Another great site for kanji (you can search by english meaning, japanese pronunciation, or radical) is jisho .org which also has a people and place name dictionary.
I'm currently living in Japan and can tell you that besides the names of places, there are plenty of different terms for different administrative divisions. First off, japan is split into the "to-do-fu-ken". There are 43 ken, or prefectures with the -ken used as a suffix (aomori-ken, shizuoka-ken), 2 fu or urban prefectures (osaka-fu and kyoto-fu), one do or "circuit" (hokkaido), and one to or metropolis (tokyo-to). Within these larger divisions fall designated cities or shi (sapporo-shi, fukuoka-shi, nagoya-shi) and districts or gun (in aomori-ken we have kamikita-gun, higashi-tsugaru-gun etc.). Larger cities (Tokyo, Osaka, Sendai, etc.) are divided into wards or ku (Tokyo has Oota-ku, minato-gu, setagaya-ku etc.) while gun/districts are divided into towns (machi or cho) or villages (mura). The difference between machi and cho usually depends on whether the town is historically free-standing, or whether it is a conglomeration of older, smaller divisions. For example, next to my town, rokunohe-machi, is oirase-cho which used to be split into shimoda-machi and momoishi-machi.
Scriptkitty, whether you use higashi or tou for east depends on whether the word is part of a compound, or an adjective describing an existing place name. For example, Tokyo (a better transcription would be Toukyou) literally means Eastern Capital, so, being part of a compound the onyomi or "chinese" pronunciation of tou is used. In the example of higashi-tsugaru-gun, however, higashi is used to distinguish the eastern portion of the tsugaru region. To supplement what youve already posted, the onyomi for west is sei and for south is nan (or nam before p, b, n, or m). These onyomi can also be combined into quarter directions-- tohoku for northeast, seinan for southwest etc. but notice that e/w comes before n/s. As for "central" Chuuou means the center of something, so cities might have a chuuou-ku (central ward) or chuuou-dori (central avenue), but its not really found in place names. Naka is the kunyomi of the chuu portion of chuuou (中) and simply carries the meaning "middle". Kami (上) and Shimo (下) can also be used to mean upper and lower respectively. In Aomori-ken we have the kamikita (upper north) and shimokita (lower north) regions.
Many place names in japan are made out of the few geographic words (ishi-stone, yama- mountain, kawa or sawa- river etc.) but the region i live in also has a cirlcle of towns and cities named Xnohe. where X is a number 1-9 (except 4 which is homophonous with death) and he means door or gate (no is the possesive particle). Because the area used to be used for raising horses, the different paddocks/pastures through which the animals would rotate gave their name to a ring of towns. You could do the same thing with ports (ichinokou ninokou sannokou) or castles (ichinojou, ninojou, sannojou).
Another layer of Japanese naming are the many places in northern honshu and on hokkaido whose names come from the language of the native Ainu people. For example theres a city near me called towada, which is written with kanji (十和田) meaning "ten peaceful fields" but the actual Ainu meaning is lost-- the kanji only gloss the original pronunciation. You could transform foreign place names into Japanese though, as in Chicago becoming Shikagou (鹿郷) --Deer Township. This isnt how modern japanese deals with foreign place names, but is still kind of fun.
The best way to familiarize yourself with japanese place names and place name conventions is probably just to surf google earth or wikipedia-- pick a prefecture and go through the links to its constituent cities/districts/towns etc. The kanji are usually written right and the top, and you can look them up from there.
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