@pipeworx/japan-places

Facilities in Japan near a point or a named train/subway station — convenience stores (konbini), restaurants, pharmacies, hospitals, banks, ATMs, hotels and other places, with distance in metres and coordinates for each result.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1870+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• places_near_station(station, category, radius_m?, limit?) — geocodes a Japanese station or place name (e.g. "Shibuya Station, Tokyo") and returns nearby facilities matching the category, sorted by distance. Answers "convenience stores within 500m of Shibuya station".

• places_near_point(latitude, longitude, category, radius_m?, limit?) — same search, from coordinates you already have instead of a station name.

category accepts plain English/romanized terms (convenience_store, konbini, station, eki, hospital, byouin, pharmacy, yakkyoku, restaurant, izakaya, cafe, supermarket, bank, atm, hotel, post_office, toilet, parking, school, temple, shrine, park) or an exact OpenStreetMap tag (shop=bakery).

Related MCP server: gachi-data

Auth

Keyless.

Data sources

• OpenStreetMap contributors — place and point-of-interest tags (shops, amenities, railway stations) for Japan, served live through the public Overpass query service. Data is © OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed ODbL 1.0: attribution is required and carried in every response's source field and here. See https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright for the full terms. This pack sends one live query per call and stores nothing — a proxy of the public service, not a copy of the dataset (CLAUDE.md: "proxying is not redistribution").

• OpenStreetMap contributors — the public Nominatim geocoding service, used only to resolve a station/place NAME to coordinates (never to look up arbitrary addresses in bulk). Usage is kept to the documented public-policy shape: identified User-Agent, one request per call, no caching of the dataset itself. See https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/nominatim/ for the policy this pack follows.

Notes

• This is a Japan-branded, discoverability-focused entry point over the same public OpenStreetMap query service the general-purpose overpass pack also uses (shared/src/overpass.ts handles host failover for both). It exists because a bare "Overpass" or "OSM" name and description do not surface for Japan-phrased questions ("convenience stores near Shibuya station") — see fleet #4092, where that exact question mis-routed to a Mexico-only pack and came back with a false "no results" instead of failing honestly or finding the real answer.

• Station-name geocoding is biased to Japan (countrycodes=jp) so common station names ("Central Station") do not resolve outside Japan. Adding the city disambiguates same-named stations in different cities.

• distance_m is a straight-line (haversine) distance from the search center, not a walking route distance.

• The public Overpass instances are a small set of volunteer-run servers and occasionally all answer slowly or time out at once — this is the upstream service, not a Pipeworx fault; the error names which instances were tried.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "japan-places": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/japan-places/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/japan-places/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1870+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/places_near_station \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"station":"Shibuya Station, Tokyo","category":"convenience_store","radius_m":500,"limit":20}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/places_near_station. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-japan-places is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/japan-places/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "japan-places": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-japan-places"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Japan Places data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides

• pipeworx.io

License

MIT