A solo builder in Japan on designing for the day updates stop: static hosting, honest missing-data labels, and two AIs researching independently

1. Treating “the day I stop” as a starting assumption

Have you ever tried to compare two towns’ finances before an election? In Japan, local government data is not easy for citizens to read. Every municipality structures its website differently, and much of what is published comes as PDFs or tables saved as images. Before an election, I wanted to look up my own town’s policies and finances. As someone with a full-time job, though, I found it hard even to find a basis for comparison.

Others have tackled this problem before. “Where Does My Money Go?”, a project born in the UK, had a Japanese edition, spending.jp. It started with Yokohama in 2013 and spread to other cities through volunteers.…