The Japan City Game: read 1,651 real Japanese place names
Chimei (地名, literally "place name") is a free browser game built on a database of 1,651 real Japanese municipalities — every city, town, village and ward, with its authentic kanji spelling, its correct hiragana reading, its prefecture, its population and its true coordinates. Nothing in the game is invented. The map of Japan you play on is not a drawing: it is those 1,651 places plotted at their real latitude and longitude, which is why the archipelago's shape emerges from the dots.
Three ways to play
- Reading Rush — a place name appears in kanji and you pick its correct reading from four hiragana options. You start with Japan's largest and most recognisable cities and, as your score climbs, the game reaches deeper into the country until you are reading villages of a few hundred people.
- Map Hunt — you are given a city and you pin it on the map of Japan. Scoring is by real great-circle distance, so landing in the right prefecture is worth a lot and landing on the exact town is worth everything.
- Daily Challenge — five cities, identical for every player in the world, refreshed at midnight Japan Standard Time. One attempt per day, a shareable grid at the end, and a streak that grows for every consecutive day you play.
Why Japanese place names defeat even native speakers
Japanese place names are the single most notorious category of kanji reading in the language. They are so difficult that Japanese has a dedicated term for the hardest of them: 難読地名 (nandoku chimei), "hard-to-read place names". Newsreaders check them before broadcasts, and quiz shows built entirely around reading local town names are a fixture of Japanese television.
There are concrete historical reasons for this difficulty:
- Frozen archaic readings. Place names were fixed in writing centuries ago and kept pronunciations that ordinary vocabulary abandoned. The characters modernised; the names did not.
- Ainu and other substrate languages. A great many Hokkaido names are Ainu words transcribed into kanji chosen purely for sound. The characters carry no meaning at all, so ordinary kanji knowledge gives you nothing to work with.
- Regional divergence. The same characters are genuinely read differently in different parts of the country, and there is no rule that predicts which — you simply have to know the place.
The suffixes: 市, 町, 村 and 区
Every Japanese municipality carries a suffix marking what kind of place it is, and two of the four are traps:
- 市 shi — a city. Reliably read shi.
- 町 chō or machi — a town. Both readings are correct Japanese; which one a given town uses is local convention, and it varies sharply by region.
- 村 mura or son — a village. Same problem again.
- 区 ku — a ward inside a designated city, such as the 23 wards of Tokyo.
Because Chimei always asks for the full reading including the suffix, you drill this distinction on every single question — which is exactly the part textbooks skip.
What you actually learn
Place names are unusually efficient study material. The kanji used in them are overwhelmingly common characters — 山 mountain, 川 river, 田 rice field, 島 island, 大 big, 新 new — so you are drilling core JLPT vocabulary while learning geography. At the same time you absorb the reading flexibility that makes Japanese hard: that 大 can be ō, dai or tai, and that only exposure tells you which.
Every city in the game links to its full profile on Nihoner, with population, area, founding date, transport and travel information, so a name you failed becomes something you can actually go and read about.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, completely, and it needs no signup. A free Nihoner account saves your XP, streak, achievements and your record of every city learned permanently, and syncs them across devices.
No. Reading Rush is multiple choice and all answers are in hiragana, so if you know the hiragana alphabet you can start today. The difficulty scales with your score, so the same game serves a first-week beginner and someone preparing for N1.
At midnight Japan Standard Time the game selects five cities that are identical for every player worldwide. You get one attempt. Your result becomes a grid of coloured squares you can share, and consecutive days build your streak.
From Nihoner's own database of Japanese municipalities — 1,651 places across all 47 prefectures, each with verified kanji, kana reading, romaji, prefecture, population and coordinates.
Start with Japan's biggest cities
These are the places Reading Rush opens with. Each links to its full profile: