Ethics Policy

Reader first

Every editorial decision — which event to cover, which booking partner to recommend, which season to warn against — is made with the reader's trip in mind. If an affiliate program paid us more to recommend a worse hotel, we would still recommend the better hotel. If one of our strongest advertising relationships required us to omit a less-flattering fact about an event, we would omit the advertising relationship instead of the fact.

Advertising and sponsorship boundary

• Affiliate links are not endorsements.We use affiliate programs (Booking.com, Agoda, Klook, Trip.com, GetYourGuide, Hotels.com, Viator) because they make the site financially sustainable. We earn a commission only when a reader books through our link, and never from showing the link itself. Which partners we recommend per article is chosen on fit for the reader's likely need, not on commission rate.
• No disguised sponsored content.We do not accept payment to write about a specific event, hotel, tour or product under an editorial byline without disclosure. Clearly-marked sponsored content (if we ever accept it) is labelled "Sponsored" at the top of the article and excluded from search index via a nofollow link policy.
• No free-stay bias. If an operator provides complimentary access (press hotel night, event ticket) to one of our writers, that fact is disclosed inline in the article where the resulting coverage appears.

Conflicts of interest

Our writers may personally use the services we recommend (Suica cards, JR passes, Klook tours) — that is how we come to recommend them. We do not hold equity in any Japan tourism business, hotel group or booking platform. If this changes we will update this page before any article affected by the holding is published or updated.

Reader privacy and safety

• We respect browser Do Not Track (DNT) and Global Privacy Control (GPC) signals and skip loading our analytics script for those visitors.
• Reader photo submissions (if contributed) go through moderation before being shown. EXIF location and camera metadata are stripped before display so a reader's home location is never leaked by sharing a hanami photo.
• We never publish a reader's email, feedback or newsletter signup address.
• Newsletter unsubscribe is one-click and immediate — no "are you sure" interstitials, no re-signup requests, no retention attempts.

Diversity of coverage

Japan's tourism press tends to over-cover Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka. We spend editorial effort on under-covered regions — Hokkaido, Tohoku, Fukuoka, Okinawa, lesser-known Kansai and Chubu spots — proportional to their actual seasonal appeal, not proportional to their existing search demand. Over time this raises the content inventory for travelers planning off-the- Golden-Route trips.

AI use policy

We use AI assistants (including Anthropic Claude) for research, translation drafts, outline generation and copyediting. We do not publish AI-generated article bodies without human verification against primary sources. We do not use AI to generate images represented as photographs of real locations. Our Editorial Standards page describes our verification process in full.

What we will not cover

• Businesses with credible reports of worker-safety abuses
• Events that bar foreign visitors (unless noted as context that readers specifically need)
• Any event, hotel or operator that has threatened legal action against another independent travel site for honest reporting

Changes to this policy

Material changes to this ethics policy are versioned by date at the top of the page. We will not quietly weaken reader protections to accommodate a commercial relationship.