About PharmaGap Tokyo

In central Tokyo, you are rarely more than a few minutes from a pharmacy. In the wards where many of the city’s oldest residents actually live, that is not true — and until this project, almost no one had measured the gap.

The pattern is close to the opposite of what people assume. The central business districts are dense with pharmacies but home to relatively few elderly people, because the residents there skew young. The outer wards to the north and east are older, more working-class, and thinner on pharmacies relative to the number of people who depend on them. Access is highest where the need is lowest, and lowest where the need is highest.

This matters most for two groups. Older residents use a disproportionate share of prescription medication and manage more ongoing conditions, so distance to a pharmacy is not a minor inconvenience — it is a recurring obstacle to staying on treatment. For international residents, the barrier is different but compounding: a foreign prescription cannot simply be filled in Japan. A prescription 処方箋 written by a Japanese physician is required, the clinic that prescribes and the pharmacy that dispenses are usually separate places, and much of the process assumes fluent Japanese. Add a scarce local pharmacy to that, and a routine errand becomes a genuinely hard one.

Japan is also the oldest large society in the world — roughly 29.4% of the national population was aged 65 or older as of September 2025, per the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications — and Tokyo’s aging share is projected to keep climbing. A gap that is already real today widens as the population ages. That is the problem PharmaGap exists to make visible and, eventually, to help close.

PharmaGap is not built on impressions. It is built on an original, ward-level analysis of pharmacy access across all 23 special wards — the first study of its kind to weigh pharmacy availability against the specific vulnerability of each ward’s population, rather than just counting pharmacies.

The analysis identified six wards that qualify as pharmacy deserts under every version of the test we ran, and two more that qualify under some treatments of the data but not others. Together these wards form a connected belt across Tokyo’s outer north and east: the same areas that carry some of the city’s oldest and most internationally diverse populations.

The full dataset behind this finding is published in Harvard Dataverse with a permanent digital identifier: doi:10.7910/DVN/JKNZOL ↗

That link matters more than it might look. Publishing to Harvard Dataverse means the finding is not a claim on a website that could quietly change — it is a citable, versioned, publicly downloadable dataset that any researcher, journalist, or ward official can inspect, reuse, and check for themselves. The DOI is permanent and points to the exact data and methodology the finding rests on. If you want to verify what this page says, you can go to the source and do it.

We would rather show you less and have it be true than show you more and have it be wrong.

The map displays the location of every pharmacy in the registry. But two of the fields people most want — opening hours and language support (whether staff can help in English, Chinese, or Korean) — are only shown where we have actually verified them. Where we haven’t, the field is left blank. We do not fill gaps with guesses, estimates, or scraped values we can’t stand behind.

This is a deliberate choice, and it has a real cost: parts of the tool will look incomplete, because they are. We think that’s the right trade. A blank “hours not yet verified” is honest and harmless; a confidently wrong closing time that sends an elderly resident to a locked door is not. Verification is expanding ward by ward, and coverage will grow over time — but it will grow honestly.

The datasets published by PharmaGap are made available under terms that respect each source’s license; full attribution and licensing details accompany the dataset in Harvard Dataverse.

The goal is larger than a map. It is to make healthcare in Tokyo genuinely navigable for the people who currently have to work hardest to use it — to turn “I don’t know where to go or how this works” into a few clear steps.

The project is growing in three directions at once:

• Verification is expanding across the wards, so that hours and language support are confirmed for more pharmacies over time.
• The tool itself is being built out around the research, so the finding becomes something you can act on, not just read about.
• The underlying method is designed to be repeatable, so the same analysis could extend to other cities as the work matures.

PharmaGap is an ongoing project, and it is early. What exists today — a published dataset, an honest map, and a clear account of how Tokyo’s pharmacy access actually breaks down — is a foundation, not a finished product.

PharmaGap Tokyo is built by two high-school students — the research, the dataset, and the finder you’re using now.

Questions, corrections, or an offer to help? See the Contact page — there’s a path for each.