Nihon — Japan Travel Explorer
Interactive Japan travel discovery and time-planning application built from a verified destination dataset.
Nihon turns a structured Japan travel research base into a visual explorer: browse places on a map, open photo-ready place profiles, compare nearby options, save favorites, and estimate how much real-world time selected experiences require.
Current status
Nihon v1.1.0 — release candidate. The previously published release is
v1.0.0 (2026-09-17);
v1.1.0 adds two travellers, accommodation zones, provenance and freshness, and a portable backup,
all backward compatible. See the v1.1.0 release notes.
Discovery and manual trip planning are both implemented; photography closed for v1 at Phase 4M.
- The application opens on a map of the whole of Japan, drawn from official MLIT
administrative geometry, and browses down through region → prefecture → hub → place.
- All 214 verified places across 7 hubs are reachable, with filters, free-text search,
place details, nearby jumps, saved places, and activity-time estimates.
- 157 of the 214 places carry a licensed photograph with full attribution, 163 images in
all; the rest show their editorial
imageBrief fallback. Six places carry a second perspective
as a gallery. Every
photograph also ships a card-sized rendition, which cuts the bytes a phone spends scrolling a
hub by 72%. See the photography closure
and Block 2.
- A manual planner turns a saved selection into an ordered route: day assignment,
calendar anchoring from Day 1, stable day identity across reordering, trip bounds, manual
inter-hub segments, whole-trip composition, and evidence-complete local swap/relocation
alternatives.
- Recorded opening hours and closure composition, manual visit start-time fit against
recorded intervals, reservation mechanisms, trip-derived reservation dates, and a route-wide
official reservation calendar for the February–March 2027 window.
- A phone-first discovery layer over all of it: photo-led place cards that state a plain-language
level of interest, what the place is, where it is, why it is worth it and how long it takes,
with a
Lista/Mapa switch, a three-card first-run explainer, and saving confirmed from every
surface. See Block 1.
- An accommodation-zone comparison for Tokio, Kioto and Osaka: 16 zones as distinct lodging
strategies, comparing sourced transport facts, Nihon's own editorial judgement, and how far each
zone sits from the places you saved — with facts, computed values and opinion labelled
separately, and no zone ever called the best. See Block 3.
- Two travellers, one trip. Each person marks what they want to see; the shared "Quiero ir"
list is derived from both, coincidences and divergences are reported as such, and a preference
never becomes a plan on its own. The itinerary stays one shared document — the two of them have
one trip. See Block 5.
- Everything persists locally in the browser, and nothing leaves it. A portable backup writes
the travellers' durable decisions to a JSON file they keep, and reads it back in another browser
— replacing, never merging, and never uploading. No account, no server, no sync. See
Block 13.
- Still out of scope: automatic itinerary generation, live transit, routing, and booking.
The planner never reorders a route for the user.
Experience
Japan → region → prefecture → hub → photo-led place cards (or map markers) → visual detail panel → save places → time estimate
The national view shows all 47 prefectures and makes clear which of them Nihon actually
covers today; prefectures without verified places stay on the map without pretending to
have content. Selecting a covered prefecture opens the hub its places belong to
editorially, which is not always the hub nearest to it.
Data source
The application is fed by Nihon — Base Maestra v2 (data/source/Nihon-Base-Maestra-v2.xlsx), updated 2026-09-01. The workbook remains the research source of truth; generated JSON (data/*.json, copied into app/src/data/) is an application build artifact. See docs/DATA_MODEL.md for the exact commands to regenerate it.
The dataset intentionally preserves uncertainty and operational warnings, including February–March 2027 closures, pending calendars, reservation requirements, seasonal risks, and official source URLs.
Documentation
Portfolio framing
This project combines structured research, data normalization, geospatial UX, photo-led discovery, and time-planning logic. It is designed to demonstrate a complete product workflow rather than a static travel landing page.
