Collection scope and verification status

Nationwide meeting-level acquisition and verified coverage rates have not yet been established. A council with one stored record does not show how much of its records are available or verified. Scope, dates, document types, expected meetings, acquired meetings and verified meetings must be matched before publishing a rate.

261,689,817 speech records·Municipal 1,718/1,741·Prefectural 47/47·509,342 meetings·Data aggregated: 2026-11-09

Note: the denominator 1,788 counts real assemblies (1,741 municipal + 47prefectural), excluding six Northern Territories villages that have no functioning assembly. It matches the Ministry of Internal Affairs' conventional figure of "1,788 councils (1,718 municipalities + 47 prefectures + 23 special wards)".

Image for data coverage — PHOTO Illustration: Aerial view of rural Japan (AI-generated / national data coverage)

4-tier data acquisition model

Minutes availability varies widely by municipality. KOUSOU 0 classifies acquisition difficulty into 4 tiers and publishes the status and outstanding challenges for each tier transparently.

Tier A: Public minutes system not counted

Councils that publish HTML or PDF minutes on the web. Automatically acquired by crawler. The largest coverage tier.

Tier B1 / B1+ / B2: Parser required not counted

Minutes are publicly available but in a proprietary format (frameset HTML, legacy DOC) that requires a council-specific parser. Being acquired progressively.

Tier C: Disclosure request / paper records not counted

Councils with no web-published minutes. Records are extracted via information-disclosure requests under local ordinances, or from council bulletins and similar alternative sources.

Tier D: Video transcription not counted

Councils that only publish session recordings (e.g. YouTube). Minutes are obtained by transcribing the video with WhisperX.

Example: Iheya Village, Okinawa has no web-published minutes; the village assembly office kindly provided council bulletin PDFs. We plan to extend this model to other municipalities. Details will be published in our flagship reports.

Coverage by prefecture

Number of municipalities per prefecture registered in the KOUSOU 0 registry.

Prefecture	Municipalities

Indicators

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Corrections

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Collection scope and verification status

4-tier data acquisition model

Coverage by prefecture

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