Japan - Subnational Administrative Boundaries

Adapted from prefecture sources and P-coded by OCHA. Feature name translations by OCHA. Hundreds of polygons in the source files covering parts of the surrounding water were removed by OCHA. The administrative level 2 (city, town, or village) shapefile was created by dissolving a working set of overlapping administrative level 3 shapefiles to make level 2 and then consolidated with the ArcGIS ‘integrate’ command (100 m tolerance) that makes new compromise boundaries where input features disagree in order to establish topological integrity.

Because of the methodology many of the administrative level 2 boundaries will be as much as 100 m from the positions in the source shapefile.