About

I’m Ryota. I grew up in Okinawa, spent eighteen years there, and have lived in Tokyo for the last four.

That’s the whole premise of this site, and it’s a bigger advantage than it sounds.

Why I started writing this

The number of visitors coming to Japan has climbed sharply in the last few years, and I’ve watched it happen from both ends of the country. I want people to enjoy this place. But I’ve come to think something that doesn’t get said often enough:

Japan is difficult to enjoy fully without knowing a few things in advance.

Not because anyone is unwelcoming — the opposite. It’s that a lot of how things work here is unwritten. There are rules, customs and small courtesies that nobody explains because to us they aren’t rules, they’re just what you do. Visitors run into them constantly without ever being told, and it quietly takes the edge off an otherwise good trip.

I’m on the other side of that. I see the moments where a visitor gets something slightly wrong and nobody says anything. That perspective is not available to a writer working from outside Japan, and it’s most of what this site is for.

The other thing: everyone writes about the same places

English guides converge on the same short list of sights. Those places are genuinely worth seeing. But the parts of Japan I’d actually recommend — a local izakaya where you don’t order from a picture menu, a neighbourhood that isn’t on anyone’s itinerary — barely appear in English at all.

I’ve travelled through nineteen prefectures: Hokkaido, Fukushima, Ibaraki, Tochigi, Saitama, Chiba, Tokyo, Nagano, Yamanashi, Shizuoka, Toyama, Mie, Kyoto, Osaka, Hyogo, Fukuoka, Oita, Kumamoto and Okinawa. Where I write about a place, it’s usually somewhere I’ve been.

The problem with most English guides to Japan

Most of them are written from outside Japan, working from English sources that are themselves translations of Japanese sources, often several years old. The result is a lot of confidently-stated information that used to be true.

Some real examples from articles on this site:

Guides still recommend buying a Kyoto bus one-day pass. It stopped being sold in September 2023.
Guides still say “just get the Japan Rail Pass.” After the 2023 price increase, a Tokyo–Kyoto round trip covers only 55% of the cost of a seven-day pass.
Guides publish “2026 autumn foliage dates” that are simply last year’s numbers, because the actual forecast isn’t released until September.
Almost none have Kyoto’s new five-bracket lodging tax right, despite it taking effect on 1 March 2026.

None of this is written in bad faith. It’s just what happens when the source material is second-hand and the incentive is to publish quickly.

What I do differently

I read the Japanese sources. City government pages, transport operator notices, meteorological forecasts, hotel operators’ own announcements. When this site quotes a tax bracket or a fare, it comes from the organisation that sets it.

I explain the unwritten part. Not just where to go, but how it works when you get there — what’s expected, what isn’t, and what nobody will tell you at the time.

I say when I don’t know. If I can’t confirm a figure from a primary source, I say so in the article rather than repeating someone else’s guess. You’ll find sentences on this site admitting exactly which numbers I couldn’t verify.

I date everything and update it. Several things this site covers are actively changing. Articles carry the date they were checked, and I revise them when the underlying facts move rather than leaving a stale page to rank.

I’ll tell you not to buy things. See the affiliate disclosure for why that matters and how this site makes money.

What this site covers

Practical trip-planning for Japan: when to go, how to move around, where to base yourself, what it actually costs — and how to behave once you’re here without having to guess.

Less “10 magical hidden gems,” more “here is the number, here is where it came from, here is what it means for your dates.”

Get in touch

Corrections especially welcome — if something here is wrong, I want to fix it.

hello@japanfromhere.com