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Mahiro Hirakawa
Mahiro Hirakawa

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I built a 5-second CLI to check if your site is ready for the Japanese market

#japan #cli #webdev #opensource

A monolingual team can ship for years without hitting the bugs that lose them Japanese users on day one. I kept finding the same five gaps while looking at foreign dev-tools, so I turned the check into a CLI.

Run it

Update: the command that used to be here no longer works. The CLI was published from a GitHub handle I have since retired, and the repository npx fetched it from is gone, so running it now just fails. I have taken it out rather than leave you a command that errors.

The five checks below are the whole of what it did, and each one takes a minute by hand. The scored results for real products are at jp-ready.glovrex.com.

What it checks

  1. hreflang ja — without it, Google.co.jp / Yahoo! Japan can't reliably surface your Japanese pages.
  2. A Japanese locale path / switcher — the ja content often exists, but nothing links to it, so Japanese users never reach it.
  3. 特商法 (Tokushoho) page — the legal disclosure Japanese buyers expect when paying for an online service. Its absence reads as "not set up to sell here."
  4. JPY pricing — USD-only reads as "you're not our market."
  5. Japanese content at all — whether there's any lang="ja" / Japanese text on the page.

What it can't check (on purpose)

The most common real breakage is an IME/CJK input bug — an Enter that confirms a Japanese conversion getting treated as "submit." That needs a runtime test, not an HTML scan. (I wrote about that class of bug here.)

So a passing score is necessary, not sufficient — but a failing score is a fast, honest signal that the funnel isn't speaking Japanese yet.

Why I built it

I'm a Tokyo-based dev, and Japan has unusually high SaaS ARPU — but the path from "the product could work in Japanese" to "a Japanese buyer trusts it" is full of these quiet, controllable gaps. I scored 13 open-source dev-tools on these dimensions, each gap linked to a real GitHub issue or live URL: https://jp-ready.glovrex.com

Want the deep version verified against your live site? https://glovrex.com/check

The checks were MIT-licensed, but that repository is no longer public, so there is nothing here for you to fold into your own CI.

The same five checks, run against forty products and published with the evidence for each score: github.com/mahirhir/japan-readiness-index.

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