Building "あ" -> "雨": Japanese Suggest Without IME Access

This article was originally published on my blog (Rapls Works) in Japanese. I've translated and adapted it for dev.to readers. When you type あ into Google's search box, you immediately see kanji suggestions like 雨 (rain), 赤 (red), 青 (blue), and 秋 (autumn). Ever wanted to build the same feature on your own site? My first instinct was: "I'll just grab the IME's conversion candidates from JavaScript." Turns out, this is impossible . Not a bug — an intentional security design. So how do you actually