It reads はやしまちょう — Hayashima 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. Hayashima is marked in red.
Measured as real great-circle distance from Hayashima.
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早島町 is read はやしまちょう (Hayashima Cho). It is a town in Okayama 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.
Hayashima has a population of 12,584 across 8 km², making it the 1064th largest of Japan's 1,651 municipalities and the 19th largest of the 27 in Okayama.
The closest municipalities to Hayashima are Kurashiki Shi (4 km), Soja Shi (10 km), Okayama Shi (11 km).