It reads ざおうまち — Zao 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. Zao is marked in red.
Measured as real great-circle distance from Zao.
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蔵王町 is read ざおうまち (Zao Machi). It is a town in Miyagi 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.
Zao has a population of 11,360 across 153 km², making it the 1095th largest of Japan's 1,651 municipalities and the 24th largest of the 31 in Miyagi.
The closest municipalities to Zao are Murata Machi (7 km), Ogawara Machi (8 km), Shiroishi Shi (9 km).