The largest city in Japan is Tokyo, with roughly 13.9 million residents in its core metropolis, followed by Yokohama (3.7M), Osaka (2.7M), Nagoya (2.3M), Sapporo (2.0M), Fukuoka (1.6M), Kobe (1.5M), Kawasaki (1.5M), Kyoto (1.5M) and Saitama (1.3M). Together these ten cities anchor a nation of about 125 million people, one of the most heavily urbanised societies on Earth. Below is a closer look at how they rank, why they grew where they did, and what sets each apart.
The Ten Largest Japanese Cities
Japan defines its biggest cities by the population of the official municipality rather than the wider commuter belt, which is why the figures below look smaller than the sprawling metro areas many travellers picture.
- Tokyo — ~13.9 million (capital and global financial centre)
- Yokohama — ~3.7 million (historic port just south of Tokyo)
- Osaka — ~2.7 million (commercial heart of western Japan)
- Nagoya — ~2.3 million (automotive and manufacturing hub)
- Sapporo — ~2.0 million (largest city on Hokkaido)
- Fukuoka — ~1.6 million (gateway to Kyushu and Asia)
- Kobe — ~1.5 million (major port beside the Rokko mountains)
- Kawasaki — ~1.5 million (industrial belt between Tokyo and Yokohama)
- Kyoto — ~1.5 million (former imperial capital)
- Saitama — ~1.3 million (northern Tokyo suburb)
Tokyo and Its Unrivalled Scale
No other city in Japan comes close to Tokyo. The 23 special wards that form the city proper hold about 13.9 million people, but the real measure of its dominance is the surrounding Greater Tokyo Area, which gathers roughly 37 million residents across Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama and Chiba prefectures. That makes it the most populous metropolitan region on the planet. Tokyo concentrates Japan's government, stock exchange, corporate headquarters and media, and its rail network moves more passengers daily than any other on Earth. Shinjuku Station alone handles millions of travellers a day, a scale that helps explain how so many people live and work in one place without permanent gridlock.
The Kansai and Central Clusters
While Tokyo dominates the Kanto plain in the east, a second great urban cluster sits in the Kansai region around Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe. Osaka is Japan's traditional merchant city, famous for its food culture and blunt, friendly humour, and serves as the commercial capital of the west. Nearby Kyoto preserves more than a thousand years of imperial history in its temples, shrines and machiya townhouses, while the port of Kobe rebuilt itself into a sleek waterfront city after the devastating 1995 earthquake. Between Tokyo and Kansai lies Nagoya, the centre of Japan's automotive industry and home to Toyota's heartland, anchoring the Chubu region's manufacturing economy.
Regional Capitals Beyond the Megalopolis
Several of the top ten cities lead their own regions rather than orbiting Tokyo or Osaka. Sapporo, the largest city on the northern island of Hokkaido, grew rapidly in the 20th century and is known worldwide for its annual Snow Festival and the 1972 Winter Olympics. Fukuoka, on the southern island of Kyushu, is one of Japan's fastest-growing cities thanks to its youthful population and close ties to mainland Asia. Closer to Tokyo, Kawasaki and Saitama function partly as extensions of the capital region, housing large commuter populations while sustaining their own industries and civic identities.
Why Japan's Cities Are So Concentrated
Japan is a mountainous archipelago where only about a quarter of the land is flat enough to build on easily. As a result, population has crowded onto coastal plains, and the corridor running from Tokyo through Nagoya to Osaka — sometimes called the Taiheiyo Belt — holds a large share of the entire national population. Decades of rural-to-urban migration concentrated young workers in these centres. Today Japan faces the opposite pressure: a shrinking, ageing population means many cities are slowly losing residents, even as Tokyo continues to draw people from the rest of the country. If you want to test how well you know these places, try our geography games and locate them on the map.
The Corridor Where Most of Japan Lives
Japan is about three quarters mountain, and the flat land is concentrated in a handful of coastal plains. Almost every city on this list sits on one of them, along the Pacific belt that runs from Tokyo through Nagoya and Osaka to northern Kyushu.
That corridor, the Taiheiyo Belt, holds the great majority of the population and industry on a small fraction of the land area. It is also the route of the Tokaido Shinkansen, opened for the 1964 Olympics as the first high-speed rail line in the world and still among the busiest, carrying more passengers annually than most national rail networks.
The Kanto Plain around Tokyo is the largest flat area in the country, which is the fundamental reason the capital grew where it did rather than anywhere else.
Greater Tokyo Is the Largest Urban Area on Earth
Tokyo's own figure of roughly nine to fourteen million depends on whether you count the twenty-three special wards or the whole metropolis. Neither number captures the reality: the Greater Tokyo Area, taking in Yokohama, Kawasaki, Saitama and Chiba, holds around 37 million people and is by common measure the largest metropolitan area in the world.
Yokohama's presence at second place on the city list is itself a product of that agglomeration. It is a distinct municipality with its own history as the port opened to foreign trade in 1859, but it is physically continuous with Tokyo and functions as part of the same labour market.
Shinjuku station handles more passengers than any other railway station in the world, generally put at over three million a day, which is a direct consequence of that scale.
Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe Are One Region
The Kansai region works as a counterweight to Tokyo, and its three cities have complementary roles. Osaka is the commercial centre, historically the merchants' city and the kitchen of Japan, with a dialect and a comic tradition distinct enough to be nationally recognisable.
Kyoto was the imperial capital for more than a thousand years, from 794 until 1868, and it was famously spared the heaviest American bombing, which is why it retains seventeen UNESCO-listed temples, shrines and gardens when comparable cities do not.
Kobe is the port, squeezed onto a narrow strip between mountains and sea. The Great Hanshin earthquake struck it in January 1995, killing more than 6,000 people and destroying elevated expressway and port infrastructure that had been assumed earthquake-proof, which forced a national revision of building standards.
The Cities That Are Shrinking
Japan's population peaked around 2008 and has been falling since, and the decline is not evenly distributed. Tokyo continues to draw young people from the regions, while cities on the Sea of Japan coast, in Tohoku and across rural Kyushu and Shikoku are contracting.
The term akiya, abandoned houses, describes several million empty properties nationally, and municipalities have begun offering them free or nearly free to anyone willing to move in and renovate. Some rural towns are projected to disappear entirely within decades.
Among the cities in this ranking the effect is muted but visible: Kitakyushu, built on steel and coal, has been losing population for years, and Osaka's own municipal figure has been broadly flat while Tokyo's has grown.
Sapporo and the Northern Frontier
Sapporo is the newest of Japan's large cities and the only one laid out on a grid. Hokkaido was not systematically settled by Japanese until the Meiji period, and the government hired American advisers in the 1870s to plan its development, which is why the street pattern looks more like the American Midwest than like Kyoto.
The island is the homeland of the Ainu, whose language and culture were suppressed for a century and who were only recognised as an indigenous people by Japanese law in 2019.
Sapporo hosted the Winter Olympics in 1972 and holds an annual snow festival built around large ice sculptures. Its winters are severe by Japanese standards, with several metres of snowfall a season, and the city is one of the snowiest large urban areas in the world. For the mountains and plains that force this pattern, see our Japan country guide.
Common Questions About Japanese Cities
What is the largest city in Japan?
Tokyo is the largest city in Japan, with about 13.9 million people in the city proper. Its wider metropolitan area holds roughly 37 million, making it the most populous urban region in the world.
What is the second largest city in Japan?
Yokohama is the second largest city with around 3.7 million residents. It sits just south of Tokyo on Tokyo Bay and grew from a small fishing village into a major international port after Japan opened to foreign trade in the 1850s.
Is Osaka bigger than Kyoto?
Yes. Osaka has roughly 2.7 million residents, making it Japan's third largest city, while neighbouring Kyoto has about 1.5 million. Both belong to the same Kansai region but Osaka is the commercial centre, whereas Kyoto is celebrated for its historic temples and former imperial role.
How many people live in Japan overall?
Japan has a total population of approximately 125 million. The country is highly urbanised, with the great majority of people living in and around its largest cities along the Pacific coast.
Is Tokyo a city?
Not in the ordinary administrative sense. Tokyo is a metropolitan prefecture, and the urban core is made up of twenty-three special wards, each of which is a municipality in its own right. There is no mayor of Tokyo city, only a governor of the metropolis.