It reads みのわまち — Minowa 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. Minowa is marked in red.
Measured as real great-circle distance from Minowa.
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箕輪町 is read みのわまち (Minowa Machi). It is a town in Nagano 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.
Minowa has a population of 24,887 across 86 km², making it the 807th largest of Japan's 1,651 municipalities and the 20th largest of the 73 in Nagano.
The closest municipalities to Minowa are Minamiminowa Mura (4 km), Tatsuno Machi (8 km), Ina Shi (8 km).