It reads ちっぷべつちょう — Chippubetsu 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. Chippubetsu is marked in red.
Measured as real great-circle distance from Chippubetsu.
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秩父別町 is read ちっぷべつちょう (Chippubetsu Cho). It is a town in Hokkaido 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.
Chippubetsu has a population of 2,365 across 47 km², making it the 1513th largest of Japan's 1,651 municipalities and the 147th largest of the 169 in Hokkaido.
The closest municipalities to Chippubetsu are Numata Cho (4 km), Moseushi Cho (7 km), Hokuryu Cho (9 km).