Japan Station Master & Ridership — Canonical Open Datasets (Japan)

Two combinable, maintained open datasets sharing a common station_id join key: Station Master (nationwide) — entity-resolved: one row per physical station (e.g. Shinjuku resolved to a single entity across JR East, Keio, Odakyu, Seibu, Tokyo Metro and Toei), with per-operator source records preserved and a merge-confidence flag. 9,145 physical stations across Japan; 681 lines. The 425 Greater-Tokyo stations come from the Public Transportation Open Data Center (ODPT) with operator English names and declared transfer links; the rest are from MLIT National Land Numerical Information (国土数値情報 N02), with English names from Wikidata (CC0). v2 preserves every v1 station ID and value unchanged (append-only). Station Ridership 2000-2025 — annual per-station passenger journeys (3,144 tidy rows, 292 stations), joined to the station master. Captures the COVID trough and recovery station by station. Existing English-language datasets on this topic are largely hand-built, stale, or incomplete — these are annually-refreshed, schema-frozen alternatives with transparent methodology. Full harvest/build/validate pipeline is included in the repository. Data derives from ODPT (Public Transportation Open Data Basic License, CC BY 4.0 equivalent) and MLIT 国土数値情報 (国土数値情報 利用約款, CC BY 4.0 compatible); required attribution is in LICENSE-DATA.txt.