# Install $ npx rakuten-mcp # One server. Three Rakuten services. No other MCP does this. You: I'm going to Kyoto next week. Find hotels under ¥15,000 and some travel guide books. Claude: Searching Rakuten Travel for Kyoto hotels... Found 8 available rooms under ¥15,000/night. Searching Rakuten Books for Kyoto travel guides... Found 6 books. # Travel + Books + Ichiba + Reviews, all in one server.
MCP servers that connect AI agents to Japanese services. LINE, Rakuten, freee. One config, and your AI assistant can search products, send messages, or pull financial reports.
I was learning how MCP worked through building rippr, and I started wondering what else agents could talk to. Most MCP servers out there connect to English-language services. GitHub, Slack, Notion. I live in Japan, so I wanted to try building some for Japanese services.
I built three: LINE for messaging, Rakuten for e-commerce and travel, and freee for accounting. Each one is a standalone server with its own tools. You drop it into your Claude config and start asking questions in Japanese or English.
LINE and freee both have official MCP servers. Rakuten doesn't, as of now, mine is the most complete Rakuten MCP available. All three are open source, and Rakuten is also on npm (npx rakuten-mcp) for one-command installs.
01
Rakuten MCP is published on npm. Run npx rakuten-mcp and you're connected. No cloning, no building, no monorepo checkout. The other servers (LINE, freee) live in the same repo but stay completely independent. You use what you need and ignore the rest.
02
Other Rakuten MCPs cover one service each. If you want Ichiba and Travel, you install two servers, manage two configs, and your agent has no way to combine results. This server covers Ichiba (product search, rankings, reviews), Books (title, author, ISBN), and Travel (hotels, vacancies) through a single config entry. One setup for the human, seven tools for the agent.
03
Most MCP servers crash on startup if an API key is missing. The user sees a silent failure and no explanation. These servers start up, complete the handshake, and only check credentials when a tool is actually called. You get a specific error telling you what's missing and where to get it.