It reads しょうないまち — Shonai 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. Shonai is marked in red.
Measured as real great-circle distance from Shonai.
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庄内町 is read しょうないまち (Shonai Machi). It is a town in Yamagata 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.
Shonai has a population of 19,977 across 249 km², making it the 878th largest of Japan's 1,651 municipalities and the 12th largest of the 30 in Yamagata.
The closest municipalities to Shonai are Mikawa Machi (8 km), Sakata Shi (11 km), Tsuruoka Shi (13 km).