Talk:Prefecture

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"In the Japanese system, prefecture are used for translating an adminstrative district about the size of a county. " What does "county" relate to here? Is it a US county? By the way, what is the size of a county? - Olivier

That was written by a Canadian, so I couldn't begin to guess. In the US, there's no standard size to counties that I'm aware of; here in California they vary in area from a couple hundred to fifty thousand km², and in population from about a thousand people to about ten million. --Brion

That sentence was borrowed from a Geocities website written by a Jap. That non-copyright page is brief so I intended to post here as a stub.kt2

I managed to dig up some stats on population and land area by prefecture (ignore the forest stuff, just look at the first couple columns; the area figures are in hectares). The prefectures also vary fairly widely from 1880 to 83,410 km², with an average size of about 8000 km² (vs about 7000 km² average of counties in California), and a median around 6000 km² (vs about 4000 km² median for counties). In terms of population, Japanese prefectures are significantly more crowded, with an average population of about 2.7 million each (vs ca counties 583,000), but the population is a bit more evenly spread out among them (median of ~1.8 mil, vs counties a mere 165,669!) Hope that helps... --Brion