About this project
Purpose
Hinomi Map is an open data archive that plots fire incidents at Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, poultry farms, and pig farms in Japan on an interactive map. Its goal is to surface trends to support cultural property fire prevention and livestock biosecurity.
Scope
- Target facilities: temples, shrines, pig farms, poultry farms
- Target incidents: fires (ignition, spread, total loss, etc.)
- Time range: from 2015 to present
Out of scope: livestock infectious diseases, theft, and natural disasters (potential future extensions).
Data collection
Public news articles (e.g. Google News) are ingested on a regular schedule, and articles related to fires at temples / shrines / farms are extracted and placed on the map. When the same incident is covered by multiple outlets, the records are aggregated monthly into a single pin that retains every source link.
Coordinates are derived by extracting the prefecture and city from article titles and geocoding them via the GSI of Japan's address matching API. When a city is not present in the article, an approximate prefecture-level location is used.
Because the automatic ingestion is heuristic, unrelated articles (rites, rebuilds, retrospectives, fire drills, etc.) sometimes slip through. We remove them by hand as we notice them.
How to use
- Hover a pin on the map to see a summary.
- Click a pin to open the source article in a new tab.
- You can also reach each article from the list in the side panel.
- The filters let you narrow by type (religious / livestock), year range, and prefecture.
- Selecting a prefecture (from the dropdown or by clicking on the map) zooms into it; clicking the same prefecture again zooms back out.
Data policy
- Every record must include at least one source URL.
- Personal names (e.g. of priests or farm owners) are not recorded.
- Causes of fire are treated as secondary information based on news reports and police announcements, and definitive wording is avoided.
- For incidents under investigation we preserve hedged wording such as "suspected ...".
Disclaimer
This site organises secondary information from public news reports. While we take care to keep it accurate and up to date, we make no guarantees. Please always verify against the primary sources listed. See the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy for details.