# nihonken.org: a pedigree database and the revived Nihon Ken Forum

> nihonken.org is Brad Anderson's site for the six native Japanese dog breeds: a pedigree and breeding-decision database of about 23,000 dogs with a COI and AVK genetics engine, and the Nihon Ken Forum he founded, revived in 2026 with its full 2007 to 2009 archive of about 80,000 posts.

nihonken.org is my site for the six native Japanese breeds: the Shiba, Akita, Kai, Kishu, Shikoku and Hokkaido. It's two products on one site. One is a pedigree and breeding-decision database. The other is the Nihon Ken Forum, which I founded years ago (it started as the Shikoku Dog Forum) and brought back in 2026 with its archive. It's not to be confused with nihonken.co, which is my friend Shigeru Kato's blog.

## The pedigree database

The database started from the export of an older hosted pedigree database: 23,341 dogs, along with registry numbers, health records and titles, with every parent link resolved. When it was loaded in late May 2026 that was 7,592 Shiba, 5,946 Akita, 4,169 Shikoku, 3,107 Kishu, 1,752 Kai and 775 Hokkaido.

Each dog's page has its pedigree as a tree or a grid, photos, health tests, titles and documents, and its COI (coefficient of inbreeding), AVK (ancestor loss coefficient) and pedigree completeness at 3 to 10 generations. A COI is only as good as the pedigree behind it, so when completeness is under 100 percent the site shows the COI as a floor, not an exact figure. The genetics engine is tested against coefficients worked out by hand with Wright's path-counting method, and migrated dogs keep the COI the old system had computed for them.

Beyond single dogs there's a mate finder, trial matings, side-by-side comparison, breed dashboards and yearly reports, breeders and litters, and a nightly measure of each dog's influence: how much of its breed's modern population descends from it, and how much of their genes it accounts for, again as a floor. One Kishu born in 1980, for instance, is in the recorded pedigree of nearly every US Kishu born in the last fifteen years.

Anyone can sign up and submit a dog, but a submission is staged until a moderator approves it, so unverified data never reaches the genetics engine. The site also publishes its data: nightly CSV and JSON exports under CC BY 4.0, Atom feeds, and every page as Markdown or JSON for crawlers and agents. There's also an optional assistant, off by default, built on the rule that the model never invents a number: every figure it gives comes from a tool. The same read-only tools are open to other agents over MCP, with an API key.

## The forum

The original Nihon Ken Forum ran on Vanilla Forums from 2007 to 2009. The revival brought back the whole archive: 80,136 posts in 4,158 threads from 762 members. The old database stored UTF-8 text inside latin1 columns, so the importer repaired the encoding to recover the Japanese text, and private categories and whispers stayed private. The attachment files died with the old server, so the posts keep placeholders where the pictures were. The forum is closed to new sign-ups: members of the original forum and invited people can sign in, and anyone can read the public categories. It has threads, polls, photo galleries, private messages, notifications, a daily digest, and dog mentions that link to the pedigree pages.

## How it's built

It's a pnpm monorepo in TypeScript: Hono APIs, Vue 3 front ends, Postgres as the source of truth (its schemas and migrations in Drizzle), and Meilisearch and Memgraph as indexes that can be rebuilt from Postgres. One gateway puts both products on one origin, so they share a login and need no CORS. The pedigree database came first, in May 2026, the forum revival followed in late June, and the two were merged into one site at the end of June. As with my other recent work, I made the design calls, and Claude Code wrote much of the code.

## Details

- **Category:** Projects
- **Tags:** nihonken.org, Nihon Ken, Nihon Ken Forum, Japanese dog breeds, pedigree database, pedigrees, dog genetics, COI, coefficient of inbreeding, AVK, breeding, Shiba Inu, Akita, Kai Ken, Kishu Ken, Shikoku, Hokkaido, forum, open data, TypeScript, Hono, Vue, Postgres, Meilisearch, Memgraph

**Also read:** [All writing](https://bradanderson.org/writing?format=md) · [About Brad](https://bradanderson.org/about?format=md)

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