List of regions of Japan


is traditionally divided into eight regions. They are not official administrative units, but are used for regional division of Japan in a number of contexts. For instance, maps and geography textbooks divide Japan into the eight regions, weather reports usually give the weather by region, and many businesses and institutions use their home region as part of their name.
Each region groups several of the country's 47 prefectures, except for the region of Hokkaidō which corresponds to Hokkaidō Prefecture. Of the four main islands of Japan, three make up a region each while the largest island of Honshū is divided into five regions. Okinawa Prefecture is usually included in Kyūshū, but is sometimes treated as its own ninth Okinawa region.
While Japan has eight High Courts, their jurisdictions do not correspond to the eight traditional regions below..

Table

RegionPopulationArea in km2Prefectures contained
Hokkaidō5.4 million83,000Hokkaidō
Tōhoku8.91 million67,000Akita, Aomori, Fukushima, Iwate, Miyagi, Yamagata
Kantō43.3 million32,000Chiba, Gunma, Ibaraki, Kanagawa, Saitama, Tochigi, Tōkyō
Chūbu21.4 million67,000Aichi, Fukui, Gifu, Ishikawa, Nagano,
Niigata, Shizuoka, Toyama, Yamanashi
Kansai 22.5 million33,000Hyōgo, Kyōto, Mie, Nara, Ōsaka, Shiga, Wakayama
Chūgoku7.3 million32,000Hiroshima, Okayama, Shimane, Tottori, Yamaguchi
Shikoku3.8 million19,000Ehime, Kagawa, Kōchi, Tokushima
Kyūshū14.5 million44,000Fukuoka, Ōita, Kagoshima, Kumamoto,
Miyazaki, Nagasaki, Okinawa, Saga

Regions and islands

This is a list of Japan's major islands, traditional regions, and subregions, going from northeast to southwest. The eight traditional regions are marked in bold.