Rails developer in Osaka. I build things and then keep them running.
10 years in Japan, working day to day in Japanese. I develop Kengaku Cloud at Biz Creation, and outside that I run two products of my own — one for Japanese Pension refunds, one documenting my 8 years of reviewing ramen.
Work
Independent products I build and operate, alongside team-based product work.
My Pension Japan
People leaving Japan are owed their pension contributions back, but the application is cumbersome for non-Japanese speakers, and the tax portion is legally restricted work. My Pension Japan connects them to the professionals licensed to do it: a Labor and Social Security attorney files the pension claim, a tax accountant handles the tax. It runs everything around that in one place: intake, documents, signatures, payment. It is live in private beta, with multiple paying customers moving refunds through it before any marketing.
- Licensed filings routed to a labor attorney and a tax accountant — separate records, separate reviewers
- Stripe checkout with an upfront fee plus commission split
- Generated pension forms — coordinate-mapped PDF overlays
- E-signatures, staff review queues, and end-to-end audit history
- Self-managed infrastructure in Japan — data residency, automated encrypted backups, and regularly tested recovery
Off the clock
- StudyingWorking toward JLPT N1, and learning Go
- BuiltA Raspberry Pi e-ink board showing ITM and KIX arrivals
- Dialing inEspresso on a Silvia Pro X
- Reading The Odyssey — Homer Updated from Goodreads
Ramen Ranger
My own ramen site: every bowl I've reviewed since 2018, mostly Kansai and wherever else in Japan I end up. Scored, photographed, and mapped. Readers can sign up to favorite bowls and leave comments. It publishes a JSON API, which is what fills the row below.
theramenranger.com
Latest five from my API, with a build-time fallback. Browse the reviews
Kengaku Cloud
A cloud platform used by Japanese home builders and real estate firms. I work on a long-lived Rails codebase with a team of three: new features, third-party integrations like the Google Calendar API, bug fixes, and performance tuning. I also help define the team's practical workflow for using AI tools to deliver faster while maintaining code-quality standards. The whole environment is Japanese: specs, code review, and working directly with sales and customer success.
Where I started
A Rails chat app on ActionCable, a React crypto portfolio calculator, Ozei (a team project that helps large groups find restaurant reservations), and a few Python games. My bootcamp year and the months after. The production work since is closed source, so this is what's public.
How I work
Rails 8's minimal setup, deployed with Kamal to servers I manage myself when the choice is mine — I'd rather know exactly what is on the machine than debug a platform I can't SSH into. When a project already runs on AWS, I work there too. For products I operate, staging mirrors production.
Application
- Ruby on Rails 8
- Hotwire — Turbo, Stimulus
- Solid Queue, Solid Cache, Solid Cable
- SQLite + Litestream, PostgreSQL
- JavaScript, Python
Infrastructure
- Kamal, Docker
- Vultr, Hetzner, Heroku
- AWS — S3, RDS, CloudFront, CloudWatch
- Cloudflare CDN and WAF
- Backblaze B2, Litestream backups
Working together
- One developer from build through deployment, or embedded in your team
- Stabilizing and improving an existing Rails application
- Deployment with documented operating and handover steps
- Ongoing maintenance
- English or 日本語