Japanese Place Name Resources?

I've long thought it would be interesting to attempt to determine the origin of Japanese postmarks, but I've never been able to find a suitable reference online that lists Japanese place names in kanji. I have found this site, but it is ordered according to romaji alphabetic order, which won't help me when all I have are kanji characters.

http://www.gsi.go.jp/ENGLISH/pape_e300284.html

I have approximately zero point zero diddly ability with Japanese script, so a listing ordered by stroke count would be easiest for me, but I suppose I could work my way through something ordered by radical if I was really desperate. I have found a printed copy of Stanley Gerr's gazetteer, and if nothing is available online, I suppose I'll end up purchasing that.

Kim / Tony / Zhang, any ideas?

Ryan

In the past, I have had no luck finding a good single online site.

Feel free to post them, and I'll try to help you identify the ones I can read. I don't mind the practice. If I or the others miss the post and there's no reply, send me an email to let me know you uploaded some pics.

Does Keijo (aka scb) know how to read Japanese. [That's just a guess based on the name.] You might try asking Keijo?

Ryan, I just checked out the link you provided. That's an excellent resource, even though it is in ABC order, as you noted. Thanks!!

The other thing to keep in mind, if you are looking at postmarks on older Japanese stamps, is that the provinces/prefectures boundaries/names have changed since then, even if the city name has not changed. So you may find the city name but not in the prefecture according to today's map! An example of this is shown in this earlier thread:

https://goscf.com/t/6956

I use this site http://www.mapion.co.jp/address/ for working out Japanese addresses. It's entirely Japanese, but it does include the hiragana for place names. You'll need to drill down from region, to prefecture, to town, to district, but it is comprehensive for current localities.

If you need help with any other, older place names, I may be able to help if you can post them.

I'm not yet to the point where I'll be sorting the stamps, but thanks for the offer. I was just trying to get my ducks in a row and find some information now, before I get too involved with anything.


Keijo is Finnish. The Finnish language is almost as crazy as Japanese ... (By the way, Keijo, you have an excellent blog.)

Ryan

Yes, I came across that site while I was on the search for something. I don't have too much grief with katakana, I find it quite easy to recognize. But hiragana still looks mostly like noodles in a bowl ...

I just had a jolt to the brain that says I should check my Japanese road atlas (published by Shobunsha). Unfortunately, no such thing as a kanji index in the back of that either.

I snooped a little bit deeper into the gazetteer by Stanley Gerr, and it doesn't look like it will help me too much. If I search for some of the names I do sort of recognize (Nagano, Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka), I sometimes don't see anything familiar there at all. No hits for "radical" or "stroke" either - I think if I bought this, it would just go in the "inscrutable" pile and be forever branded as something I can't make heads or tails of.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Zt...eer&q=nagano

Hmmmm, maybe a search on Amazon.co.jp for bilingual maps or atlases ....

Ryan

Never come across a list arranged by radical/stroke count. All the lists I know of assume you know the readings of the characters. (Not always helpful at either end of the archipelago: I got stuck today with a really weirdly irrational town name in Okinawa. And Hokkaido and Northern Honshu, and Kyoto, place names are also a nightmare.)

You might find the annual #20840;#22269;#24066;#30010;#26449;#35201;#35239; a useful hard copy resource, but once again, it requires a knowledge of hiragana. There's also Japan - a Bilingual Atlas/#26085;#26412;#20108;#12534;#22269;#35486;#12450;#12488;#12521;#12473; by Kodansha International. But its Romanized index requires you to know the reading of the place name: otherwise, you'll have to pore over the bilingual map for the relevant prefecture and find the location by trial and error.

If it would help, I can at least post the kanji for the prefectures. All possible place names is a liiiitle beyond the limits of my benevolence.

Learning hiragana isn't too hard. If you can get katakana under your belt, hiragana is just the same number of kana, again!

I do have a Japanese / English dictionary published by Kodansha printed in both kanji and furigana, so I was just stabbing in the air, hoping for the same thing with place names.



The earlier post that Kim referenced dealing with "obsolete" prefecture names was interesting to me, I hadn't realized that was a recent enough change to affect 20th century names. I happened to find the following dictionary on Google Books, giving me a list of both old & new prefecture names as well as all of the cities over 100,000 people, so that will be a good starting point. The scan is a bit fuzzy, but it should be something that can be used. Just slow, slow work for me!

http://books.google.com/books?id=8b...ames&f=false

Ryan

Ryan, that information is also available online. I neglected to bookmark the link in the past. I'm a little tied down right now, but I'll try to find the link and post it later. If I don't post within 3 days, fire off an email to remind me. Or, you can do some googling.

Ryan, the Japanese bureaucracy is constantly tinkering with municipal boundaries and place names. Prefectures and major cities are fairly safe, but smaller 'cities' (#24066;) come and go regularly - merged into larger cities and changing their names in the process. Larger cities may grow large enough to deserve division into 'wards' (#21306;), where none existed before.

If you can't find it elsewhere, I can let you have a high resolution scan of those lists from the back of Nelson's kanji dictionary - though mine is an older edition.

Thanks for the offer, but I should be OK. I've found various pages online that should get me buried under kanji for a long time. I even learned some things about Karafuto / Sakhalin at the same time (trying to find a single list of kuni that has both Ryukyu and Karafuto on it was more than I could achieve, though). I doubt I'll ever find a cancellation from Karafuto, though ...

Ryan

Funny you should mention Karafuto. Just the other day I translated a Family Register which included an entry for a woman born in Karafuto. Mercifully the client provided the furigana for the place names involved. I don't know how I would have found them otherwise.