We are a small team in Japan writing English-language guides to eating and travelling here.
Here is the thing that makes this site different, and it is not a very romantic thing: we read Japanese.
That sounds trivial. It isn’t. Most English-language travel content about Japan is assembled from other English-language travel content, which means it inherits every error, every closed restaurant, and every set of opening hours that changed in 2019. The information that would fix all of it — the shop’s own website, the notice on their X account, the Tabelog review from someone who eats there every week — sits in Japanese, where almost no English-language guide goes looking.
We go looking. That is the job.
What you get from this site
Guides that pair what to eat with where to sleep. Every guide covers a specific area and answers both questions in one place, because the standard travel-planning experience is reading one article about food, a second about hotels, then trying to work out on a map whether they are anywhere near each other.
The practical details that decide whether your evening works. Which day it closes. Whether they take cards. Whether you need to book, and whether you can book online or only by phone in Japanese. What time locals start queuing. These are the things that turn a planned dinner into a locked door, and they are the things that are hardest to find in English.
Honest notes on the annoying parts. If a place is worth going to but the queue is genuinely 90 minutes, we say 90 minutes. If a famous spot is mostly worth it for the photograph and the food is average, we say that too. A guide where everything is wonderful is not a guide, it is a brochure.
How we make money
Some links on this site are affiliate links — mostly for hotels and activities. If you book through one, we may earn a small commission, and it costs you nothing extra.
Nobody pays to be listed here. We do not sell placements, we do not sell rankings, and no restaurant has ever been included because they asked. If that ever changes for a particular article, that article will say so at the top, clearly, before you read it.
Our full method, our sources, and the things we deliberately don’t claim are set out in How We Research. It is worth two minutes if you are deciding whether to trust us.
Travel that leaves something behind
Most of the money a visitor spends in Japan goes to a small number of very large places. We would rather point people towards the neighbourhood soba shop that has been run by the same family for three generations, the coffee stand two streets off the main road, and the ryokan in a town that most itineraries drive straight past.
Those places are frequently the better experience anyway. They are just harder to find in English — which brings us back to the beginning.
Get in touch
Found something out of date? A place that has closed, hours that have changed, a shop that now takes cards? Tell us through our contact page and we will check it and fix the guide.
Planning a trip and stuck on something? Ask. We do not always have an answer, but we usually know where to look in Japanese.