Municipal Mergers and Dissolutions in Japan - Naming of New Municipalities

Naming of New Municipalities

Naming a new post-merger municipality is not a negligible matter. Disagreement on a name sometimes causes merger talks to break down. If a city is far larger than other towns which join it, no arguments take place; the city's name simply survives. However, if their sizes do not differ significantly, lengthy disputes ensue. Sometimes the problem can be solved by adopting the district's name. Another easy solution is a simple compounding of the names, but this method, relatively common in Europe, is unusual in Japan. Instead, they are often abbreviated. For example, the Ōta (大田) ward of Tokyo is a portmanteau of Ōmori (大森) and Kamata (蒲田), it seems that Ōkama was not chosen because of its likeness to 'okama', a derogatory word for homosexual. Toyoshina, Nagano is an acronym of the four antecedent villages: Toba, Yoshino, Shinden, and Nariai.

Another common method is borrowing a well known nearby place name and adding a direction, like Nishitōkyō ("West Tokyo"), Kitakyūshū ("North Kyūshū"), Higashiosaka ("East Osaka"), Shikokuchūō ("Central Shikoku") and recently Higashiōmi ("East Ōmi").

Other towns sometimes use nouns with pleasant connotations, such as peace (平和, heiwa?), green (緑, midori?), or future (未来, mirai?).

A characteristic of the Heisei mergers is a rapid increase of hiragana names. The names of Japan's cities used to be written in Kanji exclusively. The first instance of "hiragana municipalities" was Mutsu (むつ?), renamed in 1960. Their number reached 45 by April 2006. They include 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. The recent merger of Minami Alps is the first example of a katakana city name.