AI maps 55,000 nurseries in solo-built childcare search tool

For families looking for an opening at a nursery, the information they need is not laid out on a single screen. A service that uses AI to reorganize the task of tracking information scattered across national and local governments and individual facilities launched in August. “Clues for Choosing a Nursery” displays information on more than 55,000 childcare facilities nationwide in one place.

The service collects more than facility capacity, vacancies and third-party evaluations. It also monitors nursery job listings and organizes publicly available information. It was developed by one individual developer, who used AI to collect and organize the information and make it accessible to the public.

Behind the project is a waiting-list problem that is difficult to see in the numbers alone. According to the Children and Families Agency, as of April 1, 2026, 1,552 municipalities—89.1% of the 1,741 municipalities nationwide—reported zero children on waiting lists under the national definition. On the other hand, families on parental leave and those using unlicensed childcare facilities are not included in that definition. In February 2026, entertainer Kyary Pamyu Pamyu posted that her child had been rejected by a nursery.

In other words, a numerical “zero” is not the same as families being able to find childcare. Alongside the shortage of licensed nurseries, there is also a shortage of childcare workers. For families burdened by being unable to leave their children in care despite wanting to work, and by having difficulty finding childcare unless they start working, shortening the time spent searching for facility information could create more time for applications and comparisons. This is the concrete part that can change immediately.

The service does not eliminate children waiting for childcare; it is an attempt to resolve the fragmentation of information. Even so, it has used AI to bring a task long regarded as requiring significant time and human resources from public authorities down to a scale that one person can handle. The case, reported by ITmedia NEWS, points not to a replacement for the system’s statistics, but to a tool that helps citizens draw closer to the realities falling through the gaps in that system.