Kodama are tree spirits of Japanese folk belief. They live in the oldest trees of a forest.
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.
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.
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.
Be usable before the move starts. A tool for a move that is only finished after the move has missed its problem.
