Actually, that is not entirely correct...^-^

Within each prefecture, it has it's own city or 
cities, and each city within it's confines, has 
it`s own "wards" called (something)-ku.

Prefecture(ken), city(shi), ward (ku),...in that 
order.

Tokyo and Osaka are special cases. I think 
because they are so vast in size for cities, 
although they are too inside of their own 
respective prefectures Kanto and Kansai.

As pointed out Tokyo-to (and Osaka-fu).

For  Americans, a "prefecture" could be 
imagined to be a large county or even a State, 
but since the scale of that is ridiculous to 
compare given the geographical size of the 
USA, county would probably be a better 
comparison. Within these counties you have 
cities and further divided sections (ku).
There used to be an even further break-down 
in areas with another (cho) prefix and number 
pattern, but that has been mostly eliminated 
and postal prefixes have taken over "the 
slack". There are no street addresses in the 
since that Americans are used to. More like 
coordinate points. You can imagine what 
driving is like without a GPS tracking device!! 
Most places are found by road posts..." Make a 
left at that McDonalds, and then go straight 
until you see this funny crab-like thing on the 
right,," could be a typical description of how to 
get to some place. There is no 42nd street 
make a left,,,Chestnut drive make a right type 
of direction mapping...So driving or walking 
around searching for somewhere, well,,,it can 
become a nightmare ^-^! Even for Japanese!

E