Developer builds local tool to turn Japanese official paperwork into plain English

A developer preparing to move to Japan for a first job struggled to understand official Japanese letters, such as a ward office notice about a residence registration deadline. They built Namakemono, a command-line tool that reads Japanese .txt documents placed in an inbox folder. The tool produces a Markdown digest sorting documents by urgency, with English summaries, action checklists, required items, and key Japanese terms with readings, plus a calendar file of deadlines. It runs entirely on a laptop using the Gemma 3 4B model through Ollama, requiring no internet connection, API key, or subscription. The project was submitted to the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge and its source code is publicly available on GitHub.