What this database does

It gathers in one place what you need when you look into monjayaki: shop data, the history, the differences between regions, how far it has spread outside Japan, the economics, and the regional dishes closest to it.

It is not made once and left. Every month we re-check the existing data and fold in what has changed: openings, closures, moves, prices, menus. What changed is recorded in the update log.

Fact, opinion and editorial reading are kept apart

There are three kinds of statement on this site, written so the reader can tell them apart.

Fact — confirmed against a source. Addresses, telephone numbers, opening hours, year founded, figures from statistics. Each shop page carries the source name and URL, so you can open the original and check.

User ratings — scores and reviews from review sites. Not used at present. We have not settled how they would be obtained or what the terms allow, so there is no ranking based on scores.

The editors' reading — judgements such as "this is the weak point" or "this is a waste as a tourist asset". Where the text says "the editors' reading" or "estimate", that is what it is. Please do not read it as fact.

How confidence is graded (A to D)

Each shop carries a four-step grade for how firm its sources are. D is not published.

A — official (the shop's own site, the cooperative, a local authority) and corroborated by another source.

B — confirmed from one line of primary information, such as an operator's or a development's official list.

C — mainly review media and first-hand accounts. Existence is confirmed, but details such as opening hours may be out of date.

D — existence weakly confirmed. Not published.

Each shop page shows this grade in words. Not hiding it lets the reader decide for themselves how far to trust an entry.

About the images

There is not one photograph of a real shop or its food on this site. That is so we do not use photographs whose rights we cannot confirm. For a shop's frontage, or the dish as it actually arrives, follow the links from each shop page to its official site and social accounts.

The images of food are made with an image-generating AI. They are there to show what kind of dish monjayaki is on the first screen, and none of them depicts any particular shop's cooking. The alt text and the body text both say so. The job IDs used and the reasons images were kept or rejected are recorded in `docs/IMAGE-CREDITS.md` in the repository.

Maps, diagrams, thumbnails and the OGP image are drawn by us in SVG and Pillow. The site is designed to hold no photographs at all, so the pages still work if no generated image arrives.

What is missing right now

Written openly. These are what later updates are for.

Independent shops outside Tsukishima. We have not picked up the independents in Asakusa, Kinshicho and Jujo in Tokyo, the sweet shops of Isesaki, or the tarashiyaki shops of Oarai. Our reach into primary sources is still shallow.

Review scores and counts. No mechanism for obtaining them is in place.

Coverage outside Japan. We have not worked systematically through local-language review sites (Dianping, NAVER, Zomato and others). "Could not confirm" is not "does not exist".

Set-up costs, FL ratio and other operating figures. We have not reached public information with a basis behind it.

Closure and relocation history. We hold no past history. This is the first edition, so differences accumulate from the next update onward.