Survive in Japan
What is "Survive in Japan"?
Survive in Japan is an educational/informational website which I created to make living in Japan easier for foreign residents. While the focus is residents, I also add content which will help tourists and prospective residents as well. I lived in Japan for several years and experienced first hand the daily struggles of non-Japanese residents of Japan and visitors. These struggles are made worse if Japanese language ability is limited. This is where the inspiration for the project came from and will be the focus for the foreseeable future. At the end of the day, I just want to make things easier for people who were in similar situations as me. I chose "Survive in Japan" as living in a country which is very different from most western countries can really feel like survival sometimes. This sentiment is also common amongst foreign residents of Japan I found in my time living there. Often conversations and stories sound more like a survival stories and triumphs of will, when in reality the conversation is just about a common errand or task.
The Long-term Vision for SIJ
In the long term, I hope Survive in Japan will become a hub and database of knowledge for anyone in Japan who is not Japanese. I would like tourists and residents to ponder to themselves how to accomplish some daunting task in Japan and instantly trust Survive in Japan enough to immediately go the website and search for the information they need. While having a website is great, I also want to expand to other forms of media, especially video. Possibly I will create an accompanying YouTube channel in order to make advice and articles more accessible. In the terminal state of Survive in Japan I would like to do content not only about surviving but also fun articles/videos about interesting aspects of Japan (i.e. food, culture, events, traditions)
The Technical Details
So how am I building this? Well for the frontend and backend I am using TypeScript with Next.js. Next allows me to serve static pages quickly which also heavily benefits SEO. In fact, all the pages are statically generated at build time except for the search page which is server-side rendered.
All this is hosted on Vercel using a combination of CDN and serverless functions. The server-side rendering part is actually using the edge computing runtime which allows for very fast response times. The database used for search is only available in one region so I was able to take advantage of in-memory caching on the edge computing side of things to make responses lightning fast.
Finally, I use a headless CMS called Sanity to store and write articles. This is hugely beneficial as non-engineers can write and add articles to the site.
