日本を一周して にほんをいっしゅうして — Having Gone Round Japan

One 都, one 道, two 府 and forty-three 県

Four words for one kind of thing, and the reason is history rather than hierarchy. When the Meiji government replaced the domains with prefectures it kept 府 for the cities it considered most important — Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, the 三府 — and gave everywhere else 県. Hokkaido got 道, which is not a modern invention at all: 道 was an administrative circuit in the ancient system of 五畿七道, and the name 北海道, the northern sea circuit, was coined in 1869 when the island was annexed and renamed. Tokyo stopped being a 府 in 1943, when the prefecture and the city were merged into 東京都 under wartime administration, which is why the capital alone carries 都. That leaves one 都, one 道, two 府 and forty-three 県, and the total of forty-seven is a number worth knowing because it is the frame of every conversation about where somebody is from. Note what speakers do with it: the suffix gets dropped for the famous ones — you say 大阪 and 京都, not 大阪府 and 京都府 — while the less famous keep theirs, so 山形県 and 鳥取県 stay whole. And nobody says 北海道県, because the 道 is already in the name.