It reads いかるがちょう — Ikaruga 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. Ikaruga is marked in red.
Measured as real great-circle distance from Ikaruga.
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斑鳩町 is read いかるがちょう (Ikaruga Cho). It is a town in Nara 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.
Ikaruga has a population of 27,330 across 14 km², making it the 770th largest of Japan's 1,651 municipalities and the 15th largest of the 39 in Nara.
The closest municipalities to Ikaruga are Heguri Cho (2 km), Oji Cho (2 km), Ando Cho (3 km).