It reads やはばちょう — Yahaba 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. Yahaba is marked in red.
Measured as real great-circle distance from Yahaba.
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矢巾町 is read やはばちょう (Yahaba Cho). It is a town in Iwate 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.
Yahaba has a population of 27,638 across 67 km², making it the 765th largest of Japan's 1,651 municipalities and the 12th largest of the 33 in Iwate.
The closest municipalities to Yahaba are Shiwa Cho (6 km), Morioka Shi (11 km), Takizawa Shi (16 km).