How Japan Neighborhoods Calculates Safety Scores and Crime Statistics

Japan Neighborhoods builds its safety grades from Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department incident data covering 2018–2024, then normalizes each neighborhood by population so areas of different sizes can be compared. The site reports 70,081 recorded incidents for 2024 across 3,110+ Tokyo neighborhoods, and expresses results as a letter grade (A–F) alongside a rate per 1,000 residents — for example, Suginami's 4.4 incidents per 1,000. Grades are relative rankings within Tokyo, not absolute judgments about any single block.

Where the Data Comes From

The site names three official sources, each feeding a different part of the picture:

The seven-year window (2018–2024) means the site can show trends rather than a single snapshot, though the headline figures on the homepage are pinned to the most recent full year, 2024.

How the Safety Grade Is Built

The methodology implied by the published figures works in three steps:

1. Count recorded incidents in each neighborhood from police data.
2. Divide by population from census data, scaled to incidents per 1,000 residents. This is why the site shows both a letter and a number — Suginami is "A, 4.4/1K," Setagaya "A, 4.8/1K."
3. Assign a letter grade by ranking neighborhoods against each other across Tokyo. The homepage list runs from Suginami (A, 4.4) down through Ota and Meguro (B, 5.5–5.7) to Chiyoda (F) and Shinjuku (F), so grades track the per-1,000 rate in order.

Two consequences follow from this design. First, a grade tells you where a neighborhood sits within Tokyo, not how it compares to Osaka or to international cities. Second, because the denominator is resident population, areas with heavy daytime foot traffic but few residents — central business districts like Chiyoda — can look worse than their street-level feel suggests. Treat grades as a screening tool, then check the underlying incident counts and the interactive map for the specific streets you care about.

Reading the Ward Rankings

The 23-ward list is effectively a leaderboard of the same metric aggregated upward:

• A grades: Suginami, Setagaya, Nerima
• B grades: Ota, Meguro, Shinagawa, Itabashi, Edogawa, Nakano, Arakawa, Katsushika, Kita, Adachi, Bunkyo, Koto
• C–D grades: Sumida, Minato, Taito, Toshima, Chuo, Shibuya
• F grades: Chiyoda, Shinjuku

The pattern — western residential wards at the top, central commercial wards at the bottom — is consistent with a per-resident denominator, which is worth remembering before drawing conclusions about any individual ward.

What Else the Same Data Powers

• Interactive crime map: all 3,110+ neighborhoods color-coded by grade, useful for comparing adjacent areas rather than whole wards.
• Cheapest places to live: ward-level property prices from MLIT transactions, combined with safety into a Value Index that weighs affordability against the safety grade.
• Neighborhood pages: each ward breaks down into individual neighborhoods with their own statistics, so you can drill below the ward average.

If you are using the site to shortlist an area, the practical sequence is: start from the ward ranking, open the crime map to compare specific neighborhoods within a ward, then cross-check property data if cost matters. The site also links to English-speaking agents and hotel search, but those are commercial additions — the safety figures themselves rest on the three government sources above.