[self-promotion] Japan’s Tourist Rules As A Dataset: Fines, Statute/ordinance Level, Issuing Authority, Source URL And Verified Date Per Row (Gion Photo Ban, Shibuya Street Drinking, Osaka Smoking, Nara Deer, Tax-free). 17 Rows, CC BY 4.0, JSON + CSV

Disclosure: I run genchijapan.com. This is my own dataset.

What it is

A table of the rules foreign visitors keep asking about in Japan — is Gion closed to photos, can you drink on the street in Shibuya, is there a fine for smoking in Osaka, what the tax-free refund rules actually say — with the things that are usually missing from English answers:

• level — national law / prefectural ordinance / city ordinance / district rule with no statutory force (e.g. a neighbourhood council’s posted ¥10,000 “fine”)
• authority — who issued it
• penalty and since — fine amount and effective date
• source — URL of the primary source (e-Gov statute text, ministry or city page) or, where the issuer has no web page, press coverage
• verified — date a human last checked the row against the source

Manners are excluded on purpose: they can’t be sourced.

Honest limits

• 17 rows across 7 areas. Small. Rows are added as I verify them, not scraped.
• A few rows (mainly Gion) cite press instead of the issuing body, because the district council publishes nothing online. source_label tells you which.
• verified is a date, not a guarantee. Rules change.

Links

• GitHub (JSON + CSV + schema): https://github.com/genchijapan/japan-tourist-rules
• Live JSON, CORS-enabled: https://genchijapan.com/rules.json

CC BY 4.0. Corrections with a source URL are the most useful thing you can send me.