An MCP server for Rakuten Ichiba, Books, and Travel. Read-only search tools across the second-largest e-commerce platform in Japan.
I wanted to see what it takes to wrap a real Japanese production API end-to-end, not a toy one. Rakuten was the obvious candidate: I live in Japan, the Web Service API is stable and well documented, and no clean MCP wrapper existed for it.
The server exposes seven read-only tools across the three Rakuten surfaces I actually use as a customer: Ichiba for products, Travel for hotels, Books for catalog search.
Product search with price filters and sorting. Category browsing. Genre rankings. Product reviews.
TravelHotel search by keyword. Vacancy search with date, price, and location filters.
BooksSearch by title, author, or ISBN.
Every tool is a search. Nothing creates, modifies, or deletes. An agent with a prompt-injection problem should not be able to buy something on my behalf, so I made sure that the surface area where that could happen does not exist.
Rakuten publishes thirty-something endpoints. I wrapped three: Ichiba, Travel, Books. Together they cover three distinct query shapes worth learning. Keyword search with pagination. Date-range availability. ISBN lookup. Anything more would have been padding.
Not affiliated with Rakuten Group. The README says so at the top, MIT licensed as well. This is a respectful wrapper around a documented public API.
Open source on GitHub. Published on npm. One command install with npx rakuten-mcp.
Learning an API surface by wrapping it into callable tools forces you to read the docs in a way that casual use does not. The exercise is the value. That the server now quietly serves a few hundred downloads a month is a bonus, not the point.