Tony Wang11 min readShrines, Temples, and Ramen Shops: What Google Maps Calls a 'Business' in Japan
6 of Japan's top 10 Google Maps categories by volume aren't businesses — they're shrines, temples, parks, and apartment blocks.
Pull the 50 largest Google Maps categories in the US and you get a commercial landscape: banks, insurance agencies, pizza restaurants, dentists. Run the same query scoped to country=Japan in Crawlora's Google Maps dataset and the picture changes entirely. 6 of Japan's top 10 categories by listing count aren't businesses at all. They're shrines, temples, historic sites, parks, apartment buildings, and community centers — places, not commerce.
That's not a data error. It's what Google Maps actually indexes in Japan, where shrines and temples are civic landmarks with their own listed hours, ratings, and reviews, right alongside the ramen shop next door. We pulled the numbers to see exactly how far the pattern goes, and it goes further than "a few temples show up" — it reshapes what "top category" even means.
What's actually in the top 10
Only beauty salons, construction companies, izakaya, and corporate offices are recognizably commercial. The other six are places you visit, live in, or pass through — not places you patronize. Widen the lens to the top 50 and the pattern holds at scale: 778,858 of the 1,941,910 listings in Japan's top 50 categories — 40.1% — are non-commercial places, not businesses.
Sacred spaces outnumber the food scene
Here's a comparison that captures the scale of it: add up every shrine, temple, historic site, and park in the top 50, and you get 304,794 listings. Add up every restaurant, cafe, bar, and izakaya category in the same top 50, and you get 250,370. Japan's Google Maps data has more shrines-and-scenery than it has places to eat and drink, among its most heavily mapped categories:
This isn't a claim that Japan has more sacred sites than restaurants in reality — it's a statement about what Google Maps chooses to index as a discrete, rateable location. Shrines and temples get the same treatment as a business: a pin, opening hours, a star rating, and a review count. That civic-landmark-as-listing pattern is far more pronounced in Japan's data than in the US or UK cuts of the same dataset, where the top categories are almost entirely commercial.
We can sanity-check the shrine and temple counts against real-world figures. Japan's Association of Shinto Shrines reported approximately 81,248 registered shrines nationally as of 2022, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs put the Buddhist temple count at approximately 77,256 in 2021. Crawlora's dataset independently counts 73,704 shrines and 69,651 temples — about 90% of each official figure, entirely through a Google Maps crawl with no religious-registry data involved. That's a strong completeness signal for the underlying dataset, not just a curiosity about Japan's religious geography.
A crack in Google's own category taxonomy
Look closely at the top 10 chart and four labels stand out for a different reason: shinto_shrine, buddhist_temple, and (further down the top 50) place_of_worship and atm are raw English, snake_case tokens — not Japanese labels. Every other category in Japan's top 50, from 美容院 (beauty salon) to 建設請負業者 (construction contractor), is a proper localized Japanese term. These four are not: 216,614 listings total carry a category value that looks like an internal Google Places API type code that never got localized for the Japan-language surface.
This is a Google-side data quality artifact, not a Crawlora extraction bug — but it's a real gotcha for anyone building a cross-language product on Google Maps category data. A naive "does this category contain religious/tourism keywords" filter written against English category names would silently miss every shrine and temple in the Japan-language dataset, because they're tagged with the same raw token as the ATMs. Anyone normalizing categories across countries needs to check for this kind of leak explicitly, rather than assuming category taxonomy is uniformly localized per market — it isn't.
Show all 50 categories
| Category | Listings | Type |
|---|---|---|
| 美容院 (Beauty salon) | 97,090 | Business |
| 史跡 (Historic site) | 83,649 | Place |
| 公園 (Park) | 77,790 | Place |
| shinto_shrine (untranslated) | 73,704 | Place |
| buddhist_temple (untranslated) | 69,651 | Place |
| 建設会社 (Construction company) | 69,159 | Business |
| 集合住宅 (Apartment complex) | 68,175 | Place |
| 居酒屋 (Izakaya) | 61,276 | Business |
| コミュニティ・センター (Community center) | 59,970 | Place |
| 企業のオフィス (Corporate office) | 55,132 | Business |
| atm (untranslated) | 50,739 | Place |
| 駐車場 (Parking lot) | 49,423 | Place |
| 歯科医院 (Dental clinic) | 48,806 | Business |
| 理容店 (Barber shop) | 45,775 | Business |
| カフェ・喫茶 (Cafe) | 45,364 | Business |
| バス停 (Bus stop) | 42,290 | Place |
| バー (Bar) | 39,941 | Business |
| コンビニエンスストア (Convenience store) | 39,637 | Business |
| エステティック・サロン (Esthetic salon) | 36,944 | Business |
| 調剤薬局 (Pharmacy) | 35,478 | Business |
| 保育園 (Nursery school) | 34,872 | Business |
| 公衆トイレ (Public toilet) | 34,845 | Place |
| クリニック・医院・診療所 (Clinic) | 34,623 | Business |
| スーパーマーケット (Supermarket) | 32,142 | Business |
| 介護施設 (Elder care facility) | 30,989 | Business |
| 不動産仲介業 (Real estate agency) | 30,660 | Business |
| 製造元 (Manufacturer) | 30,646 | Business |
| ラーメン屋 (Ramen shop) | 30,169 | Business |
| レストラン (Restaurant) | 30,050 | Business |
| 衣料品店 (Clothing store) | 28,876 | Business |
| 電気自動車充電スタンド (EV charging station) | 27,948 | Place |
| 観光名所 (Tourist attraction) | 27,289 | Place |
| 電気工 (Electrician) | 27,059 | Business |
| 自動車販売店 (Car dealer) | 26,686 | Business |
| ロジスティクスサービス (Logistics service) | 26,400 | Business |
| 税理士 (Tax accountant) | 25,711 | Business |
| 倉庫 (Warehouse) | 25,230 | Business |
| クリーニング店 (Dry cleaner) | 24,987 | Business |
| 協会・組織 (Association / organization) | 24,975 | Place |
| コーヒーショップ・喫茶店 (Coffee shop) | 23,209 | Business |
| 廃棄物リサイクル業 (Waste recycling) | 22,722 | Business |
| place_of_worship (untranslated) | 22,520 | Place |
| 市役所・区役所 (City / ward office) | 22,395 | Place |
| 郵便局 (Post office) | 22,266 | Place |
| 指圧・マッサージ (Shiatsu / massage) | 21,564 | Business |
| 月極駐車場 (Monthly parking) | 21,229 | Place |
| (uncategorized) | 20,843 | Unknown |
| 建設請負業者 (Construction contractor) | 20,715 | Business |
| 中華料理店 (Chinese restaurant) | 20,361 | Business |
| レンタカー (Car rental) | 19,936 | Business |
What this means for anyone scraping or filtering Google Maps data
If you're building anything on Google Maps category data — a lead list, a competitive map, a local-SEO tool — and it needs to work across countries, don't assume "top categories" means "top businesses" outside markets you've explicitly checked. Two concrete filtering rules fall out of this data:
Exclude places, not just POIs you already knew about. The usual point-of-interest denylist (bus stops, ATMs, parks) needs Japan-specific additions: shrines, temples, historic sites, apartment complexes, and community centers all rank in the top 10 by volume here and would badly skew a "most common business type" ranking if left in. Crawlora's own /local-business-index and review-depth study both apply this filtering before ranking categories — this post deliberately did not, to show what the unfiltered picture looks like.
Don't filter by category name alone across languages. A keyword filter built against English category strings will miss the untranslated tokens hiding inside Japan's dataset (and vice versa for other non-English markets) — check for raw English/snake_case leakage explicitly rather than assuming every market's category field is uniformly localized.
If you need this filtering already handled, Crawlora's Google Maps API exposes the same category facet used in this post, filterable by exact value, so you can build your own denylist or allowlist directly against live data instead of a static snapshot.
Methodology & data
Every figure in this post comes from a live facet aggregation (facet=category) against Crawlora's google-map-businesses dataset, filtered to country=Japan, pulled July 20, 2026, covering the 50 largest categories by listing count. "Business" vs. "Place" classification is a manual read of each category's real-world nature (a judgment call, not a field in the dataset) — categories genuinely ambiguous between the two (nursery schools, elder-care facilities, post offices) were classified by whether the location is primarily a commercial service (business) or a civic/public site (place); a full uncategorized bucket (20,843 listings with no category value) is shown separately and excluded from both totals. Shrine and temple counts are cross-checked against publicly reported 2021–2022 figures from Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs and the Association of Shinto Shrines, cited below — those are third-party figures, not independently verified by Crawlora, and the ~90% coverage comparison is directional, not an exact reconciliation.
This is a point-in-time crawl snapshot, not an authoritative registry of Japan's religious or civic sites. We publish aggregate rollups only; no individual business or place record from this dataset is exposed in this post.
Query Japan's Google Maps category data directly
4.9M+ Japan listings across every category — filterable by exact category value, prefecture, rating, and website presence, over one REST API.
Frequently asked questions
Are shrines and temples listed as businesses on Google Maps in Japan?
Yes. Crawlora's Google Maps dataset separately categorizes 73,704 Shinto shrines and 69,651 Buddhist temples in Japan — combined with historic sites and parks, these four place categories (304,794 listings) outnumber every restaurant, cafe, bar, and izakaya category combined (250,370) among Japan's top 50 Google Maps categories by volume.
Why do some Google Maps categories in Japan appear in English instead of Japanese?
4 of Japan's top 50 categories — shinto_shrine, buddhist_temple, place_of_worship, and atm — are raw English/snake_case Google Places API tokens that were never localized into Japanese, covering 216,614 listings combined. Every other top-50 category has a proper Japanese label. This is a gap in Google's own category taxonomy, not a Crawlora extraction issue.
What percentage of Google Maps listings in Japan are non-commercial places?
40.1% (778,858 of 1,941,910) of listings across Japan's 50 largest Google Maps categories are non-commercial places — shrines, temples, historic sites, parks, apartment buildings, bus stops, ATMs, and government offices — rather than active businesses.
What are the most common actual business categories on Google Maps in Japan?
Excluding non-commercial places, Japan's largest business categories on Google Maps are beauty salons (97,090 listings), construction companies (69,159), izakaya (61,276), corporate offices (55,132), and dental clinics (48,806).