We take indicators from public statistics — the World Bank, Our World in Data, and Japan's e-Stat — select them editorially, and shape them into year-by-year rankings published in both Japanese and English. There are two families: rankings of countries, and rankings of Japan's 47 prefectures. Every figure is generated mechanically from a specification file; none is typed by hand.

The centre of each page is not the table but the commentary beneath it. We examine whether the data can be taken at face value, and set out what the source does not tell you — stretches filled in by interpolation, steps caused by a change in statistical classification, outliers that do not match their neighbours by an order of magnitude, units of collection that do not line up — with the actual numbers attached.

World rankings generally keep the top 30 countries by the most recent year's value. Because of that cut, a country that was once among the largest does not appear if its latest figure is low. Japan's absence from many world rankings has the same cause: it falls outside the cut, not that data is missing.

What we include, how it is processed, how our original composite metrics are calculated, and which automated checks every page must clear before publication are all set out on the Data Policy & Methodology page.

Data Policy & Methodology · About the editor