Okinawa Island compared with Tokyo’s 23 wards: area, population and density

Geography and shape

Okinawa Island is the largest island in the Ryukyu chain: long and narrow, with forested hills in the north and most towns and cities in the centre and south. Tokyo’s 23 special wards are a compact block on the Kanto Plain at the head of Tokyo Bay, almost entirely built up.

Population context

Tokyo’s 23 wards held 9,873,999 people (October 2024 estimate), about 7.3 times Okinawa Island’s 1,352,975 (resident register, January 2025). That works out to about 15,735 people per km² in the wards against about 1,120 on Okinawa Island.

Boundaries and definitions

Okinawa Island is the island’s own coastline (1,208.49 km², Geospatial Information Authority island table), not Okinawa Prefecture; its population, from the prefecture’s survey by island, also counts small bridge-linked islands, so its density reads about 2% high. Tokyo’s 23 wards (627.51 km²) is a Geospatial Information Authority reference value and excludes the rest of Tokyo Metropolis. The two population counts are three months apart.

Okinawa Main Island: The main island of Okinawa, not the whole prefecture. Area is the island's own coastline, so bridge-connected satellites such as Yagaji, Henza and Sesoko are counted separately by the mapping authority. The prefectural population survey does the opposite: it reports only islands not linked by bridge, so those satellites are folded into this figure. The density shown is therefore about 2% high; a like-for-like denominator would be roughly 1,237 km². The count is the resident register, which includes foreign residents but not US military personnel stationed on the island.

Tokyo 23 Special Wards: The 23 special wards only, not Tokyo Metropolis and not the wider Greater Tokyo area. The wards hold about 70% of the metropolis population on under 30% of its land; the metropolis additionally contains 26 cities, 13 towns and villages and the Izu and Ogasawara islands. The area is a Geospatial Information Authority reference value because five wards have partly undetermined boundaries, and it includes 4.68 km² of river-mouth and bay landfill not assigned to any individual ward. Daytime population is far larger than the resident count: the 2020 census recorded 12.35 million people in the wards on a weekday.