It reads あなんちょう — Anan Cho. This is one of the harder names in the country: small municipalities are exactly where Japan's nandoku chimei (難読地名, "hard-to-read place names") live.
This place is one of 1,651 in Chimei, our Japan city game. Read the kanji, then pin it on the map.
Play Chimei →Every dot is one of Japan's 1,651 municipalities, plotted at its real coordinates. Anan is marked in red.
Measured as real great-circle distance from Anan.
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阿南町 is read あなんちょう (Anan Cho). It is a town in Nagano Prefecture.
町 means "town" and is read chō / machi. A town. 町 is read either chō or machi — which one is local convention, and it varies by region. This is one of the classic traps in Japanese place names.
Anan has a population of 4,338 across 123 km², making it the 1389th largest of Japan's 1,651 municipalities and the 48th largest of the 73 in Nagano.
The closest municipalities to Anan are Yasuoka Mura (6 km), Tenryu Mura (7 km), Shimojo Mura (8 km).