Jikan is the unofficial MyAnimeList REST API; the name comes from the Japanese word for "time." It exists for a simple reason: for years MyAnimeList had no usable public API, so the community built one by reading the site’s public pages and re-serving the result as clean JSON. Today it runs as a PHP/Laravel application, the current version is v4, and the public instance lives at https://api.jikan.moe/v4. Its defining feature is zero friction: no API key, no account, no OAuth, no Authorization header — send a GET and you get JSON. The endpoint surface is broad: /anime and /manga for search and detail, /characters and /people for cast and staff, /seasons/now for the current season, /schedules for each weekday’s lineup, /top/anime for rankings, /genres/anime for genre filtering, /producers for studios, plus /random, /recommendations, and /reviews — covering essentially everything a browse-and-discover product needs to show. Two facts to design around: first, rate limiting. The public instance enforces 3 requests/second and 60 requests/minute simultaneously; both apply, and exceeding either returns HTTP 429. The project is donation-funded via Patreon and expects aggressive client-side caching rather than charging you. Second, freshness. Jikan serves cached data with a 24-hour default cache (CACHE_DEFAULT_EXPIRE=86400, shorter for some endpoints), which is fine for synopses, scores, and rankings but wrong for real-time needs. The most important boundary is read-only: Jikan reads public data and cannot authenticate as a user, so it can never modify anyone’s list — marking as watched, changing scores, and adding or removing entries all require the official MyAnimeList API. Many real apps therefore use both: Jikan for the public catalog and the official API for the per-user list. When throughput outgrows the shared instance, jikan-rest is open source and Dockerized; self-hosting lifts the rate limit without changing client code, but a self-hosted instance is still read-only because it still has no user authentication.