Ikuden

Ikuden — Facility Search Platform for Childcare & Disability Support (Japan)

Ikuden is a Japanese web platform that helps parents and caregivers discover, compare, and contact childcare and disability-support services for children. It brings a nationwide directory of over 50,000 facilities — each with a detailed profile, location and map search, photos, user reviews, and inquiry tools — together into one clear, searchable website.

My role focused on the backend: the engine that stores all of this information and delivers it to the website quickly and reliably. The centrepiece of the project was rebuilding that backend from the ground up and migrating it from Xano to Directus.

Tech stack

• Backend & data platform: Directus (v11) running on a PostgreSQL database
• Hosting: Elestio (managed), in the Tokyo region for fast response times for Japanese users
• Custom API: Node.js / TypeScript endpoint extensions for high-speed search, released automatically through a GitHub Actions pipeline
• Caching: Redis
• Frontend: Nordcraft (a visual web builder)

Rebuilding the backend: from Xano to Directus

The project started on Xano, a no-code backend service where the database and business logic are built visually. As Ikuden grew, it moved to Directus — an open-source data platform — for more direct control over the database, stronger performance, and lower long-term running costs.

I handled this migration end to end:

• Redesigned the data model in Directus to hold every part of a facility’s information — core profile, location, services offered, staff and qualifications, opening hours, pricing, photos, and reviews — along with the relationships between them.
• Migrated more than 50,000 facility records, plus user accounts and saved-facility lists, using custom Python and Node.js scripts. A large part of this was careful data cleaning and validation — catching duplicates, repairing broken links between records, and correctly handling Japanese-language text and encoding before anything went live.
• Re-created the site’s logic as custom API endpoints. Features such as facility search and filtering, “facilities near me”, and “facilities near a school or station” were rebuilt as dedicated, high-performance endpoints that replaced the original no-code workflows.

Making it fast

Searching across tens of thousands of facilities needs to feel instant. I put a lot of focus on performance — writing efficient database queries, adding indexes on the fields people filter by, running independent queries in parallel, and layering in caching — so results come back quickly even under load. I also set up an automated deployment process, so backend changes can be tested and pushed to the live site safely and repeatably.

Frontend

The website itself is built in Nordcraft, a visual frontend builder. My involvement there was smaller and supporting — mainly making sure the frontend connected cleanly and efficiently to the new Directus backend.