It reads やまとちょう — Yamato 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. Yamato is marked in red.
Measured as real great-circle distance from Yamato.
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山都町 is read やまとちょう (Yamato Cho). It is a town in Kumamoto 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.
Yamato has a population of 13,210 across 545 km², making it the 1046th largest of Japan's 1,651 municipalities and the 24th largest of the 45 in Kumamoto.
The closest municipalities to Yamato are Minamiaso Mura (15 km), Kosa Machi (17 km), Mifune Machi (17 km).