It reads めいわちょう — Meiwa 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. Meiwa is marked in red.
Measured as real great-circle distance from Meiwa.
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明和町 is read めいわちょう (Meiwa Cho). It is a town in Mie 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.
Meiwa has a population of 22,523 across 41 km², making it the 843rd largest of Japan's 1,651 municipalities and the 14th largest of the 27 in Mie.
The closest municipalities to Meiwa are Tamaki Cho (6 km), Taki Cho (9 km), Matsusaka Shi (10 km).