If you're building a price comparison tool, a market research dashboard, or an AI agent that needs real Japanese ecommerce data, you've probably hit the same wall: Japan's biggest marketplaces don't have public APIs — or they're locked behind expensive enterprise contracts.
Mercari, Yahoo Auctions, Rakuten Market, SUUMO, Kakaku.com — these are the platforms where actual transactions happen. But getting structured data out of them requires either:
- Reverse-engineering their internal APIs (fragile, often blocked)
- Running a headless browser with the right session cookies
- Using someone else's work
We've been doing #1 and #2 for over a year, and we've turned what we learned into 8 Apify Actors on the Apify Store.
What Each Actor Does
| Actor | Target | What It Extracts |
|---|---|---|
| mercari-japan-search-scraper | Mercari Japan | Search results, prices, listing details, sold data |
| yahoo-auctions-japan-scraper | Yahoo Auctions | Active/closed listings, bid history, seller ratings |
| japan-kakaku-price-search | Kakaku.com | Product price comparisons across Japanese retailers |
| suumo-japan-real-estate-scraper | SUUMO | Rental/property listings with price per square meter |
| japan-market-mcp | Multi-platform | Unified MCP interface for Japanese market data |
| rakuten-japan-mcp | Rakuten Market | Product catalog + pricing via MCP |
| mercari-japan-scraper | Mercari Japan | Full listing scraper with image URLs |
| japan-prize-giveaway-scraper | Japanese X Giveaways | Campaign tracking for sweepstakes automation |
Why This Matters for AI Agents
If you're building an agent that needs to answer questions like:
- "What's the going rate for a used Sony α7 IV in Japan?"
- "How do camera gear prices fluctuate across Mercari vs. Yahoo Auctions?"
- "What's the rental market doing in Shibuya vs. Shinjuku?"
…you need real data. And Japanese market data is notoriously hard to get. These Actors handle the scraping complexity so you don't have to.
The Hard Parts We Solved
Mercari's search API is not callable directly. The search page is a fully client-side rendered Next.js app. The JSON endpoint exists (POST https://api.mercari.jp/v2/entities:search) but requires session tokens that change on every page load. Our Actor handles the token extraction and rotation automatically.
Yahoo Auctions rate limits. Yahoo is aggressive about bot detection. We use residential-proxy rotation + request pacing to stay under the radar while still hitting the endpoints that matter.
Kakaku.com's dynamic pricing. Kakaku.com renders prices client-side via JavaScript. Our Actor uses headless Chrome to extract the final rendered prices, not the raw HTML.
Get Started
Each Actor has:
- Example run input — paste it in and hit "Run" to see results immediately
- Dataset output — structured JSON/CSV you can query or pipe into your pipeline
- Scheduled runs — set it and forget it, with daily/weekly refreshes
Try the mercari-japan-search-scraper first — it's the most mature and has the richest output schema.
Data Used in This Post
The market data behind our weekly Japanese ecommerce reports comes from these same Actors. If you find this useful, star the repo on GitHub — it helps other developers discover these tools.
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