TOBAE

作品 All projects

Kodama 木霊

Apartment finder for Tokyo

進行中 · 2026

Kodama are tree spirits of Japanese folk belief. They live in the oldest trees of a forest.

Katsushika Hokusai, “Mishima Pass in Kai Province”, ca. 1830–32. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0.

技術 Stack

Runtime
Hono (Node)
Data
SQLite (better-sqlite3) · scraper (cheerio)
Frontend
React · Leaflet · visx · Lenis · Motion

01 課題 Problem

No visa, no flat; no address, no bank account — the chain starts with finding a flat. Apartment listings for Tokyo are scattered across a handful of Japanese real-estate sites, most of them built for renting from inside the country, not for comparing options from abroad.

A single site does not show what is actually around a room, or how it compares with the rest of the neighbourhood. That comparison gets pieced together by hand, tab by tab.

02 手法 Approach

A scraper collects listings from those sites into one database, and a map ties each one to its neighbourhood — one place to compare what is actually available, instead of a browser full of tabs.

03 結果 Result

No measured values yet. Once the scraper runs end to end, this chapter will report the duration of a full run and the number of listings it returns, the share that come out unusable after parsing, and the p95 query time against SQLite.

04 Next step

Be usable before the move starts. A tool for a move that is only finished after the move has missed its problem.