Loading data for JapanLining up the latest figures for all 47 prefecturesPulling together quakes, weather, and live camerasBuilding the map layers
About · Nippon Pulse
With a second child on the way, my wife and I were choosing where to build a house. Moving back and forth between real-estate sites, tourism portals, and government statistics, one thing kept nagging at me: you cannot see them side by side, on the same map, from the same point of view.
Nippon Pulse is the platform where I am giving that nagging feeling a shape, with the hands of a profession that reads numbers for a living.
100% of all prefectures
across 9 categories
sourced, by confidence
Big-4 audit firm
It started from a personal need. Ahead of our second child arriving in 2026, my wife and I began choosing an area for a house. Every time we found a municipality worth considering, we ended up reopening separate sites for its birth rate, daycare capacity, number of paediatricians, hazard map, land-price trend, and the frequency of trains within commuting range.
Existing services are split across real-estate listings, tourism portals, and government statistics, and reading them side by side from one point of view is far harder than it should be. Real-estate sites are designed around a sales call to action; government sites are siloed, cut up by department. In the gap between them, the thing a decision-maker actually wants — a map with sourced, parallel comparison — was missing entirely.
As a Certified Public Accountant, I spent more than 10 years at a Big-4 audit firm whose work was scrutinising how numbers are put together (what the denominator is, who is counted, where the timing gaps are). The most dangerous thing about reading numbers, I have learned, is that a single choice of how to line them up can flip the conclusion. So I go and fetch the data myself, examine it from the calculation method up, attach every source, and lay it back out. That is what I am building.
The development process is open as Build in Public on X (@NipponPulse01). Feature priorities are set by one question: would I want to use this for my own area search next week? The heaviest user is me.
These are the design decisions I have committed to keeping. They are not internal memos — they are the material by which you, the reader, can grade the operator.
The mission of this site is to keep transparent access to public data. So the act of browsing itself stays permanently free for the metrics, rankings, commentary, and every layer across the 47 prefectures. We do not blur the top or bottom, and we do not cap how often you can look. Keeping the data current, however, costs money. I (Atlas) designed two ways to cover that cost.
At the stage of looking for a property, we place external links to real-estate portals. Revenue may be returned to us on a transaction, but rankings and ratings are never linked to that revenue. Rankings are decided only by public data and the calculation method, and we list several portals regardless of whether there is a contract. You keep the choice of where to go.
Features that save you effort when you compare areas again and again — saving, comparing, alerts, export — are paid. The line we draw is to charge for saving effort, not for hiding data. Your support becomes the funding that keeps the free features in good shape. The breakdown is disclosed on the pricing page.
How far across the country, and to what depth, the data is in place. We disclose it without hiding anything. All figures are live measurements from the database we operate.
Prefecture-level metrics cover all 47 prefectures at 100%. Municipal-level coverage is deepest in Greater Tokyo and the designated and core cities, and is being extended outward in stages. The higher-computation axes (distortion z-scores, yield estimates, neighborhood-block scoring) are currently centred on Greater Tokyo; we present this honestly as an asset under construction rather than overstating its reach.
The interactive coverage map is available on the Japanese About page.
Nippon Pulse's data is taken from primary sources — the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, MLIT, the JMA, and others — and the operator, CPA Atlas, examines the metric selection, aggregation method, and direction (is higher or lower better?) one by one.
Because this is a solo project, there is no editorial board and no copy desk. That is precisely why we chose, instead of borrowing authority through a credential badge, to let readers verify through transparent sources. If something about a figure looks off, please send it through the feedback form.
The broad outline from Phase 1 to Phase 4+, laid out in time order. The detailed roadmap, down to individual tickets, is published at /roadmap.
Map, My Card, live cameras, and realtime visualisation shipped to production. Over the past month, expanded to commentary for all 47 prefectures, 42 metrics, and 164 major development plans.
My Map plus composite metrics (overlaying and weighting several metrics), integration of public live cameras, and page expansion to the ~50 major municipalities of Greater Tokyo.
Starting from designated and core cities and reaching all 1,724 municipalities. Original metrics whose calculation has been scrutinised from a CPA viewpoint — such as a Family-Friendly Index.
Life-event-driven presets for marriage, childbirth, schooling, employment, caregiving, and retirement, plus full integration of J-SHIS expected-intensity, flooding, and liquefaction risk.
API and CSV sales of cleansed data, B2B provision for real-estate firms, home builders, municipalities, and financial institutions, and the World Pulse concept (overseas expansion).
I am building this site for myself, but if it helps when you are choosing an area too, nothing would make me happier. Pointers like "this metric is missing" or "this calculation method would be better" feed directly into the development priorities.