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

• Deployment policy and provider freeze
• Product specification
• Data model
• Geographic layer, source and licence
• Roadmap
• Block 1 — UX, hierarchy and usability
• Block 2 — the photographic layer
• Block 3 — debt, and the accommodation-zone decision layer
• Block 4 — zone-seeded accommodation
• Block 5 — two travellers, and what is genuinely personal
• Block 6 — divergence between the two travellers
• Block 7 — what each source actually supports
• Block 8 — airport links and their operators

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.