It reads やくしまちょう — Yakushima 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. Yakushima is marked in red.
Measured as real great-circle distance from Yakushima.
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屋久島町 is read やくしまちょう (Yakushima Cho). It is a town in Kagoshima 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.
Yakushima has a population of 11,810 across 540 km², making it the 1083rd largest of Japan's 1,651 municipalities and the 24th largest of the 43 in Kagoshima.
The closest municipalities to Yakushima are Minamitane Cho (24 km), Nakatane Cho (33 km), Nishinoomote Shi (53 km).