Izumo is named after billowing clouds. Tsuruga was once written with the kanji for "horned deer."
Twelve old province names from Ayatoki's Geography genre, and the stories behind them.
12 Province Names and Where They Came From
01
近江国Ōmi no Kuni
Seen from the capital in Nara, Lake Biwa was the "nearby freshwater sea" — chikatsu afumi — which contracted into Ōmi. Lake Hamana, much farther away, got the mirror-image name Tōtōmi, "the distant freshwater sea." Few province names were assigned this literally, by sheer distance from the capital.
02
出雲国Izumo no Kuni
The Kojiki preserves a poem attributed to the god Susanoo: "Yakumo tatsu Izumo yaegaki..." ("Eightfold clouds rise, Izumo of the eightfold fence..."). A popular theory ties the name directly to that image of clouds billowing up in layers — making Izumo a place name that appears inside what's often called Japan's oldest surviving poem.
03
甲斐国Kai no Kuni
Edo-period scholar Motoori Norinaga argued in his Kojiki-den that the name comes from kai, a word for a gorge or valley enclosed by mountains — a fitting description for a basin tucked between steep peaks.
04
陸奥国Mutsu no Kuni
Originally read michi no oku, "the far end of the road," marking where the Tōsandō and Tōkaidō highways from the capital finally ran out. By the Nara period the characters had settled into 陸奥, still read mutsu, but the sense of a remote frontier lived on in the name.
05
常陸国Hitachi no Kuni
One theory traces the name to hitamichi, a "straight road" unbroken by rivers or coastline. Local legend adds another layer: when the hero Yamato Takeru had a well dug here, he's said to have dipped his sleeve in the fresh water that gushed out.
06
山城国Yamashiro no Kuni
Seen from the old Nara capital, this land lay on the far side — the "back" — of the mountains, so it was first written 山背, "mountain's back." When Emperor Kanmu moved the capital to Heian-kyō in 794, the characters were swapped for the more auspicious 山城, "mountain fortress," honoring the natural defenses of hills and rivers around the new capital.
07
讃岐国Sanuki no Kuni
In the Kojiki's creation myth, Shikoku is born as a single body with four faces, and Sanuki appears among them under the name Iiyorihiko. A separate theory reads the name as a compound of "praise" and "mountain shape" — a tribute to the beauty of the land itself.
08
上総国・下総国Kazusa no Kuni / Shimōsa no Kuni
Both provinces split off from a region once called Fusa, after the hemp grown there. Because travel from the capital arrived by sea, the half you landed in first — the southern tip of the Bōsō Peninsula — was called "upper" (Kazusa), and the farther, northern half "lower" (Shimōsa), the opposite of what the map would suggest.
09
因幡国Inaba no Kuni
The name is thought to derive from Inaba-gō, a district in what's now eastern Tottori Prefecture. It's also the setting of one of the Kojiki's best-known myths, the White Rabbit of Inaba, in which the god Ōkuninushi helps a rabbit that had been skinned by a trick.
10
敦賀Tsuruga
According to the Nihon Shoki, this is where a horned visitor named Tsunuga Arashito is said to have landed after crossing over from the Korean peninsula — and the place was originally written 角鹿, literally "horned deer." An imperial edict in 713, requiring place names to use auspicious characters, changed it to the 敦賀 still used today.
11
紀伊国Kii no Kuni
Once a mountainous, timber-rich region, it was originally called Ki no Kuni, "Land of Trees." When a 713 decree required every province name to be written with two characters, officials chose 紀伊 — characters meant to honor the deity of trees enshrined in the region.
12
伊豆国Izu no Kuni
The leading theory ties the name to izu, "to emerge," describing how the Izu Peninsula juts dramatically out into the sea. Others point instead to the hot springs bubbling up across the peninsula. Either way, the name seems to describe something pushing its way up out of the ground.