It reads おぶせまち — Obuse 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. Obuse is marked in red.
Measured as real great-circle distance from Obuse.
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小布施町 is read おぶせまち (Obuse 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.
Obuse has a population of 10,510 across 19 km², making it the 1121st largest of Japan's 1,651 municipalities and the 30th largest of the 73 in Nagano.
The closest municipalities to Obuse are Suzaka Shi (4 km), Takayama Mura (5 km), Nakano Shi (9 km).