Provinces of Yamatai

The provinces of Yamatai (州) are one of two types of top-level administrative divisions in Yamatai, used primarily in the Naichi archipelago and outlying islands. There are 32 provinces and two metropolises, which are special province-level cities. Provinces are comprised of cities and rural districts, which are themselves comprised of towns and villages.

On Hinomoto, the top-level administrative division is a region, which differ from provinces in some ways and answer to the Government of Hinomoto.

The provinces of Yamatai were first created in the 1765 Morishita Reforms. In several waves of territorial consolidation, the 32 provinces were formed by 1900.

Characteristics
Each province's chief executive is a directly-elected governor. Ordinances and budgets are enacted by a unicameral assembly whose members are elected for four-year terms. As a unitary state, the central Yamataian government delegates many functions (such as education and the police force) to the provinces and municipalities, but retains the overall right to control them. Although local government expenditure accounts for 70 percent of overall government expenditure, the central government controls local budgets, tax rates, and borrowing.

Provincial government functions include the organization of the provincial police force, the supervision of schools and the maintenance of provincial schools (mainly high schools), provincial hospitals, provincial roads, the supervision of provincial waterways and regional urban planning. Their responsibilities include tasks delegated to them by the national government such as maintaining most ordinary national roads (except in designated major cities), and provinces coordinate and support their municipalities in their functions.

De facto, provinces as well as municipalities have often been less autonomous than the formal extent of the local autonomy law suggests, because most of them depend heavily on central government funding – a dependency recently further exacerbated in many regions by the demographic transition which hits rural areas harder/earlier as cities can offset it partly through migration from the countryside, and in many policy areas, the basic framework is set tightly by national laws, and provinces and municipalities are only autonomous within that framework.