We hold 854 Japanese accommodation records. 787 of them carry a usable photograph, which makes Japan one of the best-illustrated countries in our catalogue. Every one of the 854 carries coordinates. Not one carries a telephone number, a star rating, a description or a single amenity. And the field that ought to make them findable — the city — is broken in a way that is worth showing rather than working around, because it is the reason you cannot simply search this data for hotels in Tokyo.
Where these numbers come from. These are Wikidata records: building entries rather than business listings, metadata under CC0, photographs from Wikimedia Commons under their own individual licences. 521 of the 854 carry a website — a better rate than the 22% we manage for Britain from the same source, and the only contact channel any of them has. Queried 17 August 2026.
Chūō-ku means central ward, and every city has one
The single most common real place name in our Japanese data is Chūō-ku, on 32 records. It is not a city. It is the word for the central ward of a Japanese city, and a great many cities have one. Sorting those 32 records by latitude walks you 1,150 kilometres up the country:
And the same trap is set three more times. Minami-ku spans 34.34 to 42.97 degrees north, Kita-ku spans 34.67 to 43.17, Naka-ku spans 34.39 to 35.45 — south, north and middle wards respectively, each of them a generic label doing duty as a city. Chūō-ku and Chūō are also stored as two different values. Group this data by city and you will merge Sapporo with Kumamoto and split Tokyo from itself.
What the city field costs you
The clearest way to price the damage is to draw a box around the twenty-three wards of Tokyo and count what falls inside it. 171 records sit in that box. They carry 61 different city values between them, and exactly 5 of those records say Tokyo. Search our Japanese data for Tokyo and you will find 5 hotels out of 171 — a 3% recall rate. Kyoto is the same story on a smaller scale: 41 records inside the city, spread over 9 place names, of which 2 say Kyoto.
A further 153 records — 18% of the whole country — have the city value Unknown, the single largest bucket in the file. 144 of them are photographed and 48 of them are, by their coordinates, inside central Tokyo. They are not missing data so much as unlabelled data: the position is exact, the name of the place is simply absent.
Geography that does work
Coordinates are present on all 854 records and they are reliable, so every geography in this article is drawn from them. Grouping by metropolitan bounding box rather than by the city string:
Sapporo is the exception that proves the point: 22 records using just 2 city values, because Wikidata editors there settled on a convention. Osaka needs 23 values for 38 records, and Nagoya 21 for 32. Nothing about the buildings differs — only the labelling habits of whoever entered them.
Hotel or ryokan? The name is the only clue
There is no accommodation-type field on any Japanese record, so the only handle on what kind of place a record describes is the words in its name — which is a weak handle and should be treated as one. 371 names contain Hotel, 51 Hostel, 34 Resort, 17 Onsen and 12 Ryokan. 362 names — 42% — contain none of those words at all, because they are building names: Maruito Sapporo Building, Fujieda-juku, 2-1-17 Kitaueno. A ryokan that does not put the word in its name is indistinguishable here from an office block.
Three that the photographs are worth looking at for
Hōshi Ryokan at Awazu Onsen in Ishikawa, the Fujiya Hotel at Hakone, and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Each carries a photograph and a website and nothing else — no telephone number, no grade, no description. The websites are the properties’ own and are the place to check anything you plan around.
What we don’t know
- Whether any of these is open. There is no operating-status field. Wikidata records notable buildings, and notable buildings include closed, demolished, rebuilt and renamed ones. For 521 there is a website; check it.
- Whether a place is a hotel, a ryokan, a hostel or a converted warehouse. We infer from the name and the inference fails on 42% of the file. We do not hold the ryokan-versus-hotel distinction that matters most to anyone planning a trip to Japan.
- Anything about the rooms or the stay. No price, no star rating, no room count, no bathing arrangements, no meal plan, no accessibility, no telephone number. Every one of those fields is empty on every Japanese record.
- How to read the place names with confidence. Romanisation is inconsistent across the file, macrons are applied unevenly, and district names, ward names and city names all share the same column. This article routes around the city field rather than repairing it, and a reader who reads Japanese would find more in these records than we can.
- Whether the coverage means anything. 854 records is a fraction of Japan’s accommodation and it is shaped by which buildings Wikipedia editors chose to write about — architecturally or historically notable ones, and large chains. It is a heritage sample, not a market.
- When the photographs were taken. Commons images carry a date and range across two decades. The hero image on this page is from July 2026; many others are far older than that.
Sources
Building records from Wikidata under CC0; photographs via Wikimedia Commons, each under its own licence. Retrieved 17 August 2026: 854 active Japanese records, 787 with a usable photograph, 521 with a website, 0 with a telephone number, star rating, description or amenity; 389 distinct city values, of which Unknown is the largest at 153. Hero photograph: Hōshi Ryokan, Awazu Onsen, Komatsu, by 663highland, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, taken 19 July 2026.
More from the same catalogue
- Devon and Cornwall: 673 hotel buildings and almost nothing else — the same source and the same silence, with a bounding-box problem instead of a place-name one.
- Switzerland’s hotel stars: 60% of the register carries none — what a register looks like when it does carry grades.
- Where to sleep above 2,000 metres in South Tyrol — a register with altitude on nearly every row.
- Every Japanese property we hold — the destination page behind these counts.
