The largest urban area in Japan is Tokyo, followed by Osaka–Kobe–Kyoto and Nagoya. Tokyo has 33.2 million people on 5,165 km² of built-up land. 9 urban areas in Japan have at least 1 million people or are a national capital; the table lists them all.
| # | City | Population |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tokyo | 33.2 million |
| 2 | Osaka–Kobe–Kyoto | 12.7 million |
| 3 | Nagoya | 7.72 million |
| 4 | Fukuoka | 2.21 million |
| 5 | Sapporo | 1.93 million |
| 6 | Sendai | 1.27 million |
| 7 | Kitakyushu | 1.21 million |
| 8 | Hiroshima | 1.15 million |
| 9 | Naha | 1.07 million |
Urban area = contiguous built-up land and the people living in it in 2025, drawn the same way for every city regardless of administrative boundaries. Source: GHSL Urban Centre Database R2024A, European Commission, Joint Research Centre (CC BY 4.0); some names adjusted to the city names people use, and country attribution follows the dataset.
Official city limits are drawn differently in every country: some take in farmland and mountains, others stop at the historic core. Ranking cities by those limits mostly ranks boundary decisions. These lists use the built-up area instead, so a city's figure includes its suburbs wherever they are continuous with it, and nothing beyond.
For figures inside official limits, see the city-limits rankings; for the background, read how to compare city sizes honestly. Click any city to see it on a map at the same scale as another.