Municipalities in Japan: the local level of government

Resident registration, waste services, local roads, childcare and schools bring municipal administration into daily life. Statutes divide responsibilities, and municipalities may cooperate across boundaries. Prefectures handle wider-area functions and coordination. This is a division of work rather than a rule that every matter moves through an identical chain of offices.

Cities, towns and villages are ordinary local public entities at the same level. Under the Local Autonomy Act’s general rules, a city needs at least 50,000 residents; at least 60% of households must be in its central urban area, and people engaged in urban industries, together with their household members, must make up at least 60% of the population. Prefectural urban requirements also apply, while special merger provisions have allowed exceptions. Prefectural ordinances define town requirements. Population decline does not automatically demote an existing city. Readings such as machi or chō and mura or son belong to individual place names.

Adopting a budget

Separate elections give the chief executive and assembly different roles. A mayor leads the administration; the assembly considers ordinances and budgets. Omihachiman’s published budget process shows how those roles meet: departments cost next year’s proposed work, the finance office examines their requests, and the mayor reviews the resulting plan before submitting a budget to the assembly for deliberation and a vote. A request for a service is one input into that process, not permission to spend.

Restrictions on revenue

Revenue also comes with different degrees of flexibility. Local allocation tax redistributes nationally collected resources to help address unequal local tax capacity, without earmarking it for a particular service. National disbursements for specified programmes must be used for those purposes. Funabashi explains the practical consequence: cancelling a project may remove its associated national subsidy or borrowing as well as its cost. The entire saving on paper is therefore not necessarily available to finance something else.

Tokyo’s special wards are special local public entities with a distinctive division of functions with the metropolitan government. Wards within designated cities are administrative subdivisions of those cities. Smaller address units bearing the word machi are not necessarily municipalities either. A place name must therefore be read together with its institutional level. A gun, or district, in a town or village address is now a geographical and address grouping, not another elected local government between prefecture and municipality.

Meiji local institutions

The Meiji government experimented with districts and larger administrative groupings before the three local-government laws of 1878 restored established towns and villages as administrative units. The city, town and village legislation promulgated in 1888 took effect around 1889, with different paths in Hokkaidō and Okinawa. Local assemblies existed, but participation depended on sex, age and tax qualifications; city mayors also required central appointment.

Prewar changes and postwar autonomy

This balance shifted before the war. Reforms in 1926 let city assemblies elect mayors and removed prefectural approval from the selection of town and village heads. The 1943 changes restored central selection of city mayors and prefectural approval for town and village heads. Postwar reforms enfranchised women as well as men and introduced direct elections for local executives. The Local Autonomy Act took effect with the new Constitution in 1947.

Decentralisation in 2000

Decentralisation legislation enacted in 1999 and effective in April 2000 abolished the agency-delegated functions through which local executives acted as organs of central government. The new division included autonomous functions and legally entrusted functions, clarifying the statutory relationship between national and local government.

Meiji mergers sought an administrative scale suited to primary schools, household registers and other duties. Shōwa mergers responded to postwar responsibilities, including the new lower-secondary schools. Heisei mergers drew on national and prefectural promotion and financial support. Participation varied by locality. A place name could survive while its boundaries and legal identity changed, so historical addresses need the map of their own date.