Checking a Tokyo neighborhood with data before you move
Apartment listings in Tokyo tell you the layout, the rent and the minutes to the station. They rarely tell you much about the surroundings, which is exactly what you notice once you have moved in. Public statistics can cover part of that gap. Here is how to use SHIZUAN when you are comparing places to live.
1. Open the exact spot
Most listing sites show a map. Copy that map link, or the latitude and longitude from a map app, and paste it into the search box on the map. The card for the neighborhood containing that point opens. You can also search by neighborhood or station name, in English or Japanese.
The link or coordinates you paste are read inside your browser and are not sent to or stored by this site. To draw the background map, though, your browser loads map tiles for the area on screen from the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (see the privacy policy).
2. For daily life, start with residential incidents
Switch the tab at the bottom to Residential incidents. The colors now follow reported incidents per 1,000 residents. This layer counts violent crimes and assaults, and adds burglary and theft of bicycles, motorcycles and cars, including theft from parked cars. Burglary carries a weight of five because it affects homes directly.
Per-resident figures come out high in central shopping and office districts, where few people live but many people pass through. That makes the layer most useful for comparing residential neighborhoods with one another, which is usually the real choice when you are apartment hunting. Neighborhoods with fewer than 100 residents are marked “Too few residents to show a figure”, because dividing by such a small number would be misleading.
3. For your commute, look at street incidents
The streets you walk every day are closer to what Street incidents describes: reported incidents per square kilometer. Check the neighborhoods between your front door and the station, not only the one your building is in. Station fronts often show up darker simply because so many people pass through them, so it helps to read your home block and the station area separately.
4. For evenings, look at estimated quietness
Estimated quietness is a 0 to 100 score built from commercial and industrial zoning, late-night venues, major roads and surface railways, and station ridership. A low score means the conditions for evening activity and traffic are all there. It is not a noise reading: a building on a main road and one on a side street in the same neighborhood can sound completely different. The details are in how the quietness estimate works.
5. Compare candidates on the same scale
All levels use one baseline, the median neighborhood in Tokyo's 23 wards, including for the Tama area in the west. That means you can compare an apartment in a central ward with one in a western suburb and the colors still mean the same thing. Within a level, the “× the median” figure on the card shows how far apart two candidates really are.
A practical way to compare a shortlist:
- note the residential and street levels for each address;
- note the quietness score;
- check the area, population and three-year total on each card, since tiny neighborhoods can move a lot with a few cases;
- look at the blocks around each address, not just the one it falls in.
Treat the result as a way to decide what to look into next, not as the answer.
6. What to check in person
No dataset replaces a walk around the block. Things worth checking yourself:
- how foot traffic changes between day and night, and between weekdays and weekends;
- how well lit the route from the station is, and whether there are shops or homes with people around;
- the building's own features, such as an auto-lock entrance, lighting in shared areas and soundproofing;
- nearby main roads, rail lines and the opening hours of bars or shops below or next door;
- local crime prevention notices from the city or ward office and the police.
The figures are summaries for whole neighborhoods and cannot describe a single building or street. Reported incidents are cases known to the police, and none of this guarantees anyone's safety. Use the map to narrow your list, then go and see.
A note for newcomers to Japan
If you are moving from abroad, the numbers can look alarming or reassuring depending on what you compare them with. Every level here is relative to Tokyo's 23 wards, not to your previous city. “Average” means typical for a neighborhood in Tokyo's 23 wards. Reading the three-year totals on the cards is the best way to get a feel for the actual scale.
For the basics of each layer, see how to read the map. Common questions are answered in the FAQ.