About PharmaGap Tokyo
PharmaGap is a free tool for people who need to find a pharmacy in Tokyo and can’t take that access for granted — chiefly international residents navigating an unfamiliar medical system in a second language, and older residents for whom a nearby pharmacy is part of staying healthy. It maps pharmacies across Tokyo’s 23 special wards and helps you understand how the city’s prescription system works, so that filling a prescription is a solved problem rather than a source of anxiety.
Who we are
Built after school, in TokyoPharmaGap 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.
The problem
Access is highest where the need is lowestIn central Tokyo, you are rarely more than a few minutes from a pharmacy. In the outer wards, where many of the city’s oldest residents actually live, that is not true.
The pattern is close to the opposite of what people assume. Access is highest where the need is lowest, and lowest where the need is highest.
International residents hit a second barrier: a foreign prescription cannot be filled in Japan. You need a 処方箋 written by a Japanese doctor, 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 hard one.
The research behind it
A ward-level dataset, published in fullPharmaGap is built on an original ward-level dataset of pharmacy access across all 23 special wards, created by our co-founder Jackson Bomongcag and published on Harvard Dataverse. Anyone can download, inspect, and re-check the finding: doi:10.7910/DVN/JKNZOL ↗
Data sources
Public and open data, credited here and in the published datasetMap and software credits
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.
Partners
Projects we point people to
Where it’s going
A foundation, not a finished productThe 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.
The research is the why. The finder is the how.
Look up a verified pharmacy near you, or write to us with a question, a correction, or an offer to help.