What is a prefecture and what is the difference between it and a province, county, shire or whatnot?
Is Japan the only country with prefectures? Certainly there is a Japanese word that is translated to “prefecture”, but why not translate it into “county”?
It seems weird that there would be a special word to talk about divisions of a country whose people don’t even speak English…
A check of Encarta shows that there are prefectures in Corfu, Thessaloniki, the Cyclades, and Ioannina, in other words, Greece. Everything else is Japan.
http://www.encarta.msn.com/find/search.asp?search=prefecture
Their dictionary definition ain’t much help. “Prefecture: the district over which a prefect has jurisdiction.”
Okaaayyyy… :rolleyes:
Anyway, they have prefectures in France, too.
http://lessites.service-public.fr/cgi-bin/annusite/annusite.fcgi/loc7?lang=uk&orga=4515
And Tibet.
http://www.tibetinfo.net/tibet-file/counties.htm
Romania.
http://www1.oecd.org/puma/sigmaweb/profiles/romania-r/rom-5.htm
And some actual info.
I’ve read it twice and I still don’t get it. Evidently, at least in Romania, he’s some kind of federal government busybody, peering over the shoulders of local governments making sure they’re Doing It Right.
I lived in Japan and speak no-longer-fluent Japanese; anyone who lives there can name much more bizarre translations than these. The Japanese word - acutally words - is a mess called “to-do-fu-ken,” which is even more unwieldy than it sounds. (Tokyo is the only “to,” better translated as “metropolis” since it combines city and prefectural government, Hokkaido is a “do,” which sort of corresponds to “circuit” and reflects its 19th-century frontier status, Osaka and Kyoto are “fu,” which is sort of like a “to” only I think some local divisions have more autonomy, and the rest are “ken,” honest-to-god-I’m-not-making-this-up :p. One of my Japanese coworkers at the prefectural board of education told me that modern “ken” have somewhat more independence than a French départment but less than a U.S. state.)
IIRC When Japan went through an intense political modernization in the 1870s, it based its local administrative system on that of France. For whatever reason the government (probably the notoriously pedantic Ministry of Education) chose the word “prefecture” rather than “department.” WAG: it was to avoid confusion with “department” in the sense we in America use it, for Cabinet ministries.
Similarly, for many years Japan translated its national assembly (kokkai) as the Diet, which just seemed bizarre. It made sense when I learned that the early constitution under which the kokkai first appeared was based on Germany - where Diet of Worms is not only for Tweety. Lately the media seem to be using Parliament, a much more accurate reflection of Japan’s postwar government system.