About LiterallyMaps

What Is LiterallyMaps?

Every Japanese place name is built from kanji— Chinese characters that each carry their own meaning. When you see “Tokyo” on a map, you’re reading a romanisation of 東京, which combines 東 (eastern) and 京(capital). Tokyo literally means “Eastern Capital.”

This pattern holds across the entire country. Mountains, rivers, neighborhoods, train stations — nearly all Japanese place names encode descriptions of geography, history, nature, or culture in their characters. LiterallyMaps translates over 300,000 places character by character so you can see what they actually mean.

Open the map and click any place to see its full kanji breakdown, character-by-character meanings, and literal English translation.

How Translation Works

Japanese place names are translated through a multi-step process:

1. Tokenisation— The name is broken into morphemes (meaningful units) using the kuromoji Japanese language tokeniser. For example, 秋葉原 is split into 秋 + 葉 + 原.
2. Dictionary lookup— Each kanji is looked up in a curated geographic meaning table, then cross-referenced against JMdict, the comprehensive Japanese–English dictionary. Geographic meanings are preferred over abstract or technical ones.
3. Compound matching— Multi-kanji compounds (like 空港 = airport) are identified and translated as units rather than character-by-character, producing more natural translations.
4. Assembly— The individual meanings are assembled into a literal English phrase, with Japanese grammatical particles (like postpositions) repositioned for English word order.

Some kanji are used purely for their sound (phonetic use) rather than their meaning — these are marked as phonetic in the breakdown. Katakana loanwords (like ターミナル = terminal) are translated back to their English origins.

Example Translations

Here are some well-known Japanese places and what their names literally mean:

What Places Are Covered?

LiterallyMaps includes over 300,000 named places across Japan, organized by type. Different place types appear at different zoom levels — cities are visible when zoomed out, while streets and stations appear when you zoom in.

Why Do Japanese Place Names Have Meanings?

Japan uses three writing systems: kanji (Chinese characters), hiragana, and katakana. Place names are overwhelmingly written in kanji, and most were chosen centuries ago to describe something about the location.

Mountains might be named for their appearance (富士— “wealthy gentleman”), rivers for their behavior (荒川— “rough river”), and towns for their geography (平塚— “flat mound”). Train stations are typically named after the neighborhoods they serve, which in turn were named for landmarks, terrain, or historical events.

Some names use kanji phonetically — the characters were chosen for their pronunciation rather than their meaning. This is especially common in Hokkaido, where many place names come from the indigenous Ainu language and were later written with kanji that approximate the Ainu sounds. In these cases, the literal kanji translation may be whimsical or nonsensical (like “Wealthy Gentleman Mountain” for Fuji, which likely derives from an Ainu word for fire).

This blend of meaningful and phonetic naming is part of what makes Japanese place name etymology so fascinating — and why LiterallyMaps exists.

Data Sources

• Place data— sourced from OpenStreetMap via the Overpass API. Covers cities, towns, wards, districts, stations, mountains, islands, lakes, rivers, parks, and streets across Japan.
• Dictionary— kanji meanings are derived from JMdict, the most comprehensive freely available Japanese–English dictionary, supplemented with a curated table of geographic kanji meanings.
• Map tiles— rendered by MapTiler using OpenStreetMap data, displayed with MapLibre GL JS.

Frequently Asked Questions