Fukuoka's 7 wards ranked by natural hazard exposure — 164 traded districts checked against official data

Fukuoka is one of the few major Japanese cities still gaining population. That makes "which ward is least exposed" hard to separate from where the city is actually growing.

This article checks the districts where homes and land actually changed hands, one by one, against official data — 164 districts across 7 wards from the most recent quarter.

What this article shows

• For each of the 7 wards, what share of traded districts falls inside a flood, landslide, or liquefaction-prone area
• Minami is lowest at 26%, Sawara highest at 83%
• No ward falls below 26% — Fukuoka has no near-clear ward of the kind Yokohama and Nagoya have
• Exposure and population growth do not line up. All 4 growing wards sit on the higher-exposure side
• Among the growing wards, Higashi carries the lowest exposure

Method — checking the districts where people actually buy

1. Collect every district that recorded a transaction in the most recent quarter, ward by ward, from MLIT's Real Estate Information Library (164 districts across 7 wards).
2. Geocode each district name to get a representative point.
3. Confirm the formatted address still contains the same ward and district. Districts that resolve somewhere else are dropped rather than counted.
4. Check that point against flood inundation zones, landslide alert zones, and the liquefaction tendency map. Only ratings on the "prone" side are counted, not merely being inside the surveyed area.

A ward is never judged from a single point. What you see is the share of the places people are actually buying.

What this check cannot tell you

• The result is for each district's representative point. Within one district, one side of a street can differ from the other.
• Districts with no transactions in the quarter are not included, so the denominator is not every district in the ward.
• Hazard zones are assumptions published by government bodies. They are revised, and they do not describe a specific building's construction or ground work.
• The median unit price mixes property types. It is not an official land price and should not be read as one.

Ranked by hazard exposure

"Any" counts districts hitting at least one of the three (a district hitting two still counts once).

The same method gave Yokohama a lowest ward of 0% and Nagoya 4%; Fukuoka's lowest, Minami, is 26%. Liquefaction-prone ratings dominate the totals — 21 of 27 districts in Hakata and 18 of 25 in Chuo — reflecting how much of the built-up area sits on low ground and reclaimed land.

To repeat: being counted here means the point falls inside a zone the authorities publish as an assumption. Structure, floor level, and ground improvement all change what that means in practice. A high share does not make a ward unliveable.

In Fukuoka, low exposure and growth do not line up

Kobe showed an inverse relationship — the least-exposed wards declined most. Nagoya showed the two pointing the same way. Fukuoka shows neither.

Minami, the least exposed, is projected at -1.8% to 2050 and Jonan at -5.9% — while Sawara, the most exposed, also declines at -6.1%. Exposure explains almost none of the population movement here.

The growing wards are Chuo (+4.7%), Higashi (+4.3%), Hakata (+3.7%), and Nishi (+1.7%), at 57–81% exposure. Chuo leads net in-migration at 1.05%, and Hakata (16.6%) and Chuo (17.0%) are young even by national standards.

With that structure, you have to decide up front which of the two you are optimising for. Among the growing wards, Higashi has the lowest exposure at 57%, with +4.3% to 2050 and 0.81% net in-migration. If exposure alone is what matters, Minami is lowest — but its population edges down.

Ward by ward

• Minami — 26% (6 of 23), the lowest of the 7, at -1.8% to 2050.
• Jonan — 43%, on only 14 matched districts (the fewest), so its percentage moves easily. -5.9% to 2050.
• Higashi — 57% and +4.3% to 2050: the lowest exposure among the growing wards, on the largest district count (35).
• Chuo — 72% and +4.7%, the strongest growth of the 7, with 1.05% net in-migration and 17.0% aged 65+.
• Hakata — 81% (21 districts from liquefaction), and the lowest share aged 65+ at 16.6%.
• Nishi — 77% and +1.7% to 2050, though it is the only ward with negative net migration at -0.08%.
• Sawara — 83%, the highest of the 7, and -6.1% to 2050, the steepest decline.

What to verify before buying

Where every ward carries meaningful exposure, as in Fukuoka, filtering candidates by whether a zone applies is not very useful. Narrow by address rather than ward, and look at what the assumption actually says rather than whether one exists.

• Whether the liquefaction rating is on the prone side, and whether ground improvement or piling was recorded
• The assumed inundation depth at the address, and the river and rainfall it assumes
• Whether the land is reclaimed, when it was developed, and what was there before
• Nearby transaction prices, and how the district's population moved over 10 years

SafeLand checks an address against the public data on the spot. No account required.

Sources and definitions

• Traded districts, transaction counts, median unit price: MLIT Real Estate Information Library
• Flood, landslide, and liquefaction layers: same library
• Population, ageing rate, net migration, 2050 projection: e-Stat (Statistics Bureau of Japan)
• District representative points: Google Geocoding, each verified to land in the same ward and district