The 23 of Tokyo are a unique form of municipality under Japan's 1947 Local Autonomy Law. They are city-level wards: primary subdivisions of a prefecture with municipal autonomy. Together, they cover and, as of 2024, house roughly 9.8 million residents, yielding a density of about . Similar ward systems are legally possible in other prefectures, but none have been established.
Tokyo's 23 special wards unite with 39 ordinary municipalities (cities, towns and villages)Tokyo Metropolitan Government: "Municipalities Within Tokyo" . to their west to form the Tokyo Metropolitan Prefecture. Without the ordinary municipalities, the special wards account for what was the core Tokyo City, before it was abolished in 1943 under the Tōjō Cabinet. It was four years later, during the Occupation of Japan, that autonomy was restored to Tokyo City by means of the special wards, each being given a directly elected mayor and assembly like all other cities, towns and villages in Japan.
In Japanese the 23 are collectively also known as , , , or less formally the or just if the context makes obvious that this does not refer to the whole prefecture. Most of Tokyo's prominent infrastructure is located within the special wards. Today, the translation of the Japanese suffix -ku varies: while the word means ward, some local ward governments officially translate -ku as city in English (e.g., Shinjuku City), maps, road signs, and official documents also frequently use ward or leave the suffix untranslated as -ku. In Japanese law, their official designation remains unchanged as .Local Autonomy Act (Act No. 67 of 1947), Part III: Special Local Public Entities, Chapter 1: Special Wards, Article 281. They are a group of 23 municipalities that do not share a single municipal government separate from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, which governs all 62 municipalities across the broader metropolis. Unlike standard in the metropolis, in special certain city-level services like water, sewage, and fire protection are managed centrally by the metropolis for the whole Wards Area rather than by each special ward individually. Certain local taxes are also collected centrally by the metropolitan government to finance these shared services and balance municipal funding across all 23 wards.
Analogues in other countries Analogues exist in historic and contemporary Chinese and Korean administration: "Special wards" are city-independent wards, analogously, "special cities/special cities" (/) are province-/prefecture-independent cities and were intended to be introduced under SCAP in Japan, too; but in Japan, implementation was stalled, and in 1956 special cities were replaced in the Local Autonomy Law with designated major cities which gain additional autonomy, but remain part of prefectures. In everyday English, Tokyo as a whole is also referred to as a city even though it contains 62 cities, towns, villages and special wards. The closest English equivalents for the special wards would be the London boroughs or New York City boroughs if Greater London and New York City had been abolished in the same way as Tokyo City, making the boroughs top-level divisions of England or New York state.
Differences from other municipalities Although the special wards are autonomous from the Tokyo metropolitan government, they also function as a single urban entity in respect to certain public services, including water supply, sewage disposal, and fire services. These services are handled by the Tokyo metropolitan government, whereas cities would normally provide these services themselves. This situation is very similar to Brazil's Federal District and its 35 administrative regions, but with local elections. To finance the joint public services it provides to the 23 wards, the metropolitan government levies some of the taxes that would normally be levied by city governments, and also makes transfer payments to wards that cannot finance their own local administration.
Waste disposal is handled by each ward under direction of the metropolitan government. For example, plastics were generally handled as non-burnable waste until the metropolitan government announced a plan to halt burying of plastic waste by 2010; as a result, about half of the special wards now treat plastics as burnable waste, while the other half mandate recycling of either all or some plastics.
Unlike cities and other municipalities (including the municipalities of western Tokyo), special wards were initially not considered to be local public entities for purposes of the Constitution of Japan. This means that they had no constitutional right to pass their own legislation, or to hold direct elections for mayors and councilors. While these authorities were granted by statute during the US-led occupation and again in 1975, they could be unilaterally revoked by the National Diet; similar measures against other municipalities would require a constitutional amendment. The denial of elected mayors to the special wards was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in the 1963 decision Japan v. Kobayashi et al. (also known as Tokyo Ward Autonomy Case).
In 1998, the National Diet passed a revision of the Local Autonomy Law (effective in the year 2000) that implemented the conclusions of the Final Report on the Tokyo Ward System Reform increasing their fiscal autonomy and established the wards as basic local public entities.
History
In Japanese legal terminology, the word distinguishes Tokyo's 23 wards from the ordinary administrative of other designated cities, which are non-autonomous subdivisions without elected councils or mayors. Before 1943, however, the wards of Tokyo City held no unique legal status and were identical to those in Osaka or Kyoto.
When the modern municipal code was implemented in 1889, Tokyo City initially comprised 15 wards. In October 1932, the city absorbed 82 surrounding towns and villages across five districts (Ebara, Toyotama, Kita-Toshima, Minami-Adachi, and Minami-Katsushika), organizing them into 20 new wards to create a 35-ward structure popularly known as . Further minor annexations, including the 1936 incorporation of Kinuta and Chitose villages into Setagaya Ward, expanded Tokyo City to the geographic boundary that defines the Wards Area today.
1943–1947 On March 15, 1943, as part of a wartime centralization of administrative authority, the Diet enacted the Tokyo Metropolitan Administration Act under the Tōjō cabinet, which took effect on July 1, 1943, merging and into . This abolished the municipal governance of Tokyo City (including its elected mayor and city council) and placed the 35 wards area under the direct control of a governor appointed by the Home Ministry.
1947–2000 The 35 wards of the former city were integrated into 22 on March 15, 1947, just before the legal definition of special wards was given by the Local Autonomy Law, enforced on May 3 the same year. The 23rd ward, Nerima, was formed on August 1, 1947, when Itabashi was split again. The postwar reorganization under the US-led occupation authorities democratized the prefectural administrations but did not include the reinstitution of Tokyo City. Seiichirō Yasui, a former Home Ministry bureaucrat and appointed governor, won the first Tokyo gubernatorial election against Daikichirō Tagawa, a former Christian Socialist member of the Imperial Diet, former vice mayor of Tokyo city and advocate of Tokyo city's local autonomy.
Since the 1970s, the special wards of Tokyo have exercised a considerably higher degree of autonomy than the administrative wards of cities (that unlike Tokyo City retained their elected mayors and assemblies) but still less than other municipalities in Tokyo or the rest of the country, making them less independent than cities, towns or villages, but more independent than city subdivisions. Today, each special ward has its own elected and .
2000–present In 2000, the National Diet designated the special wards as , giving them a legal status similar to cities.
The wards vary greatly in area (from ) and population (from less than 40,000 to 830,000), and some are expanding as artificial islands are built. Setagaya has the most people, while neighboring Ōta has the largest area.
The total population census of the 23 special wards had fallen under 8 million as the postwar economic boom moved people out to suburbs, and then rose as Japan's lengthy stagnation took its toll and property values drastically changed, making residential inner areas up to 10 times less costly than during peak values. Its population was 8,949,447 as of October 1, 2010,2010 population XLS about two-thirds of the population of Tokyo and a quarter of the population of the Greater Tokyo Area.
The Mori Memorial Foundation put forth a proposal in 1999 to consolidate the 23 wards into six larger cities for efficiency purposes, and an agreement was reached between the metropolitan and special ward governments in 2006 to consider realignment of the wards, but there has been minimal further movement to change the current special ward system.
In other prefectures Special wards do not currently exist outside Tokyo; however, several Osaka area politicians, led by Governor Tōru Hashimoto, are backing an Osaka Metropolis plan under which the city of Osaka would be replaced by special wards, consolidating many government functions at the prefectural level and devolving other functions to more localized governments. Under a new 2012 law, – sometimes informally called "Osaka Metropolis plan law", but not specifically referring to Osaka – major cities and their surrounding municipalities in prefectures other than Tokyo may be replaced with special wards with similar functions if approved by the involved municipal and prefectural governments and ultimately the citizens of the dissolving municipalities in a referendum. Prerequisite is a population of at least 2 million in the dissolving municipalities; three cities (Yokohama, Nagoya and Osaka) meet this requirement on their own, seven other major city areas can set up special wards if a designated city is joined by neighboring municipalities.Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications: 大都市地域における特別区の設置に関する法律（平成24年法律第80号）概要 , pp. 1–3; Full text in the e-gov legal database However, where special wards are set up cannot style themselves as the Local Autonomy Law only allows Tokyo with that status.CLAIR (Jichitai Kokusaika Kyōkai), Japan Local Government Centre, London, August 31, 2012: New law for Japanese megacities In Osaka, a 2015 referendum to replace the city with five special wards was defeated narrowly.