How to use VisitHero

Finding the nearest place on foot

Tap one of the need buttons — toilet, smoking area, luggage locker, free Wi-Fi, ATM, pharmacy, police box — and the map moves to the closest one and shows how far it is and roughly how many minutes it takes to walk there. Distances assume about 80 metres a minute, which is an ordinary walking pace with luggage.

The walking range buttons (5, 15 and 30 minutes) change how far the nearby list looks. If nothing appears within your range, that means nothing of that type is recorded near you, not that the area is empty — move the map to a station or a main street and try again.

The nearby list is measured from your device location when you allow it, and from the centre of the map when you do not. The panel always states which of the two it is using, so a result is never ambiguous.

Smoking in Japan without getting fined

Many Japanese city centres prohibit smoking while walking on the street, and the fine is issued on the spot. The rule is set by each municipality, not nationally, so it changes as you cross a ward boundary. Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Shimonoseki, and several Tokyo and Osaka wards all run their own designated-area systems.

VisitHero shows both sides of this: roughly 330 designated smoking areas where smoking is permitted, and the no-smoking street zones where it is not. Each zone card links to the ordinance page the information came from, so you can check the original rule.

Indoor smoking is a separate matter governed by the Health Promotion Act: most restaurants and cafés are non-smoking inside unless they have a dedicated smoking room. Heated-tobacco products are treated as smoking in most street ordinances.

Toilets, and which ones you can actually use

There are roughly 5,600 toilets in the dataset, drawn from OpenStreetMap and municipal open-data registers. Where the source states it, a card also shows which floor the toilet is on and which building it is inside — the part that actually gets you through the door once you have arrived.

Convenience stores are often the real answer late at night, but not every branch opens its toilet to the public, so ask the staff rather than assuming.

For accessibility, the nearby list has a step-free filter. It only offers facilities where the source explicitly records wheelchair access — a facility with no stated information is left out rather than guessed at, because sending someone to a toilet that turns out to have a step is worse than showing nothing.

Luggage, money and connectivity

Coin lockers fill up quickly around major stations at midday. The map records roughly 160 locker locations; if the ones nearby are full, station luggage-storage counters and takkyubin delivery services are the usual fallback.

Not every Japanese ATM accepts foreign cards. The ATM layer is filtered to the networks that generally do — Seven Bank and Japan Post — rather than listing every machine, so a pin is more likely to actually work for you.

Around 380 free Wi-Fi points are recorded. VisitHero also keeps a small offline cache of Wi-Fi locations from your previous map loads, so if you lose connection entirely you can still find a way back online. Nothing else works offline: with no network there is no AI and no live search.

Emergencies

For an ambulance or fire in Japan dial 119. For police dial 110. Both are free from any phone, including a locked one, and English support is available.

The map carries roughly 1,900 AED defibrillator locations, 775 police boxes, 2,000 hospitals and clinics, and 4,180 designated evacuation sites from the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan, used for earthquakes and typhoons.

Commercial content is suppressed entirely in emergency contexts. If you are asking about police, first aid, a hospital, a shelter or a lost passport, no advertisement or sponsored recommendation is shown.

Reading the trust labels

Every place card names where the record came from and when it was refreshed. "Official data" means the record comes from a national or municipal open-data release — trustworthy as a source, but nobody has physically walked to each one. "Community / open data" covers OpenStreetMap and visitor submissions.

Roughly 5,900 records carry a direct link to the public dataset entry they came from, so you can check the original yourself.

Data is refreshed weekly. Opening hours are only shown where the source publishes them, which is currently a minority of records — when no hours are shown, assume you need to check on arrival.

Asking questions

The Ask panel answers in six languages using the places actually near you, rather than general travel advice. It is grounded in the same dataset the map uses, and the answer cites the places it drew on.

It needs an internet connection. Answers are kept on your device so you can scroll back through them; they are not tied to an account, and each saved question records which city and which location source it was asked from, so an old answer is not mistaken for current advice.

FAQ

Does VisitHero cost anything?

No. It is free, needs no account, and works in a browser.

Which areas are covered?

Yamaguchi, Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Tokyo and Osaka, with roughly 19,900 places recorded in total.

Does it encourage smoking?

No. It shows designated areas and prohibited zones so visitors can follow local ordinances and avoid an on-the-spot fine.

Is my location stored?

Location is used to answer your question and is not kept as an account history. See the privacy page for details.

Can I add a place?

Yes. Use "Add a spot" on the map. Submissions enter a review queue and are marked as community data once published.