The symposium aims to showcase data collected and made available to researchers by the Japanese Statistical Bureau. It will have two parts. In the first part two Japanese statisticians – Professor Hiroe Tsubaki (Director-General, The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Tokyo; former president of the National Statistics Centre, Japan) and Dr Kiyomi Shirakawa (Deputy Director, National Statistics Centre, Japan) – will talk about the statistical data collected by Statistics Bureau Japan with a particular focus on the data that can be used by scholars residing outside Japan. These presentations will be followed by Prof Nobuko Nagase (Ochanomizu University) and Mr Minoru Yagishita (Tokyo Metropolitan University) presenting their own research carried out using the data from the Statistics Bureau of Japan.