was a
town
A town is a human settlement. Towns are generally larger than villages and smaller than cities, though the criteria to distinguish between them vary considerably in different parts of the world.
Origin and use
The word "town" shares an ori ...
located in
Haga District, lying in the extreme south-east of
Tochigi Prefecture
is a prefecture of Japan located in the Kantō region of Honshu. Tochigi Prefecture has a population of 1,943,886 (1 June 2019) and has a geographic area of 6,408 km2 (2,474 sq mi). Tochigi Prefecture borders Fukushima Prefecture to the ...
,
Japan.
As of 2006, the town had an estimated
population
Population typically refers to the number of people in a single area, whether it be a city or town, region, country, continent, or the world. Governments typically quantify the size of the resident population within their jurisdiction using a ...
of 16,765 and a
density
Density (volumetric mass density or specific mass) is the substance's mass per unit of volume. The symbol most often used for density is ''ρ'' (the lower case Greek letter rho), although the Latin letter ''D'' can also be used. Mathematical ...
of 300.52 persons per km
2. The total area is 55.45 km
2, spanning 14 km east–west and 9 km north–south at its widest points.
On March 23, 2009, Ninomiya was merged into the expanded city of
Mo'oka.
Ninomiya commonly means "the second shrine" of the
province
A province is almost always an administrative division within a country or state. The term derives from the ancient Roman '' provincia'', which was the major territorial and administrative unit of the Roman Empire's territorial possessions ou ...
, but this town is named after an 18th-century hero,
Ninomiya Sontoku
, also known as Ninomiya Kinjirō (二宮 金次郎), was a Japanese agriculturalist. He lost his parents when he was a boy, but through hard work and diligence, he rebuilt his fallen family at the age of 20. Later, he rebuilt approximately 600 v ...
. There is a museum dedicated to the town's namesake in the area of Ninomiya known as Monobe.
The town of Ninomiya was formed in 1955 when the town of
Kugeta (久下田) and the two villages of
Monobe (物部) and
Naganuma (長沼) merged to form a single administrative area. The train station (serving the
Mooka Line) still bears the name of
Kugeta. A popular tourist attraction is the local
steam train
A steam locomotive is a locomotive that provides the force to move itself and other vehicles by means of the expansion of steam. It is fuelled by burning combustible material (usually coal, oil or, rarely, wood) to heat water in the locomot ...
which stops at Kugeta on its route to and from
Shimodate (下館) and
Motegi (茂木).
Ninomiya was the largest producer of
strawberries in Japan, and many of the town's inhabitants are involved in the cultivation of this fruit.
External links
Mooka official website
Dissolved municipalities of Tochigi Prefecture
Mooka, Tochigi
{{Tochigi-geo-stub