Campsites and motorhome services in Japan

What is on this map

Every point comes from open map data, surveyed and recorded by the people who drive these roads. That makes it different from a campsite directory in two ways worth knowing before you use it: nobody paid to be on it, and nobody is checking it. A site that closed last autumn may still be here; a farm that opened this spring may not.

Of the 64,404 places in Japan, 20,330 carry a name. The rest are a category and a coordinate — a tap marked "drinking water", a lay-by with a view — which is often all you need, and never enough to phone ahead.

The three things a van needs

Somewhere to sleep. 1,999 campsites and caravan sites, from municipal fields to full-service parks. The table below lists the 60 the map knows most about — a name, an opening season, a capacity, whether there is water on site.

Water in, waste out. 8,440 drinking-water points and 3 dump stations. This is the half no travel site publishes and the half that decides how long you can stay out: a dump station is the difference between three days and three weeks. Where the tags say a tap is not drinkable, the table says so.

A reason to be there. 6,246 viewpoints — the places somebody thought were worth marking on a map for the view alone.

Coverage is uneven, and honestly so

People map what they visit. Tokyo alone accounts for 8,213 of the places in Japan, which says as much about who surveys there as about where the good stopping places are. A blank area on this map has probably never been walked with a phone in hand — it is not evidence that there is nothing there.

Before you drive

Check the access tag before you commit a seven-metre van to a track: private and customers mean what they say. Check the season — a lot of the best sites in the mountains are open five months of the year. And check the height of anything you have to pass under on the way, which is the other half of this site.