Japan

[Allanton]

Hi, Looking for location where I can find GIS .shp files for Japan, i.e. 47 prefectures, grid squares, lat/long degrees and regions (think there are

Any help that points me in the right direction would be appreciated.

[Arimel]

While I am sure such files exist somewhere, I am not certain this is the best place to go looking for them. I know a couple of the users here use GIS but I think you would find a larger (and quicker) response from the ESRI or QGIS community pages or a similar site. They will have far more users who would engage with such files.

I hope somebody here proves me wrong but the other communities would be the first place I'd check.

[Tiana]

Get QGis, install the QuickOSM plugin from the plugin database, and that'll allow you to do an Overpass data pull from the OSM database. Be sure to set the timeout to a longer period in 'advanced' or it'll fail to get all the information from the database in time, I usually set it to 2000 seconds for something about this size.

You'll get the prefectures and regions with Boundary: Admin Level # pulls. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:admin_level to get you started on knowing which key you'll put in. And then you can make the layer permanent (right click, make permanent, set it to a place to save and give it a file type) and convert it to a .shp file there. You will need to credit OSM to use their database, but that's easily done.

Not sure about the long/lat lines, I think that'll probably be done by setting a projection in QGis, but the boundaries should take no more than 10-15 minutes to render into QGis once you set up the Overpass query correctly, which QuickOSM will mostly do for you, you just need to identify the right key to type in which should be "boundary" in the first box and then "administrative level (number)" in the second.