japansearch

Building a Cultural Heritage Explorer App with Japan Search API

JPS Explorer is an iOS/Android app for browsing over 32 million Japanese cultural heritage items through the Japan Search (jpsearch.go.jp) Web API. This article covers what was learned during API investigation, app implementation with Flutter, and automating the App Store release process. Japan Search API Japan Search is operated by the National Diet Library of Japan and provides cross-search access to metadata for over 32 million digital cultural resources. A public Web API supports the following search parameters: ...

March 21, 2026 · 7 min · Nakamura

How Japan Search's Image Similarity Search API Works

Japan Search (https://jpsearch.go.jp) provides an “Image AI Search” feature that supports both text-based motif search and image upload similarity search. The official API guide documents text search (text2image parameter) and searching by existing item ID (image parameter), but says nothing about searching by uploading an image file. Inspecting the Web UI’s network traffic revealed that image upload search is implemented through a 3-step API flow. The 3-step API flow Step 1: Extract a feature vector from the image Endpoint: POST https://jpsearch.go.jp/dl/api/imagefeatures/ ...

March 21, 2026 · 3 min · Nakamura