Japan Market MCP — Cross-Shop Price Comparison for AI Agents

An MCP server that lets AI agents (Claude, Cursor, VS Code Copilot, ChatGPT) compare used-good prices across leading Japanese shops in a single tool call. Instead of scraping site by site, an agent queries one server and gets inter-store price gaps for the same product — perfect for reseller arbitrage, price monitoring, and market research on the Japanese second-hand market.

How it works

The server wraps market-scraping and official-API actors (Rakuten Ichiba included) behind one MCP endpoint. Each tool returns price, brand, shop, condition and a link per item, with the shop-pair crossed so you see the price spread at a glance.

Available tools

Tool	Market	Shop pair
search_camera_market	Used cameras & lenses	Kitamura + Fujiya Camera
search_watch_market	Luxury watches	Jackroad + Kitamura used watches
search_luxury_market	Used luxury brands	Komehyo + Jackroad
search_instrument_market	Used instruments	Digimart + Ishibashi U-BOX
search_offmall_market	General used goods	OffMall (Hard Off official, 800+ stores)
search_kakaku_prices	New price comparison	Kakaku.com (aggregated, thousands of shops)
search_car_market	Used cars	goo-net (nationwide, by body type)
search_car_price_stats	Used car price stats (min/max/avg/median JPY)	goo-net (by model keyword, e.g. N-BOX, Alphard)
search_rakuten_items	New retail products (official API)	Rakuten Ichiba 楽天市場 (keyword, price range, sort)
get_rakuten_ranking	Best-seller ranking (official API)	Rakuten Ichiba 楽天市場 (overall or by genre)
get_maff_market_report	Fresh produce wholesale market report (official MAFF open data)	Japan central markets (旬別, JPY/100kg, YoY%)
search_maff_price_trend	Fresh produce wholesale price trend (official MAFF open data)	Multi-market, multi-period comparison
get_maff_top_movers	Fresh produce YoY price movers (official MAFF open data)	Japan central markets (supply-shock signal)
get_maff_markets	List available MAFF wholesale markets	no charge

Each tool takes a keyword (e.g. SONY α7, ROLEX, Hermes, Fender) and returns results from the crossed shops. Leaving the keyword empty scans the full category.

Pricing

Pay per event — $0.001 per search + actor start fee. Runs finish in seconds, so a full keyword lookup typically costs well under $0.01.

Connect as an MCP server

Run it from the Apify Store (Run button), then point your MCP client at the endpoint. It stays in standby mode.

MCP client config (Claude Desktop / Cursor / VS Code):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "japan-market-mcp": {
      "url": "https://fruitful_quintessence--japan-market-mcp.apify.actor/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN"
      }
    }
  }
}

• URL: <your-username>--japan-market-mcp.apify.actor/mcp
• Auth: Apify API token in the Authorization: Bearer header (Apify Console → Settings → Integrations)

Example agent prompts

"Compare used prices for Sony a7 III between Kitamura and Fujiya"
→ search_camera_market(keyword="SONY α7 III")

"What's the inter-store price gap for a Rolex Submariner?"
→ search_watch_market(keyword="ROLEX Submariner")

"What's the market price for a Hermes Birkin 25?"
→ search_luxury_market(keyword="Hermes Birkin 25")

"What's a used Fender Stratocaster going for?"
→ search_instrument_market(keyword="Fender Stratocaster")

"Show this 旬's wholesale market report for Tokyo (Toyosu) fresh vegetables"
→ get_maff_market_report(market="toyosu")

"Which fresh produce items have spiked in price vs last year at Osaka?"
→ get_maff_top_movers(market="oosakaho")

"Track the price of daikon (だいこん) across Tokyo and Osaka this month"
→ search_maff_price_trend(item="だいこん", markets=["toyosu","oosakaho"])

Use cases

• Reseller arbitrage — spot the same product priced differently across shops
• Market research — track used prices for cameras, watches, luxury goods, instruments, cars
• Export sourcing — goo-net JDM inventory and goo-net price checks for exporters
• Collector price checks — condition-ranked physical used items from OffMall

Data sources

• Each actor collects factual data only (product name, price, brand, condition, inventory, URL). No photos or descriptions are harvested.
• All target sites allow crawling via their robots.txt.
• MAFF 青果物卸売市場調査（旬別・市場別） is served from the official 農林水産省 open-data CSV — no scraping, direct download. Published under the Government Standard Terms of Use v2.0 (政府標準利用規約2.0): commercial use allowed with attribution. Price is JPY per 100kg. Data updates are published by MAFF each 旬 (10-day period).

Local development

pip install -r requirements.txt
APIFY_TOKEN=apify_api_xxx python -m src.main
# Streamable HTTP endpoint at http://localhost:3000/mcp

License

MIT