GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT JAPANESE MOTORCYCLE PLATES

  Japanese moped/motorcycle plates are issued at various government levels.

 This means they are issued by villages, towns and cities.

       CITY     -        市    -    SHI

 NONOICHI SHI

Some of the larger cities are divided into sections called wards.

     WARD   -    区     -     KU

      TOWN   -    町   -    MACHI or CHO  

Japanese towns are either called machi or cho depending on what part of Japan you are in. The map below shows where cho is used and where machi is used . The red areas use machi, the dark blue/green use cho and the light green is a mixture of both usages.

There are exceptions to these divisions but basically the west of Japan is cho and the east is machi

 VILLAGE   -   村   -   MURA

These plates are issued for three different size classes of motorcycles- blue on white for under 50cc; blue on

 yellow for 51-90cc and blue on pink for 91-125cc. As can be seen above there are new colourful additions to

 some of these plates.

As there are larger size motorcycles there are plates issued for them. I'm not totally sure how they are issued but

 they seem to be issued at the city level, ward level and maybe by region.

250cc or larger

125cc-249cc