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are actions taken, either within one municipality or between multiple municipalities, after making a consensus agreement to do so.

Contents

Merger policy

Record of Changes

Socio-Political Context

Past mergers

Naming of new municipalities

Merger policy

The government's stated goal is to reduce the total number of Japanese municipalities to 1,000, although no distinct timetable was provided.
Japan had around 1,822 municipalities at the beginning of 2007, considerably less than the 2,190 on April 1, 2005 and a decline of 40 percent from the number in 1999 The 1,822 municipalities include 198 villages, 777 cities and 847 towns.
The municipality merger promotion law was revised to ease the burden on debt-ridden local governments and to create larger municipalities so more administrative power could be transferred to the local level. The law's deadline passed in March 31, 2006.

Record of Changes

★ List of mergers and dissolutions of municipalities in Japan shows mergers and dissolutions of municipalities that took place in recent years.

Socio-Political Context

Most of Japan's rural municipalities largely depend on subsidies from the central government. They are often criticized for spending money for wasteful public enterprises to keep their employment. The central government, which is itself running budget deficits has a policy of encouraging mergers to make the municipal system more efficient.
Although the government purports to respect self-determination of the municipalities, some consider the policy to be compulsory. As a result of mergers, some cities such as Daisen, Akita temporally have very large city assemblies.
Some people draw a ; they consider that the ultimate goal is to change Japan into a union consisting of more autonomous states. So far the mergers are limited to the local municipalities, but mergers of prefectures are also planned in some regions of Japan.

Past mergers

There have been three waves of merger activity between Japanese municipalities, the largest being in 2005. This recent peak is sometimes referred to as "the great Heisei merger" (平成の大合併) as a way of distinguishing it from the earlier two.
The first peak of mergers, known as "the great Meiji merger" (明治の大合併), happened in 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. The rump han system is still reflected in the postal system for rural areas as postal units called ''ōaza'' (大字). The Meiji mergers slashed total municipalities to 15,859 from 71,314.
The second peak, called "the great Showa merger" (昭和の大合併), took place in mid-1950s. It reduced the number of the municipalities from 9,868 in October 1953 to 3,472 in June 1961.
Municipal mergers in the island prefectures of Hokkaidō and Okinawa, have followed a different track.

Naming of new municipalities

Naming is not a negligible matter. Disagreement on a name sometimes brings the match to break up.
If a city is far larger than other towns which join in 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 their district's name. Another easy solution is simple compounding of their names, but this method, relatively common in Europe, is unusual in Japan. Instead, the Japanese often abbreviate them. For example, Ōta (大田) ward of Tokyo is a portmanteau of Ōmori ('大'森) and Kamata (蒲'田'). Toyoshina, Nagano is an extreme example. It is an acronym of the four antecedent villages: 'To'ba, 'Yo'shino, 'Shi'nden, and 'Na'riai.
Another common way is borrowing a surrounding famous placename plus direction, like Kita-kyushu 'North Kyushu', Higashi-osaka 'East Osaka', Shikoku-chūō 'Central Shikoku', and recently Higashiomi 'East Omi'.
Sometimes, this can lead to unusual pairings. One such example, Nishi-tokyo 'West Tokyo', sounds especially strange for some Japanese, because Tokyo itself literally means 'east capital'.
Other towns pick up ordinary nouns with connotations that sound pleasant to human beings, such as peace, green, or prosperity.
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, Aomori (むつ) renamed in 1960, and their number will reach to 45 in April 2006. They include Tsukuba (つくば), Kahoku (かほく), Sanuki (さぬき), Saitama (さいたま), which was upgraded to a designated city in 2003, and recently Tsukubamirai (つくばみらい).