My Blog of Japan Japan!

List of Libraries in Tokyo

Here’s a great list of all the libraries in the Tokyo area. It’s all in Kanji, but you can run it through a translator to find the one you need. This is probably going to be my next project for scraping, translating and mapping.

http://www.reference-net.jp/lib_dir/13.html

Here’s a page with links to libraries throughout Japan, organised by prefecture.

Update: [...]

Searching for a Japanese Telephone Number

I got a call from an unknown number on my Keitai but didn’t answer it. It looked like a business number with repeating parts (043-224-1010) and I knew that it was in Chiba by the first 3 digits. Being paranoid, instead of calling it back I went and searched on the internet. It turns out [...]

JR Train Station Maps

Japan Rail has a great page with maps of many major stations. I didn’t like the way they pop out a new page for every one, so I wrote a quick parser to grab all the links. Here’s the pages for individual station maps. Most are in Tokyo, but a few are further away (eg [...]

Bubble Kenchiku Go! Magazine

Last weekend I went into my local bookstore after work and found a great new magazine there called Baburu Kenchiku Go! It’s all about architecture made around the time of the Japanese Bubble years, from the mid-80s to the early 90s. The buildings built then show a great optimism and willingness to experiment, but also [...]

Google Maps Japan vs. Google Maps US

Using Google Maps to do geocoding of addresses in Japan and the US gives back much different results. Geocoding is when you ask Google Maps for information about an address. For example, you could search for “Empire State Building” and get back the address “Empire State Building, New York, NY 10001, USA” along with it’s [...]