Tony Wang9 min readTokyo vs. the Rest of Japan: Mapping Business Density and Web Presence
Tokyo holds 13.1% of Japan's 4.9M Google Maps listings and a 67% website rate vs. 57% nationally. We mapped all 47 prefectures.
Crawlora's US Google Business Profile census found the top 5 states hold 35.5% of every listing in the country — Texas and New York, not California, lead by raw count. Japan invites the same question with a much more obvious hypothesis going in: surely Tokyo, a metro area with the world's largest urban population, dominates the count even more than any single US state does. We pulled the full 47-prefecture breakdown from Crawlora's Google Maps dataset to check — and the concentration story is real, but it's not quite as extreme as the population numbers alone would suggest.
Tokyo's outsized share
Tokyo's 645,449 listings are more than 2.6 times Osaka's 243,306 — the widest single-prefecture-to-runner-up gap in the dataset. But zoom out to the top 5 (Tokyo, Osaka, Saitama, Aichi, Chiba, all in or adjacent to the Kanto and Kansai metro corridors) and they hold 31.7% of Japan's total listings combined — 1,557,449 of 4,912,075.
That's a genuinely counterintuitive result: Japan is less geographically concentrated in its top 5 regions than the US is, despite Tokyo alone housing a far larger share of national population than any single US state does. Two things can both be true — Tokyo dominates any single-prefecture comparison, and Japan's overall listing distribution across its top handful of regions is still slightly more even than America's.
Show all 47 prefectures
| Prefecture | Listings | Share of Japan total |
|---|---|---|
| Tokyo | 645,449 | 13.1% |
| Osaka | 243,306 | 5.0% |
| Saitama | 231,648 | 4.7% |
| Aichi | 230,579 | 4.7% |
| Chiba | 206,467 | 4.2% |
| Kanagawa | 202,828 | 4.1% |
| Hokkaido | 196,868 | 4.0% |
| Fukuoka | 176,180 | 3.6% |
| Hyōgo | 169,547 | 3.5% |
| Shizuoka | 136,253 | 2.8% |
| Ibaraki | 131,253 | 2.7% |
| Nagano | 116,888 | 2.4% |
| Kyoto | 101,145 | 2.1% |
| Gifu | 96,494 | 2.0% |
| Hiroshima | 96,251 | 2.0% |
| Niigata | 95,409 | 1.9% |
| Fukushima | 91,968 | 1.9% |
| Gunma | 86,499 | 1.8% |
| Tochigi | 84,422 | 1.7% |
| Okinawa | 84,064 | 1.7% |
| Miyagi | 84,035 | 1.7% |
| Mie | 80,584 | 1.6% |
| Kumamoto | 78,692 | 1.6% |
| Okayama | 74,250 | 1.5% |
| Kagoshima | 72,302 | 1.5% |
| Nara | 61,725 | 1.3% |
| Iwate | 61,283 | 1.2% |
| Yamaguchi | 60,816 | 1.2% |
| Nagasaki | 60,321 | 1.2% |
| Shiga | 58,967 | 1.2% |
| Ehime | 58,524 | 1.2% |
| Yamagata | 57,655 | 1.2% |
| Aomori | 57,501 | 1.2% |
| Yamanashi | 54,086 | 1.1% |
| Toyama | 53,701 | 1.1% |
| Ishikawa | 52,232 | 1.1% |
| Oita | 51,457 | 1.0% |
| Miyazaki | 51,244 | 1.0% |
| Wakayama | 49,045 | 1.0% |
| Akita | 48,042 | 1.0% |
| Kagawa | 42,810 | 0.9% |
| Saga | 42,690 | 0.9% |
| Fukui | 40,812 | 0.8% |
| Tokushima | 38,802 | 0.8% |
| Shimane | 33,411 | 0.7% |
| Kochi | 31,786 | 0.6% |
| Tottori | 27,888 | 0.6% |
Web presence has a geography too
Listing volume is one axis. Website coverage is another, and it doesn't move in lockstep with population density. We pulled website coverage for Tokyo, Osaka, and two very different non-metro prefectures — Hokkaido (Japan's largest and most rural prefecture by area) and Okinawa (a non-metro, tourism-heavy island chain) — against the 57.0% national average:
Tokyo and Osaka both run well above the national average, which fits a simple "metro businesses are more online" story. Hokkaido, three points below the national average, fits it too. Okinawa breaks it: despite being just as non-metropolitan as Hokkaido, it sits almost exactly on the national average rather than below it — plausibly because Okinawa's business mix skews toward tourism-facing categories (hotels, restaurants, tour operators) that tend to run higher website coverage than the trade and agricultural categories more common in Hokkaido. We don't have a category-level cut of each prefecture in this pass to confirm that directly, so treat it as a plausible explanation rather than a proven one — the honest finding is simply that "urban vs. rural" doesn't fully explain the spread.
What this means
If you're prioritizing where to sell local-SEO or web-presence services in Japan: Hokkaido's below-average website coverage (53.8%) combined with its meaningful listing volume (196,868, the 7th-largest prefecture) makes it a larger and more underserved market than its "rural" label might suggest — worth checking against Crawlora's Google Maps API filtered by prefecture and has_website=false before assuming the biggest opportunities are only in major metros.
If you're building on this data directly: every number in this post came from a live facet aggregation on the state field, filterable by the same country, state, and has_website parameters via datasets_google_map_search / datasets_google_map_facets. Full endpoint docs are at /docs/google-map.
If you want the US half of this comparison: The Google Business Profile Reputation Gap has the full 51-row US state breakdown this post's top-5 comparison draws from.
Methodology & data
Every figure in this post comes from a live facet aggregation (facet=state) against Crawlora's google-map-businesses dataset, filtered to country=Japan, pulled July 20, 2026. Website-coverage figures for individual prefectures use has_website=true combined with the relevant state filter. The facet call returns up to 50 distinct values; all 47 Japan prefectures resolved as distinct buckets within that limit, alongside a handful of near-zero foreign-city values (Seoul, Busan) that read as geocoding noise rather than genuine Japan listings, and roughly 3,760 listings (0.1% of the national total) fall outside the top 50 buckets returned. We treat that residual as an unresolved footnote rather than smoothing it into the prefecture totals.
This is a point-in-time crawl snapshot, not a government census — it measures what's indexed in Crawlora's Google Maps dataset, not a verified count of every business in Japan, and prefecture-level counts should be read as listing density in this crawl, not authoritative business-population figures. We publish aggregate rollups only; no individual business record from this dataset is exposed in this post.
Query Japan's Google Maps data by prefecture
4.9M+ Japan listings, filterable by prefecture, category, rating, and website presence — all 47 prefectures, over one REST API.
Frequently asked questions
Which Japanese prefecture has the most Google Maps business listings?
Tokyo, with 645,449 listings — 13.1% of Japan's 4,912,075 national total, more than 2.6x the second-largest prefecture, Osaka (243,306, 5.0%).
Does website coverage vary by region in Japan?
Yes: Tokyo runs 67.0%, Osaka 65.7%, the national average is 57.0%, Okinawa sits at 57.1%, and Hokkaido at 53.8%. It isn't a clean urban/rural split — Okinawa, a non-metro prefecture, matches the national average while Hokkaido, also non-metro, runs below it.
Is Japan's business landscape as concentrated in one region as the US is in its top states?
Slightly less concentrated. Japan's top 5 prefectures (Tokyo, Osaka, Saitama, Aichi, Chiba) hold 31.7% of all Google Maps listings, versus 35.5% for the US's top 5 states (Texas, New York, California, Florida, Pennsylvania) in Crawlora's companion census.
Are all of Japan's 47 prefectures represented in Google Maps business data?
Yes — every one of Japan's 47 prefectures appears as a distinct value in Crawlora's dataset, from Tokyo's 645,449 listings down to Tottori's 27,888. A small residual (about 3,760 listings, 0.1% of the national total) falls outside the top 50 facet buckets returned, alongside negligible geocoding noise from a couple of foreign cities.