Claim: Japan contains Tokyo.

Japan has three levels of government : national , prefectural , and municipal . The nation is divided into 47 prefectures . Each prefecture consists of numerous municipalities , with 1,719 in total -LRB- January 2013 figures -RRB- . There are four types of municipalities in Japan : cities , towns , villages and special wards -LRB- the ku of Tokyo -RRB- . In Japanese , this system is known as , where each kanji in the word represents one of the four types of municipalities .   The status of a municipality , if it is a village , town or city , is decided by the prefectural government . Generally , a village or town can be promoted to a city when its population increases above fifty thousand , and a city can -LRB- but need not -RRB- be demoted to a town or village when its population decreases below fifty thousand . The least-populated city , Utashinai , Hokkaidō , has a population of merely four thousand , while a town in the same prefecture , Otofuke , Hokkaidō , has nearly forty thousand residents .   Some designated cities also have further administrative subdivisions , also known as wards . But , unlike the Special wards of Tokyo , these wards are not municipalities .   The following are examples of 19 designated cities :  Fukuoka , the most populous city in the Kyūshū region  Hiroshima , the busy manufacturing city in the Chūgoku region of Honshū  Kobe , a major port on the Inland Sea , located in the center of Honshū near Osaka  Kitakyūshū , a city of just over one million inhabitants in Kyūshū  Kyoto , former capital , historic center and thriving modern city  Nagasaki , a port on the island of Kyūshū  Nagoya , center of a major automobile-manufacturing region on the eastern seaboard of Honshū  Osaka , a vast manufacturing city on the Inland Sea coast of Honshū  Sapporo , the largest city in Hokkaidō  Sendai , the principal center of northeast Honshū -LRB- also known as the Tōhoku region -RRB-  Yokohama , a port city just south of Tokyo   The capital , Tokyo , no longer has city status . Tokyo Prefecture now encompasses 23 special wards , each a city unto itself , as well as many other cities , towns and even villages on the Japanese mainland and outlying islands . Each of the 23 special wards of Tokyo is legally equivalent to a city , though sometimes the 23 special wards as a whole are regarded as one city . For information on the former city of Tokyo , see Tokyo City ; for information about present-day Tokyo Prefecture , see Tokyo .   See List of cities in Japan for a complete list of cities .   See also : Core city