Memorize All 47 Japanese Prefectures and Their Capitals: The 18 Exceptions That Cost Points

Japan has 47 prefectures, and the trap is that only about half of them share a name with their capital city. Everyone remembers Tokyo and Kyoto; the points are lost on Kanagawa (Yokohama), Hyōgo (Kōbe), Aichi (Nagoya) and Ishikawa (Kanazawa). The Japan: Prefectures deck on Flip It (deck code XI7971, 47 cards) pairs every prefecture with its capital, and each card carries the kanji and romanized name as a hint (北海道 Hokkaidō, 東京都 Tōkyō-to, 京都府 Kyōto-fu), so you learn the geography and the writing at the same time.

What the 47 cards cover

The deck runs top to bottom through the archipelago, region by region:

• Hokkaidō — Hokkaido
• Tōhoku — Aomori, Iwate, Miyagi, Akita, Yamagata, Fukushima
• Kantō — Ibaraki, Tochigi, Gunma, Saitama, Chiba, Tokyo, Kanagawa
• Chūbu — Niigata, Toyama, Ishikawa, Fukui, Yamanashi, Nagano, Gifu, Shizuoka, Aichi
• Kansai — Mie, Shiga, Kyoto, Osaka, Hyōgo, Nara, Wakayama
• Chūgoku — Tottori, Shimane, Okayama, Hiroshima, Yamaguchi
• Shikoku — Tokushima, Kagawa, Ehime, Kōchi
• Kyūshū & Okinawa — Fukuoka, Saga, Nagasaki, Kumamoto, Ōita, Miyazaki, Kagoshima, Okinawa

The cards that actually cost points

Here are the mismatched pairs, straight from the deck. If you can nail these, the rest is almost free.

Add Tokyo (capital: Tokyo, Special Wards) and you have the full list of 18 exceptions. The other 29 prefectures — Aomori, Akita, Yamagata, Fukushima, Saitama, Chiba, Niigata, Toyama, Fukui, Nagano, Gifu, Shizuoka, Kyoto, Osaka, Nara, Wakayama, Tottori, Okayama, Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, Tokushima, Kōchi, Fukuoka, Saga, Nagasaki, Kumamoto, Ōita, Miyazaki, Kagoshima — simply repeat their own name.

Two tips specific to this deck

1. Split the deck by rule, not by region. Do a first pass where the only question you answer is same name or different? The 29 same-name prefectures can be marked as known within one session. Then spend all your repetitions on the 18 exceptions above, which is where 100% of the difficulty lives.

2. Use the kanji suffix in the hint. The hints reveal the three administrative types: 県 -ken (43 ordinary prefectures), 府 -fu (Kyōto-fu and Ōsaka-fu, the two urban prefectures), 都 -to (Tōkyō-to, the metropolis) and 道 -dō (Hokkaidō, the only circuit). Noticing the suffix helps you recall the special status of Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and Hokkaido — and it is a frequent quiz question in its own right.

How to run it on Flip It

Open the deck XI7971 — Japan: Prefectures in your library at flip-it.app. Review the cards in order once to build the north-to-south mental map (Hokkaido first, Okinawa last), then let spaced repetition surface the exceptions; a 47-card deck of this kind is typically stable after four or five short sessions.

If you are also studying the language, the JLPT N2–N1 kanji deck covers the characters you will see in these prefecture names. For world-geography practice, the UNESCO World Heritage flashcards are a natural next step.