🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Realtime Trends — Live Buzz & Trend Ranking Scraper

Tap into Japan's #1 real-time trend surface — the live Yahoo! Japan Realtime ranking (search.yahoo.co.jp/realtime) that tells you what 125 million Japanese users are buzzing about right now. Every minute, ranked keywords, tweet/buzz volume, genre, and momentum — straight from the source, no login and no Twitter/X API key required.

This is data most Western scrapers simply can't touch. Google Trends barely sees inside Japan, and the X API is paywalled into uselessness — so the live Japanese conversation has been a black box for non-Japanese teams. This actor opens it. If you sell into Japan, run a JP brand, trade JP equities, or localize content, this is the untapped early-signal feed your competitors don't have.

📊 Sample Output

Real trends returned by this actor for { "mode": "trends", "maxItems": 12 } — every row below comes straight from a live run:

Rank	Keyword (trending)	Buzz volume	Category
1	今後の活動	26	—
2	スガキヤ	2,358	food
3	ココイチ	167	アニメ・ゲーム
4	がたます	223	—
5	ディートリヒ	284	—
6	秧秧	1,212	アニメ・ゲーム
7	しいたけ占い	221	—
8	古賀千景	32	ニュース
9	藤丸立香はわからない	31	アニメ・ゲーム
10	森田浩光	24	entertainment

The Realtime board emits the full ranked set (~20 topics plus the hot-buzz carousel) on every run, with live buzz_volume, heat_score, and genre — so you catch a trend in the minutes it's breaking, not hours later in an aggregated report.

What you get

Per trending topic, a flat, typed record:

• Ranking — rank (1 = hottest right now)
• The trend — keyword (the exact Japanese term Japan is searching)
• Momentum signals — buzz_volume (tweet/buzz count), heat, heat_score (0–100 momentum)
• Classification — category, category_ja (food / アニメ・ゲーム / ニュース / entertainment / …)
• Sub-topics — child_buzz[] (related buzzing terms clustered under the trend)
• Drill-down — url (the live Yahoo! Realtime search page for that keyword)
• Provenance — snapshot_time, data_source

In search mode you instead get the live buzz tweets behind a single keyword — text, author, timestamp, engagement — for sentiment and deep-dive analysis.

Sample inputs

1. Live trend ranking (the headline use case)

{ "mode": "trends", "maxItems": 12 }

2. Full board, deeper pull

{ "mode": "trends", "maxItems": 30 }

3. Buzz tweets for one keyword (sentiment deep-dive)

{ "mode": "search", "query": "東京", "maxItems": 40 }

JSON sample record

One representative record, exactly as returned:

{
  "mode": "trends",
  "rank": 2,
  "keyword": "スガキヤ",
  "buzz_volume": 2358,
  "heat": 176,
  "heat_score": 77,
  "category": "food",
  "category_ja": null,
  "child_buzz": [],
  "url": "https://search.yahoo.co.jp/realtime/search?p=%E3%82%B9%E3%82%AC%E3%82%AD%E3%83%A4&rkf=1&ifr=tp_bz",
  "snapshot_time": "2026-06-15T04:45:48Z",
  "data_source": "search.yahoo.co.jp/realtime (buzzTrend)"
}

How it works

Yahoo! Japan builds the Realtime board client-side and ships the ranking as embedded JSON inside the page. This actor loads search.yahoo.co.jp/realtime through Apify proxy, parses that embedded buzzTrend payload directly — no brittle DOM scraping, no headless-browser overhead for the trend board — and emits one clean record per topic. In search mode it walks the buzz-tweet feed for your keyword. The maxItems cap is a hard ceiling, so compute (and your bill) never outruns what you asked for.

🗾 Why this Japanese data is unique

Japan's online conversation runs on its own rails. The dominant search engine is Yahoo! Japan, not Google, and its Realtime surface is the de-facto pulse of Japanese social buzz — there is no Western equivalent dataset. Google Trends has shallow JP coverage, and the X/Twitter API is now prohibitively gated. That means the signals here — a regional chain like スガキヤ spiking, an anime/game term breaking out, a news name surging — are invisible to teams relying on US-centric tools. Getting this in clean structured form, in English-readable fields, is the edge.

⚖️ Legal & ToS

This actor reads only the public Yahoo! Japan Realtime ranking — the same trend board any visitor sees at search.yahoo.co.jp/realtime, no login required. It collects publicly displayed trend metadata (keyword, rank, buzz counts, genre). It does not access private accounts, DMs, or anything behind authentication. You are responsible for using the output in line with Yahoo! Japan's terms and your local regulations.

❓ FAQ

Q: Do I need a Yahoo! Japan account or the X/Twitter API? A: No. The actor works entirely off the public Realtime board — no login, no API key, no token.

Q: How fresh is the data? A: It's the live board at run time — typically reflecting buzz from the last few minutes. Each record carries a snapshot_time so you can timestamp it precisely.

Q: Why are some trends in Japanese and some in English? A: Yahoo! Japan ranks whatever Japan is actually typing — Japanese terms, romaji, brand names, and product names all appear exactly as they trend. We return them faithfully, never translated or altered.

Q: What's the difference between trends and search mode? A: trends returns the ranked board (the keywords buzzing right now). search returns the live buzz tweets behind a single keyword you supply — use it for sentiment and deeper context.

Q: Why did I get fewer items than maxItems? A: The Realtime board has a finite number of ranked topics at any moment. maxItems is a ceiling, not a target — getting fewer is normal, not an error.

🔗 Related Actors

Pair this with the rest of the NexGenData Asia-data fleet — the markets Western scrapers can't reach:

• 📺 Niconico Video Search — Japan's Bilibili — search and rank Japan's biggest homegrown video platform
• 💬 5ch Thread Tracker — Japan's Biggest Forum — track threads and posts on Japan's most influential message board
• 🔥 Weibo Hot Search Tracker — China's #1 Trend Surface — the China counterpart to this actor
• 🏢 About NexGenData — we maintain 260+ production Apify actors for lead-gen, competitive intelligence, and hard-to-reach web data. Browse the full catalog at apify.com/nexgendata.

💰 Pricing example

This actor uses Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for trends that actually land in your dataset:

• Actor start: $0.005
• Per item: $0.15

A 12-trend live pull = $0.005 + (12 × $0.15) = $1.805. A full 30-topic board = $0.005 + (30 × $0.15) = $4.505. No monthly minimum, no seats, no surprise overage bills.

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