Yahoo Japan Top Picks News Scraper - Fast Category Feed Extraction

Pull the latest headlines from Yahoo! News Japan (news.yahoo.co.jp) in seconds. This Actor scrapes the "Top Picks" (主要) feed and every major category feed (domestic, world, business, entertainment, sports, IT, science, local). Every run automatically fetches each article's full body text, publisher, timestamps, and comment count alongside the feed data, no extra configuration needed. Built for reliability with automatic pagination and no headless browser overhead, since Yahoo! News Japan serves the feed as plain server-rendered HTML.

Why use this Actor?

• Monitor breaking news in real time - schedule this Actor on Apify to track a category feed and get notified of new headlines as they appear.
• Build a news dataset or NLP pipeline - full article text extraction gives you clean, structured Japanese news content ready for summarization, classification, or translation.
• No coding required - just pick a category and run. Results export to JSON, CSV, Excel, or any format supported by Apify datasets.

How to use Yahoo Japan Top Picks News Scraper

1. Click Try for free or Start on the Apify Console.
2. Choose a Category (defaults to Top Picks).
3. Set Max items to control how many headlines to fetch.
4. Run the Actor and download your results as JSON, CSV, or Excel from the Output tab. Every item already includes the full article body, publisher, timestamps, and comment count.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
category	string (enum)	top-picks	Which feed to scrape: top-picks, domestic, world, business, entertainment, sports, it, science, local.
maxItems	integer	25	Maximum number of news items to fetch.
proxyConfiguration	object	{"useApifyProxy": false}	Optional Apify Proxy configuration, recommended for large runs since every item requires opening its article page.

See .actor/input_schema.json for the full definition.

Output

Example output item:

{
  "title": "気象庁「令和8年熊本地震」と命名",
  "pickupUrl": "https://news.yahoo.co.jp/pickup/6589678",
  "articleUrl": "https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/ba5c347c46de9395404687cf149f7e67816e8adb",
  "imageUrl": "https://news-pctr.c.yimg.jp/t/news-topics/images/tpc/...jpg",
  "displayTime": "7/28(火) 19:35",
  "category": "domestic",
  "body": "28日午後4時27分頃に発生した熊本県で最大震度7を観測した地震について...",
  "provider": "日テレNEWS NNN",
  "publishedAt": "2026-07-28T10:19:01.000Z",
  "updatedAt": "2026-07-28T11:33:30.000Z",
  "commentCount": 600
}

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel.

Data fields

Field	Description
title	Headline text as shown in the feed.
pickupUrl	The feed's canonical /pickup/{id} link for this item.
articleUrl	The underlying /articles/{hash} link, when resolvable. Some aggregated/live-update topics have no standalone article and this will be null.
imageUrl	Thumbnail image URL.
displayTime	Human-readable publish time as shown on the feed.
category	The category feed this item was fetched from.
body	Full article text. null for aggregated/live-update topics with no standalone article.
provider	Publisher/media outlet name.
publishedAt / updatedAt	ISO 8601 publish/update timestamps.
commentCount	Total number of user comments on the article.

Pricing

This Actor only performs lightweight HTTP requests (no browser), so it runs cheaply even on the free Apify plan. Since every item requires opening its article page for full detail, expect roughly one extra request per item on top of the feed pages themselves.

Tips

• maxItems controls how many pages of the feed are fetched (about 25 items per page), so keep it reasonable for frequent scheduled runs.
• Enable proxyConfiguration for large runs to reduce the chance of rate limiting.

FAQ

Is this legal? Scraping publicly available web pages carries legal and Terms of Service considerations that vary by jurisdiction and use case. Review Yahoo! News Japan's own terms before relying on this data for anything beyond personal or research use, and use this Actor responsibly.

Found a bug or have a feature request? Use the Issues tab on this Actor's page. Custom scraping solutions are also available on request.

Development

pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
pytest tests/
apify validate-schema
apify run --input-file test-inputs/list-only.json --purge
apify run --input-file test-inputs/full-detail.json --purge

No environment variables are required; this Actor only reads publicly served HTML pages.