003, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi proposed that the government consolidates the current prefectures into about 10 regional states. The plan called for each region to have greater autonomy than existing prefectures. This process would reduce the number of subprefecture administrative regions and cut administrative costs. The Japanese government also considered a plan to merge several groups of prefectures, creating a subnational administrative division system consisting of between nine and 13 states, and giving these states more local autonomy than the prefectures currently enjoy. As of August 2012, this plan was abandoned.
Powers
Japan is a unitary state. The central government delegates many functions to the prefectures and municipalities, but retains the overall right to control them. Although local government expenditure accounts for 70 percent of overall government expenditure, the central government controls local budgets, tax rates, and borrowing.Prefectural government functions include the organization of the prefectural police force, the supervision of schools and the maintenance of prefectural schools, prefectural hospitals, prefectural roads, the supervision of prefectural waterways and regional urban planning. Their responsibilities include tasks delegated to them by the national government such as maintaining most ordinary national roads, and prefectures coordinate and support their municipalities in their functions. De facto, prefectures as well as municipalities have often been less autonomous than the formal extent of the local autonomy law suggests, because of national funding and policies. Most of municipalities depend heavily on central government funding – a dependency recently further exacerbated in many regions by the declining population which hits rural areas harder and earlier. In many policy areas, the basic framework is set tightly by national laws, and prefectures and municipalities are only autonomous within that framework.
Types of prefecture
Historically, during the Edo period, the Tokugawa shogunate established bugyō-ruled zones around the nine largest cities in Japan, and 302 township-ruled zones elsewhere. When the Meiji government began to create the prefectural system in 1868, the nine bugyō-ruled zones became fu, while the township-ruled zones and the rest of the bugyō-ruled zones became ken. Later, in 1871, the government designated Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto as fu, and relegated the other fu to the status of ken. During World War II, in 1943, Tokyo became a to, a new type of pseudo-prefecture.Despite the differences in terminology, there is little functional difference between the four types of local governments. The subnational governments are sometimes collectively referred to as todōfuken in Japanese, which is a combination of the four terms.
''To''
, capital city of Japan is referred to as to, which is often translated as "metropolis". The Japanese government translates Tōkyō-to as "Tokyo Metropolis" in almost all cases, and the government is officially called the "Tokyo Metropolitan Government".Following the capitulation of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868, Tōkyō-fu was set up and encompassed the former city area of Edo under the Fuhanken sanchisei. After the abolition of the han system in the first wave of prefectural mergers in 1871/72, several surrounding areas were merged into Tokyo, and under the system of "large districts and small districts" ', it was subdivided into eleven large districts further subdivided into 103 small districts, six of the large districts covered the former city area of Edo. When the ancient ritsuryō districts were reactivated as administrative units in 1878, Tokyo was subdivided into 15 districts ' and initially six districts. Both urban and rural districts, like everywhere in the country, were further subdivided into urban units/towns/neighbourhoods ' and rural units/villages '. The yet unincorporated communities on the Izu and Ogasawara island groups became also part of Tokyo in the 19th century. When the modern municipalities – cities and districts containing towns and villages – were introduced under the Yamagata-Mosse laws on local government and the simultaneous Great Meiji merger was performed in 1889, the 15 -ku became wards of Tokyo City, initially Tokyo's only independent city ', the six rural districts of Tokyo were consolidated in 85 towns and villages. In 1893, the three Tama districts and their 91 towns and villages became part of Tokyo. As Tokyo city's suburbs grew rapidly in the early 20th century, many towns and villages in Tokyo were merged or promoted over the years. In 1932, five complete districts with their 82 towns and villages were merged into Tokyo City and organised in 20 new wards. Also, by 1940, there were two more cities in Tokyo: Hachiōji City and Tachikawa City.
In 1943, Tokyo City was abolished, Tōkyō-fu became Tōkyō-to, and Tokyo-shi's 35 wards remained Tokyo-to's 35 wards, but submunicipal authorities of Tokyo-shi's wards which previously fell directly under the municipality, with the municipality now abolished, fell directly under prefectural or now "Metropolitan" authority. All other cities, towns and villages in Tokyo-fu stayed cities, towns and villages in Tokyo-to. The reorganisation's aim was to consolidate the administration of the area around the capital by eliminating the extra level of authority in Tokyo. Also, the governor was no longer called chiji, but chōkan. The central government wanted to have greater control over all local governments due to Japan's deteriorating position in World War II – for example, all mayors in the country became appointive as in the Meiji era – and over Tokyo in particular, due to the possibility of emergency in the metropolis.
After the war, Japan was forced to decentralise Tokyo again, following the general terms of democratisation outlined in the Potsdam Declaration. Many of Tokyo's special governmental characteristics disappeared during this time, and the wards took on an increasingly municipal status in the decades following the surrender. Administratively, today's special wards are almost indistinguishable from other municipalities.
The postwar reforms also changed the map of Tokyo significantly: In 1947, the 35 wards were reorganised into the 23 special wards, because many of its citizens had either died during the war, left the city, or been drafted and did not return. In the occupation reforms, special wards, each with their own elected assemblies and mayors, were intended to be equal to other municipalities even if some restrictions still applied. But, as part of the "reverse course" of the 1950s some of these new rights were removed, the most obvious measure being the denial of directly elected mayors. Some of these restrictions were removed again over the decades. But it was not until the year 2000 that the special wards were fully recognised as municipal-level entities.
Independently from these steps, as Tokyo's urban growth again took up pace during the postwar economic miracle and most of the main island part of Tokyo "Metropolis" became increasingly core part of the Tokyo metropolitan area, many of the other municipalities in Tokyo have transferred some of their authority to the Metropolitan government. For example, the Tokyo Fire Department which was only responsible for the 23 special wards until 1960 has until today taken over the municipal fire departments in almost all of Tokyo. A joint governmental structure for the whole Tokyo metropolitan area as advocated by some politicians such as former Kanagawa governor Shigefumi Matsuzawa has not been established. Existing cross-prefectural fora of cooperation between local governments in the Tokyo metropolitan area are the Kantō regional governors' association ' and the "Shutoken summit". But, these are not themselves local public entities under the local autonomy law and national or local government functions cannot be directly transferred to them, unlike the "Union of Kansai governments" which has been established by several prefectural governments in the Kansai region.
There are some differences in terminology between Tokyo and other prefectures: police and fire departments are called chō instead of honbu, for instance. But the only functional difference between Tōkyō-to and other prefectures is that Tokyo administers wards as well as cities. Today, since the special wards have almost the same degree of independence as Japanese cities, the difference in administration between Tokyo and other prefectures is fairly minor.
In Osaka, several prominent politicians led by Tōru Hashimoto, then mayor of Osaka City and former governor of Osaka Prefecture, proposed an Osaka Metropolis plan, under which Osaka City, and possibly other neighboring cities, would be replaced by special wards similar to Tokyo's. The plan was narrowly defeated in a 2015 referendum, and again in 2020.