About Bunkabop: Every Place Is Connected

What makes Bunkabop different

Kyoto is a city on the Japanese island of Honshu, the imperial capital of Japan for over a thousand years. The city is renowned for its Buddhist temples, Zen Buddhism, silk weaving, tea culture, woodblock prints, and its long history as an imperial capital.

Bunkabop was built to answer
"What connects?" at scale:

places427,000+

connecting topics450,000+

pieces of evidence7.5M+

How it's made

Read. Bunkabop reads millions of sentences from Wikipedia and other sources for cultural knowledge.
Verify. Every relevant link is checked, scored, and traced back to its sources.
Connect. Verified links are added to one worldwide graph of how cultures relate.

The Inspiration

Bunkabop = bunka [(文化), Japanese for culture] + bop [rhythm and movement].

The idea arrived while watching a first-grader bop through streetview maps of Warsaw, Tokyo, and Nairobi. Asked if he liked seeing how different places are, he said:

"Actually, I like seeing what is the same.
They have ice cream and basketball too. And this place has cats."