About this guide

This English text is machine-translated from the Japanese and has not been checked by the editors. The numbers, photos and sources are the same as the Japanese page. この図鑑について is the authoritative version.

As long as it is someone’s hometown, every town holds the same precious worth.

The places that matter are not only the towns consumed as tourist spots, or the ones that make the news. Even a small town whose name you have never heard has a character found nowhere else, and people whose lives have carried on there to this day.

That is why Machigatari compiles every municipality in Japan in the same format, as one encyclopedia.

The shape of everyday life today, and the history that has never faded from the land. Setting them side by side, with the same warmth, is a small wish offered to a society that tends to value only efficiency and standing out.

Why not take a moment, now and then, to think about where you come from?

Even if you live far away, even if you rarely get home, your hometown is still there, and still alive.

Follow the map, and open the name of the town you know so well.

You should be able to feel that the unbroken history of that place leads to no one else but you.

Countless lives came before, and so there is now.
That you were born, and that you are living today, is wonderful in itself.

Every municipality in Japan gets one page. Each page follows the same order: stories of the character and history found only in that town, and the numbers of everyday life today, such as population and travel times. Every municipal website is built differently; here, every town reads the same way.

You can start from your hometown, or a town you once lived in. At the end of each page are “Similar towns”, which share the same features even across prefectures, and “Next town”, its neighbour on the map. Step by step, you can move from a town you know well to one you had never heard of.

It is not a place that lines up criteria for choosing a town. It is a place for getting to know, one by one, the towns you have never heard of — starting from the ones you know.

Numbers and photos come from primary sources. Population and area come from the System of Social and Demographic Statistics on e-Stat (the portal site of official statistics of Japan), carried through with the statistical table and the year attached to each item. Photos come from Wikimedia Commons, with the photographer and licence shown for each one at the foot of the page.

What cannot be sourced is shown as “—”, not estimated. Rent, for example, has no data source yet, so no town shows a figure. The same goes for the theme words: “Low rent” is attached to no town while the rent data is missing. Knowing that something is blank is better than a plausible-looking number.

Travel times are only shown for the legs a municipality publishes itself. Rail times change with the route and the type of service, so we do not calculate them. Legs with no official figure are dropped, and for some towns that leaves nothing at all.

Words used for comparison have fixed definitions. In “30 min to a city centre”, the centre means one of the 14 central stations of the three major metropolitan areas — never a different place for each town. Times are always rounded up.

The text is written by the editors, one town at a time, and each fact is checked. The foot of each page shows how many facts were checked and when. The sources for the numbers and photos sit in the same place.

625 towns so far, out of 1,741, added in turn. We do not write the count up to look larger than it is; the front page says how many prefectures are still empty.

平岡尚

Where the pages say “the editors”, that is one person.

If you find an error, or if you hold the rights to a photo and want it taken down, please tell us. We will check and fix it. Where a municipality’s official information and this guide disagree, the official information takes precedence.

hiraokashi@gmail.com

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