We have collected 2,416 servers in Japan in total, and 451 of them answered a real OpenVPN handshake within the last five minutes — 89 over UDP and 362 over TCP. The quickest replied in 4 ms, against a country average of 28 ms. Over the past seven days the ones still standing have answered 68.4% of the probes we sent them.

Between the two protocols: UDP is faster and is the right default on a fixed connection, while the 362 TCP entries are the safer pick on mobile data or behind a firewall, because carriers and corporate networks drop idle UDP long before they interfere with TCP. The ports most of them listen on here are 443, 1195, 1346 — 443 is the one least likely to be blocked on a restrictive network, so start there if you are behind a corporate or campus firewall. Once you have picked one, the iPhone, Android and desktop guides each take about two minutes.

7 of the live Japan servers are ones we first saw in the last twenty-four hours. That churn is normal and not a defect: these are volunteer machines that get added, moved and switched off without notice, which is precisely why the list is rebuilt every hour instead of being curated once. How the score is built has the formula in full.

Two things these figures deliberately do not claim. The latency is measured from our prober, which sits in one fixed place — it ranks Japan servers against each other honestly, but it is not a prediction of your own ping. If you are closer to Japan than our prober is, yours will be lower than the number shown. And a handshake proves an OpenVPN daemon is listening; it says nothing about whether that machine's own connection is healthy, and nothing at all about who runs it or what they can see.