It reads はなわまち — Hanawa Machi. 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. Hanawa is marked in red.
Measured as real great-circle distance from Hanawa.
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塙町 is read はなわまち (Hanawa Machi). It is a town in Fukushima 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.
Hanawa has a population of 8,209 across 211 km², making it the 1200th largest of Japan's 1,651 municipalities and the 31st largest of the 58 in Fukushima.
The closest municipalities to Hanawa are Tanagura Machi (8 km), Yamatsuri Machi (9 km), Samegawa Mura (13 km).