BestPlace lets you explore the living environment of any neighborhood in Japan simply by entering an address. We pull together open public data from multiple government sources and OpenStreetMap, and lay it all out on a single screen.
What you'll see
For any address, BestPlace shows you:
- Surrounding map with hazard map overlays
- Land prices & real estate — official assessments, transaction history, 10-year trends, zoning
- Condominium market — median prices filtered by size and building age
- Population & households — census data at the chōchōme (district) level
- Future population projections — 10/20/40-year change rates in 500m mesh units
- Disaster risk — flood depth, liquefaction tendency, landslide zones, evacuation sites
- School districts & education — elementary/junior high catchment areas and nearby schools/preschools
- Nearby facilities — stations, convenience stores, supermarkets, parks, schools, koban
- Medical facilities — hospitals, clinics, dental clinics with distance and specialty filters
- Road classification & traffic volume — congestion levels on arterial roads
On top of that, Claude AI generates a neighborhood summary (around 200–350 words) that captures the character of the area.
Our principle
BestPlace does not score or rate neighborhoods. Subjective judgments like "this is a good area" or "this place is hard to live in" should be made by the person who's going to live there. Our job is to organize public data without bias, so that you can make that judgment yourself.
That's why every data point links to its source agency and official URL — so you can always verify the original data yourself.
How to use
- Enter an address on the home page or your My Page search bar
- Scroll through the results from top to bottom and check whatever interests you
- Tap the "source" link in each section to go directly to the official data
First-time users get one free search on registration. After that, you can subscribe to a monthly plan or buy additional search tickets.
What's ahead
BestPlace will keep adding features. This blog is where we'll announce new capabilities, share details about our data sources, and post operational updates.
Thanks for trying us out — we look forward to building this with you.