
was a
town
A town is a type of a human settlement, generally larger than a village but smaller than a city.
The criteria for distinguishing a town vary globally, often depending on factors such as population size, economic character, administrative stat ...
located in
Sakata District,
Shiga Prefecture
is a landlocked prefecture of Japan in the Kansai region of Honshu. Shiga Prefecture has a population of 1,398,972 as of 1 February 2025 and has a geographic area of . Shiga Prefecture borders Fukui Prefecture to the north, Gifu Prefecture to th ...
,
Japan
Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...
.
As of 2003, the town had an estimated
population
Population is a set of humans or other organisms in a given region or area. Governments conduct a census to quantify the resident population size within a given jurisdiction. The term is also applied to non-human animals, microorganisms, and pl ...
of 12,212 and a
density
Density (volumetric mass density or specific mass) is the ratio of a substance's mass to its volume. The symbol most often used for density is ''ρ'' (the lower case Greek letter rho), although the Latin letter ''D'' (or ''d'') can also be u ...
of 285.46 persons per km
2. The total area was 42.78 km
2.
On February 14, 2005, Maihara, along with the towns of
Ibuki and
Santō (all from
Sakata District), was merged to create the city of
Maibara.
It has developed as a traffic junction. In
Edo period
The , also known as the , is the period between 1600 or 1603 and 1868 in the history of Japan, when the country was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and some 300 regional ''daimyo'', or feudal lords. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengok ...
, there were
Samegai-juku
Samegai-juku in Maibara from Ōmi-meisyo-zue (1814)
was the sixty-first of the sixty-nine stations of the Nakasendō highway connecting Edo with Kyoto in Edo period Japan. It was located in the present-day city of Maibara, Shiga Prefecture, Ja ...
and
Banba-juku
280px, Main Hall of Renge-ji in Banba-juku
was the sixty-second of the sixty-nine stations of the Nakasendō highway connecting Edo with Kyoto in Edo period Japan. It was located in the present-day city of Maibara, Shiga Prefecture, Japan.
...
. During the
Meiji period
The was an era of Japanese history that extended from October 23, 1868, to July 30, 1912. The Meiji era was the first half of the Empire of Japan, when the Japanese people moved from being an isolated feudal society at risk of colonizatio ...
, a large train station opened in the town, but it was named
Maibara, not Maihara (see
rendaku
is a pronunciation change seen in some compound words in Japanese. When rendaku occurs, a voiceless consonant (such as ) is replaced with a voiced consonant (such as ) at the start of the second (or later) part of the compound. For example, t ...
). Many Japanese people confused the town's name and the station's name, to the point where eventually, Maibara was adopted as the official name of the new, merged city.
References
Dissolved municipalities of Shiga Prefecture
{{Shiga-geo-stub