JIVX

Every year's ten most popular Japanese given names, 1912-2025, drawn as one register. From 1921 to 1956 not one name in the girls' top ten ended in anything but 子.

Ride the Yamanote line through a voxel Tokyo synced to Japan's real clock, weather, and seasons. A lofi bed plays while N5 sentences are read aloud and drift by as subtitles - an ambient Japanese study room you just press play into.

Japan's 1,300-year-old almanac divides the year into 72 five-day micro-seasons (七十二候). See all of them on a wheel, find today's, learn its words - and watch which ones the climate has pulled out of sync since 1953.

In 1872 Japan had a single railway line. Today the map carries more than 9,000 stations. Drag through 150 years and watch the network fill in - an interactive data map of every Japanese train station with a recorded opening date.

Every daimyō in Edo-period Japan had to march to the capital every other year, his family held hostage in the city. An interactive map of 260 domains - each sized by its rice income and tethered to Edo by the road it walked - and what that journey cost.

For 70 years a Japanese first-grader's randoseru came in two colours: red for girls, black for boys. Nine years of purchase data show the binary breaking into a spectrum.

The peak bloom date of Kyoto's cherry trees has been recorded for 1,200 years - the longest continuous record of any natural phenomenon on Earth. A close look at the data.