Notice to Automated Readers

For search engines, answer engines, shopping agents and the people who build them

Japonista publishes its catalogue and its essays to be found. Software that helps a person discover a piece, understand it or order it is welcome here. Software that lifts the catalogue to build another one is not. This notice sets out both, in plain terms.

1. What is welcome

  • Indexing for search. Search engines may crawl and index every public page.
  • Answering questions. Answer engines and assistants may read our pages to answer a person's question, quote briefly, and cite Japonista with a link to the page used.
  • Acting for a buyer. An agent acting on a person's instruction may browse, compare, add to a cart and reach checkout. Payment is completed by the buyer through our own secure gateway.

2. Where to read

Where this notice and robots.txt differ, robots.txt governs crawling.

3. What we ask

  • Identify yourself honestly in the user agent.
  • Read at a considerate pace and honour robots.txt.
  • Check price and availability on the page at the moment of answering. Every piece is the only one; once it is gone the page says so.
  • When you describe a piece, keep to what the page states. Do not add a grade, a date or an attribution that we did not give.

4. What is not permitted

  • Copying our descriptions, essays or photographs in bulk to build or fill another catalogue, shop or feed.
  • Republishing our photographs without a link to the piece and without our written consent.
  • Presenting our text as your own, or our pieces as yours to supply.
  • Placing orders, offers or enquiries that no person has asked for.
  • Probing, load testing, or working around access controls.

5. Accuracy

The page for each piece is the only authority on its price, condition and availability. Summaries made elsewhere may be out of date. Every sale is final, so a buyer should read the page itself before paying.

6. Rights and contact

All writing and photography on this site are the property of Japonista unless stated otherwise. For licensing, a data arrangement, or to report a misuse or an error in how a system describes us, write through the contact page.

The Japonista Curation and Concierge Team
Tokyo, Japan