It reads そうべつちょう — Sobetsu 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. Sobetsu is marked in red.
Measured as real great-circle distance from Sobetsu.
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壮瞥町 is read そうべつちょう (Sobetsu Cho). It is a town in Hokkaido 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.
Sobetsu has a population of 2,428 across 205 km², making it the 1508th largest of Japan's 1,651 municipalities and the 143rd largest of the 169 in Hokkaido.
The closest municipalities to Sobetsu are Toyako Cho (11 km), Toyoura Cho (15 km), Rusutsu Mura (20 km).