Your gateway to education in Japan

Find your place to study in Japan.

Explore universities, colleges and specialist programs across Japan, with study options available in both English and Japanese.

Compare schools, locations and study paths to find the right fit for what comes next.

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What I noticed

While going through schoolsinjapan.com, a few frontend issues stood out around stacking, z-index, sticky positioning, scroll locking and overlays.

From the public side, several WordPress technologies also appear to contribute to the same directory experience. I don't have access to the backend, plugin configuration, custom PHP or the reasons behind the original setup, so this isn't intended as an audit of their implementation.

What interested me was whether the same feature could be reduced to fewer moving parts.

What I changed

Rather than recreate the visible setup component by component, I reduced the directory to one focused WordPress feature.

Custom WordPress theme for the site shell
Custom Schools Directory plugin
Native custom post types, taxonomies and post meta
PHP for rendering and server-side logic
Plain JavaScript for filtering and interaction
Plain CSS for layout and responsive behavior
WordPress REST API for enquiries
Polylang for language handling

Why

The visible issues were the kind that can appear when several components all need to agree on the same things: stacking contexts, overflow, scroll locking, sticky positioning, breakpoints and modal behavior.

Any one component can work correctly by itself and still conflict with another when both are trying to control the same part of the interface.

For the rebuild, the theme owns the site and the plugin owns the directory. Fewer moving parts, specifically where the moving parts appeared to be colliding.