The JapanPass crawler

If you found JapanPassBot in your server logs and want to know what it was doing, this page is the answer. If you want it to stop, that is at the bottom and it takes one line.

What it is

JapanPass is an English-language directory for people travelling in and living in Japan. We publish factual information about businesses and public services: the name, the address, the telephone number, the opening hours, and whether English is available. Our crawler reads publicly available pages to check those facts and to keep them current.

What it reads, and what it does not

• It reads pages your web server serves publicly, and only those.
• It does not attempt to log in, submit a form, or reach anything behind authentication.
• It does not collect personal information about individuals. We are recording facts about a business or an office, not about people.
• It does not copy your text or images onto our site. It reads a fact, records where the fact came from and the date it was read, and links back to your page.
• It obeys robots.txt. If your file disallows us, we do not fetch the page.

How often, and how gently

Requests at once to your site	One. Never two at the same time.
Gap between requests to your site	At least one second.
Repeat visits	Responses are cached, so a re-run does not fetch your pages again. We come back when a fact needs re-checking, not on a schedule.
If your server returns an error	We record it and move on. We do not retry into a server that is struggling or that has blocked us.

How to recognise it

Every request carries this User-Agent, and it names this page so you never have to guess who we are:

JapanPassBot/1.0 (+https://www.japanpass.com/bot.html)

If something we published about you is wrong

Tell us and we will fix it or remove it. Email [email protected] with the page and what is wrong. Every fact we publish carries the source it came from and the date it was read, so if a detail has changed since we read it, that date is usually the explanation.

Back to JapanPass