Ramen, gyoza, and the everyday on a map — Introducing the Regional Statistics Heatmap

Now and then you see a news clip with a headline like "Yamagata is Japan's number-one city for ramen spending," or "Hamamatsu, Miyazaki, and Utsunomiya are trading the gyoza crown, year after year." These rankings are fun in themselves, but it is perhaps less widely known that the underlying numbers come from public statistics — chiefly the Family Income and Expenditure Survey published by Japan's Statistics Bureau.

To be honest, I have long been fascinated by this kind of data myself. While working a salaried job, I would spend weekends downloading survey files from the Statistics Bureau and from METI, loading them into spreadsheets, and sorting the columns to compare cities by "ramen spending per 1,000 people" or by "shop density." Back then the files were still old-style Excel workbooks: line up the columns, match the codes, and after a fair amount of patience a single ranking would finally take shape. It took effort, but I still remember how rewarding it was to feel the contours of each region emerge under my own hands.

The "joy of doing it by hand," brought onto a map

We have just added a feature to MAPRISE called the Regional Statistics Heatmap. Built on top of the Family Income and Expenditure Survey, it lets you see, as colour and bubble size on a map, how much each city spends or buys — across dining-out items such as ramen, gyoza, udon, and sushi, as well as everyday staples such as coffee, tea, alcohol, rice, and bread. The rankings I used to wrestle out of Excel now surface on a map of Japan just by picking a category and an item.

Pick "Chinese noodles (dining out)," for example, and Yamagata stands a head above the rest, with Niigata, Miyagi, and Fukushima following — Tohoku and Hokuriku cities stand out at a glance. Switch to udon and Takamatsu lights up; switch to shochu and the southern Kyushu cities of Miyazaki and Kagoshima deepen in colour. Looking at a map, rather than at rows of numbers, gives you a settled feeling — "ah, this food culture is rooted in this part of the country" — in a way that just lands.

These are not single-year snapshots either. Change the year, and you can trace how an item's consumption has shifted over time. Trends, fades, and regional changes come into view alongside the passing of years. Compared to my old habit of compiling a single year at a time by hand, this really does feel like a different era. The joy of those evenings has come back to me in a much easier form — and to be honest, I may have been the one most excited as we built it.

An era in which data is becoming "everyone's"

In recent years the government has become noticeably more positive about opening data and supporting wider use of statistics — what is often called the democratisation of data. Large-scale data that used to be the province of specialists is now being released in forms anyone can pick up. I think this is a very significant change.

That said, there is still a small gap between data being released and that data being something many people can actually enjoy or use. If valuable numbers are made open but still take specialist effort to work with, the benefit reaches only a limited audience. The democratisation of data, in my view, only fulfils its real meaning when it goes one step further — to the point where anyone can engage with it intuitively.

The Regional Statistics Heatmap was built with the modest hope of helping a little in that direction. No complicated operations are needed. Choose an item that catches your interest, look at the map, and you start to see how your own city differs from others. If you find yourself asking, "Why is this so common in this prefecture?", that is already a perfectly fine entry point for inquiry. When maps and numbers come together, our understanding of a region deepens a step, and the next question naturally forms. If the feature can become that kind of starting point for someone, nothing would make us happier.

Another window for getting to know a place

At its core, MAPRISE has been built for those involved in real-estate due diligence and area planning — a service that lets you check, on a single screen, the information that surrounds a piece of land or a building. We specialise in layering on a map the data that bears directly on professional decisions: land prices, zoning, hazard information.

While being that kind of practical tool, I also think MAPRISE can carry a second kind of window — one with the shoulders a little more relaxed, for simply getting to know a region, the way today's regional statistics feature does. Understanding a place, after all, becomes three-dimensional only when the hard information — prices, regulations — is combined with the softer texture of what the people there enjoy and how they live their days. A city where ramen runs strong, a region that buys a lot of tea, a prefecture where solar panels have taken root: these are also important pieces of what gives a place its character.

If the feeling I once had alone with a spreadsheet — the gradual emergence of a region's shape — can now be shared with more people, that would mean a great deal. With that in mind, we plan to keep projecting more of these everyday statistics onto the map. When the mood strikes, please come and look at your own city's "regional" side. There will, I think, be a new face to the place you already thought you knew. On a similar note of digging into a region's character, see our piece on solar PV and deforestation.

Sources

• Statistics Bureau of Japan — Family Income and Expenditure Survey: https://www.stat.go.jp/data/kakei/index.html
• Statistics Bureau of Japan — National Survey of Family Income, Consumption and Wealth: https://www.stat.go.jp/data/zenkokukakei/index.html
• Government Standard Terms of Use 2.0: https://www.digital.go.jp/resources/open_data/government_open_data_license_v20