Talk:List of mergers and dissolutions of municipalities in Japan

I think it would be more effective if this list is compiled according to prefecture rather than the merge date. Photojpn.org 05:57, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Done. Please do not hesitate to make any change. -- Taku 18:35, Feb 11, 2005 (UTC)

How about if we make this a standard section in each prefecture article? I've been updating some of the prefecture articles with this information, see for example Ehime Prefecture. I'm not overly happy with the formatting and have used a variety of formats in various places. I think the format I like best so far is what I used in Ochi District, Ehime, i.e. a section titled "mergers" with subsections (by date) for each merger with text describing the merger (although perhaps the participants should simply appear following the "merged into" entity rather than be in a bullet list). -- Rick Block 19:07, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I've just added a mergers section to Fukui Prefecture. Comments? -- Rick Block 04:45, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I have a problem with this. That is, the info about mergers and dissolution might be distraction. Although Fukui Prefecture article is stil short, it can get lengthy in the future and this kind of information is not quite relevant. Take Tokyo and we want to keep the article as concise as possible, so I don't think there is a room for this kind of info. Remember not so many people are interested in merger and dissolution. We are the exception :) But in any case, we can always change our mind later by moving parts around. -- Taku 16:13, Feb 14, 2005 (UTC)

IMO, the reason to include this in the prefecture articles is so that you know what you're looking at. In particular, without this information the list of cities, districts, towns/villages is relatively ambiguous (is it current or historical, i.e. do all the listed cities/towns/villages still exist?). Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'd think creation of a new city or dissolution of a district (for example) are relatively significant events in the history of a prefecture and should be included (somewhere) in the prefecture article. If this gets too voluminous, we could have some sort of "as of" sentence with a link to someplace where the full list is provided. -- Rick Block 17:43, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I have to agree with Rick. Info about municipal mergers/dissolutions must be included in the prefecture page because we need to know whether the list of cities/districts is current or not. Also, someone with an old map of the prefecture might look at the Wiki page and wonder why a dissolved district or city on the map is not listed on the page. Or why there's a (new) city on the Wiki page that does not appear on the outdated map. Regarding the format, I favor the Fukui Prefecture page with a subheading under Geography under the current list of municipalities. The subheading title though, should be Mergers & Dissolutions instead of just Mergers. And I don't think it's necessary to make another subheading for each merger. We can just make it like footnotes. Photojpn.org 16:17, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)

In fact, there are prefecture articles still missing merger sections... Ranma9617 01:16, 4 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Categorization[edit]

Are the dissolved municipalities really to be kept in the categories of Towns in ___ Prefecture and Villages in ___ Prefecture? To look at such a list and be inundated with dissolved municipalities is quite confusing, especially for those not familiar with the merger system. Would it make sense to leave them as geography stubs but limit village, town, and city lists to only current municipalities? -- Ehroru 02:20, 3 April (UTC)

I've been leaving them in the "Towns/Villlages in" categories (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Japan/Gappei). If anyone visits an article for a dissolved village or town, the article itself should mention that the town or village has merged. Although there are fairly many, "inundated" seems kind of a stretch. I think this came up a while ago at WP:JTNB (or some such place). It certainly wouldn't hurt to bring it up again (but I'm not going to go through every town/village in category:Dissolved municipalities of Japan and decat them!). Another option might be to move the articles, appending "(dissolved)" (or something) to the name so it's obvious from the category listing. I had a conversation with user:TakuyaMurata about this once upon a time and he was not in favor of doing this. Maybe another approach would be to use a specific category sort character in front of the name (like "併", but anyone who doesn't read Japanese would not understand this). -- Rick Block (talk) 04:11, 3 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Why not just split category:Dissolved municipalities of Japan into prefectures, and place Category:Dissolved municipalities in ___ Prefecture inside each prefecture's cat as well? There is no de-cat; just re-cat. Neier 05:14, 3 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Neier- I just don't think non-existent towns should be categorized as towns. If we had a seperate category for former municipalities that would be best. The whole merger thing is pretty confusing to those first coming to Japan- I think this would help to make sense of it for newcomers to the country looking for information. I have mostly been working on Niigata, but I am willing to help out with the Gappei project for other prefectures Ehroru 07:37, 3 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Subcats of category:Dissolved municipalities of Japan by prefecture (probably "of" not "in"), each a member of Cities in X, Towns in X, and Villages in X sounds reasonable. We could also simply link to the Dissolved cat from the header text in the cities/towns/villages cats. There are something like 600 members of category:Dissolved municipalities of Japan at this point, organized by prefecture using sort keys, so recatting these by prefecture will take a while. We could also not do the recatting and in each cities/towns/villages cat include a link to the appropriate spot within category:Dissolved municipalities of Japan, e.g. Dissolved municipalities of Niigata. -- Rick Block (talk) 13:49, 3 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Do you think it's necessary to distinguish a dissolved village from a dissolved town in the categories? They aren't now... I was thinking that (for example) underneath Category:Miyagi Prefecture we would just add one new cat (Category:Dissolved municipalities of Miyagi Prefecture) at the same level as Category:Cities in Miyagi Prefecture, Category:Towns in Miyagi Prefecture, and Category:Villages in Miyagi Prefecture. We should still link to the new cat from each of those other three existing subcats like you mentioned. I've also recently discovered the joys of monobook.js editing, so, that would help speed up the recat effort significantly if I would get the regexp matching to work. Neier 01:00, 4 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Please let's not distinguish dissolved towns from villages (even from cities). I'm OK with either a single cat per prefecture as you suggest, or just leaving them all in the one big cat they're already in and adding links to this cat. I guess either way somebody's going to have to edit all 600 or so articles (to delete them from the "villages/towns/cities in" cats). I don't do Windows, so don't use WP:AWB, but I know some folks who do. Should we bring this up at Wikipedia talk:Japan-related topics notice board just to make sure nobody else has any particular problems with the approach? -- Rick Block (talk) 02:46, 4 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Glad we agree on that. I posted to the notice board just now. And, I also don't use windows; but, there are ways to do AWB-type edits just using javascript. You have to load each page manually for editing (or, at least I haven't figured out how to do so otherwise); but, after that, a single tab-click can do all sorts of things. Neier 04:19, 4 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I just did Miyagi as a test (and, it demonstrates that there are a lot of incomplete mergers that I need to take a look at, because 12 is way too low). Check out Category:Dissolved municipalities of Miyagi Prefecture as well as the Cities, Towns, and Villages subcats of Category:Miyagi Prefecture. If there are no problems, then I'll start going through the rest of the alphabet. Neier 11:59, 5 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I've added links to the "cities/towns/villages in" categories - without this, traversal from, say, a dissolved town to the (non-dissolved) "towns in" category is kind of indirect. BTW - I believe Miyagi's dissolved municipality list is correct. -- Rick Block (talk) 12:38, 5 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Oops. I forgot about the inverse way of traversing. Thanks for covering my tracks. Re: Miyagi, I have a map that came with my newspaper last April (yes, I'm a bit behind) that shows the mergers back to 2003. By my count, there are 42 dissolutions. A good deal of those 42 don't have articles of any form on Wikipedia, but, others (like Yamoto, Miyagi appear to have been redirected improperly. I'll try to scrounge up some spare time and figure out what's going on. Neier 13:21, 5 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Nearly all the town/village articles are still the stubs that Taku created (sometime in 2003). We won't have many articles (even stubs) for any towns/villages that merged before then. I've been leaving the stubs for dissolved towns/villages, but I suspect some folks are turning stubs for merged municipalities into redirects. If I had to guess, I'd say any article we have for a merged municipality that is a stub will never progress beyond stub status so it might be reasonable to turn these into redirects. I've noticed even the official websites for the merged municipalities seem to be disappearing (they're permanently available at the Internet Archive). I clearly haven't been only doing this, but it's taking a VERY long time to even go through every prefecture to make the municipality lists current. Perhaps a next step would be to change stubs older than some threshold into redirects. We could keep the redirects in the "dissolved municipalities of xxx" cats, but I'm not sure there's much value in leaving articles like Utatsu, Miyagi (just to pick one example) linger as "permanent" stubs. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:02, 5 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I just want to give my take. Like you two, in principle, I don't see any point in keeping articles on dissolved municipalities. As Rick points out, there are basically no articles about municipalities that were in existence before we (mostly I) started creating the articles about towns/villages. It is definitely a good idea to cover places that were not inexistent today (because they were merged/dissolved or whatever reason) in some way. That there are places that do not have articles or are completely unmentioned does not mean they need not be covered. I am basically in favor of greater coverage of places in Japan in wikipedia. It is, however, not a good idea to do so by giving them (except cities clearly) standalone articles. And so we are not going to create articles on places of minor importance (read towns/villages, I guess) that existed merely in the past. The tricky part is then so how. If the places were merged into some other, then it is simple; we can simply mention those in the article that absorbed the old ones. If the place simply has disappeared (could that really happen??), then I guess maybe we can mention it in the prefecture it one belonged to. Oh, so it may not be so tricky but just tedious :) In any case, apparently nowadays, I don't have time to contribute. So, this is just my take and I say good luck. -- Taku 08:42, 8 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Consequently, I don't think we need to worry much about categorizing dissolved places. As far as priority is concerned, we really should update the basic data (e.g., population, area, etc). I might be able to do this in future, though. Speaking of future, if the ruling party loses the election this summer, Abe gets kicked out of the office, then the DPJ gets the control of the government, and it started implementing so-called 道州制-that is the dissolution of the current prefectural system, then we will be completely screwed. -- Taku 08:45, 8 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think the best way to thoroughly cover old towns/villages at this time is to create tables like many of the Japanese articles seem to have, and put them in every place that currently exists (the place exists; not the article). See ja:宮城郡 for one example; or, Izumi-ku, Sendai for one version I put in our English articles. Note that even in the Japanese table, there are links to some old places, but not all of them. We can fill out older articles eventually, or not. I'm ambivalent about them -- the completionist/eventualist side of me thinks that each place needs its own article; but, as a practical matter, what Taku wrote is currently 100% correct.

I also thought about the gappei project when I saw a recent picture that was recently promoted to featured status. Something like Image:US_states_by_date_of_statehood3.gif would be amazing to add to these articles if we had the time/resources.

Anyway, it is not too much trouble for me to recategorize the articles which exist right now. I can knock out a prefecture in about 15 minutes or less (and, if I would stop "fixing" the "missing macrons", that time would go down even more). I'm up through Ibaraki today (and, probably will do one or two more before sleeping). Even if those articles are turned into redirects, the categorization of the redirects might be helpful, as Rick suggested. So, I don't think it is a complete waste of time. Neier 13:19, 8 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Re-verification[edit]

Prior to March 31 1999, there were the following numbers:

1. - Tōhoku - 67 districts; 400 municipalities (63 cities, 252 towns and 85 villages)

1.1 - Akita - 9 districts; 69 municipalities (9 cities, 50 towns and 10 villages)
1.2 - Aomori - 8 districts; 67 municipalities (8 cities, 34 towns and 25 villages)
1.3 - Fukushima - 14 districts; 90 municipalities (10 cities, 52 towns and 28 villages)
1.4 - Iwate - 12 districts; 59 municipalities (13 cities, 30 towns and 16 villages)
1.5 - Miyagi - 15 districts; 71 municipalities (10 cities, 59 towns and 2 villages)
1.6 - Yamagata - 9 districts; 44 municipalities (13 cities, 27 towns and 4 villages)

2. - Kantō - 64 districts; 453 municipalities (163 cities, 220 towns and 70 villages)

2.1 - Chiba - 10 districts; 80 municipalities (31 cities, 44 towns and 5 villages)
2.2 - Gunma - 12 districts; 70 municipalities (11 cities, 33 towns and 26 villages)
2.3 - Ibaraki - 14 districts; 85 municipalities (20 cities, 48 towns and 17 villages)
2.4 - Kanagawa - 7 districts; 37 municipalities (19 cities, 17 towns and 1 village)
2.5 - Saitama - 9 districts; 92 municipalities (43 cities, 38 towns and 11 villages)
2.6 - Tochigi - 7 districts; 49 municipalities (12 cities, 35 towns and 2 villages)
2.7 - Tokyo - 5 districts; 40 municipalities (27 cities, 5 towns and 8 villages)

3. - Chūbu - 110 districts; 668 municipalities (134 cities, 348 towns and 186 villages)

3.1 - Aichi - 16 districts; 88 municipalities (31 cities, 47 towns and 10 villages)
3.2 - Fukui - 10 districts; 35 municipalities (7 cities, 22 towns and 6 villages)
3.3 - Gifu - 17 districts; 99 municipalities (14 cities, 55 towns and 30 villages)
3.4 - Ishikawa - 8 districts; 41 municipalities (8 cities, 27 towns and 6 villages)
3.5 - Nagano - 16 districts; 120 municipalities (17 cities, 36 towns and 67 villages)
3.6 - Niigata - 16 districts; 112 municipalities (20 cities, 57 towns and 35 villages)
3.7 - Shizuoka - 12 districts; 74 municipalities (21 cities, 49 towns and 4 villages)
3.8 - Toyama - 7 districts; 35 municipalities (9 cities, 18 towns and 8 villages)
3.9 - Yamanashi - 8 districts; 64 municipalities (7 cities, 37 towns and 20 villages)

4. - Kansai - 78 districts; 395 municipalities (103 cities, 256 towns and 36 villages)

4.1 - Hyōgo - 20 districts; 91 municipalities (21 cities, 70 towns and 0 villages)
4.2 - Kyoto - 12 districts; 44 municipalities (12 cities, 31 towns and 1 village)
4.3 - Mie - 14 districts; 69 municipalities (13 cities, 47 towns and 9 villages)
4.4 - Nara - 8 districts; 47 municipalities (10 cities, 20 towns and 17 villages)
4.5 - Osaka - 5 districts; 44 municipalities (33 cities, 10 towns and 1 village)
4.6 - Shiga - 12 districts; 50 municipalities (7 cities, 42 towns and 1 village)
4.7 - Wakayama - 7 districts; 50 municipalities (7 cities, 36 towns and 7 villages)

5. - Chūgoku - 62 districts; 318 municipalities (49 cities, 232 towns and 37 villages)

5.1 - Hiroshima - 15 districts; 86 municipalities (13 cities, 67 towns and 6 villages)
5.2 - Okayama - 18 districts; 78 municipalities (10 cities, 56 towns and 12 villages)
5.3 - Shimane - 12 districts; 59 municipalities (8 cities, 41 towns and 10 villages)
5.4 - Tottori - 6 districts; 39 municipalities (4 cities, 31 towns and 4 villages)
5.5 - Yamaguchi - 11 districts; 56 municipalities (14 cities, 37 towns and 5 villages)

6. - Shikoku - 35 districts; 216 municipalities (30 cities, 145 towns and 41 villages)

6.1 - Ehime - 11 districts; 70 municipalities (12 cities, 44 towns and 14 villages)
6.2 - Kagawa - 7 districts; 43 municipalities (5 cities, 38 towns and 0 villages)
6.3 - Kōchi - 7 districts; 53 municipalities (9 cities, 25 towns and 19 villages)
6.4 - Tokushima - 10 districts; 50 municipalities (4 cities, 38 towns and 8 villages)

7. - Kyūshū - 82 districts; 570 municipalities (94 cities, 387 towns and 89 villages)

7.1 - Fukuoka - 17 districts; 97 municipalities (24 cities, 65 towns and 8 villages)
7.2 - Kagoshima - 12 districts; 96 municipalities (14 cities, 73 towns and 9 villages)
7.3 - Kumamoto - 11 districts; 94 municipalities (11 cities, 62 towns and 21 villages)
7.4 - Miyazaki - 8 districts; 44 municipalities (9 cities, 28 towns and 7 villages)
7.5 - Nagasaki - 9 districts; 79 municipalities (8 cities, 70 towns and 1 villages)
7.6 - Ōita - 12 districts; 58 municipalities (11 cities, 36 towns and 11 villages)
7.7 - Saga - 8 districts; 49 municipalities (7 cities, 37 towns and 5 villages)
7.8 - Okinawa - 5 districts; 53 municipalities (10 cities, 16 towns and 27 villages)

8. - Hokkaidō - 70 districts; 212 municipalities (34 cities, 154 towns and 24 villages)

8.1 - Abashiri - 4 districts; 26 municipalities (3 cities, 20 towns and 3 villages)
8.2 - Hidaka - 7 districts; 9 municipalities (0 cities, 9 towns and 0 villages)
8.3 - Hiyama - 5 districts; 10 municipalities (0 cities, 10 towns and 0 villages)
8.4 - Iburi - 4 districts; 15 municipalities (4 cities, 9 towns and 2 villages)
8.5 - Ishikari - 3 districts; 10 municipalities (6 cities, 1 town and 3 villages)
8.6 - Kamikawa - 5 districts; 24 municipalities (4 cities, 18 towns and 2 villages)
8.7 - Kushiro - 5 districts; 10 municipalities (1 city, 8 towns and 1 village)
8.8 - Nemuro - 3 districts; 5 municipalities (1 city, 4 towns and 0 villages)
8.9 - Ōshima - 5 districts; 17 municipalities (1 city, 15 towns and 1 village)
8.10 - Rumoi - 4 districts; 9 municipalities (1 city, 7 towns and 1 village)
8.11 - Shiribeshi - 9 districts; 20 municipalities (1 city, 13 towns and 6 villages)
8.12 - Sorachi - 4 districts; 27 municipalities (10 cities, 16 towns and 1 village)
8.13 - Sōya - 5 districts; 10 municipalities (1 city, 8 towns and 1 village)
8.14 - Tokachi - 7 districts; 20 municipalities (1 city, 16 towns and 3 villages)

My main question is this: With that said and done, how come that some have errors in each page (the ones entitled "List of mergers in "???" Prefecture", the ones Ive continue to create and to re-modify)? I was wondering if it can be re-investigated bit-by-bit. Please let me know if possible. jlog3000 (talk) 12:31, 15 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure what your question is. Can you please explain what pages you're talking about (links might help)? -- Rick Block (talk) 15:13, 15 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

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