Fudoki Japan Editorial Team
Editorial Policy
Everything on this site is a claim about a real place that someone may travel a long way to reach. This page sets out how those claims are researched, written, checked, and corrected — and where we draw the line and tell you we do not know.
Last reviewed
Who writes this site
Fudoki Japan is an independent project, not a media company or a tourism board. It is run by a small team rather than a masthead of individually bylined writers, so articles and guides carry a single byline — the Fudoki Japan Editorial Team — and that byline links here. The work divides into four functions, several of which the same person may hold at once.
We do not publish invented staff profiles or credentials to look larger than we are. What we can tell you is exactly how a page gets made, which is the part that actually determines whether the opening time on it is right.
Editorial direction
Decides what earns a place on the site: which regions are under-covered, which spots are genuinely worth a traveler's detour, and which are famous enough that we add nothing by repeating them. Owns the standards on this page and signs off on changes to them.
Research and sourcing
Gathers each spot's facts from official and public sources — municipal and prefectural tourism bodies, operators' own sites, transit operators, and park or shrine authorities — and records what could not be confirmed so it can be written as unknown rather than guessed.
Writing and review
Drafts the English description, access notes, and insider guidance, then reviews it against the collected sources before publication. Every published page has been read by a person, whatever tools helped produce the draft.
Data and maintenance
Keeps the structured fields honest: coordinates, opening hours, fees, seasonal windows, and the derived filters built from them. Runs the periodic sweeps that catch broken images, dead links, and spots that have closed or moved.
How we work
How we choose what to cover
We start from the gap: a place is a candidate when it is genuinely worth a traveler's time and is poorly served by English-language coverage. In practice that favours regional Japan over the Tokyo–Kyoto–Osaka corridor, and it means a well-known site is included only when we can add something concrete — access that is hard to work out from abroad, timing that avoids the crowds, or context that explains why it matters. Coverage is balanced across all 47 prefectures on purpose, so that thin regions get filled in rather than the same few prefectures getting deeper and deeper. No place is ever included because someone paid for it to be.
Where the information comes from
Facts are compiled from public and official sources: municipal and prefectural tourism organisations, the operator's or the site's own information, national and regional transit operators for access and journey times, and public records for historical and cultural background. Where sources disagree — and on opening hours and fees they often do — we prefer the operator's own statement, and we cross-check it against at least one independent source before publishing. We do not copy text from other travel sites, and we do not reproduce third-party content behind our paywall.
How pages are written and reviewed
Drafting is AI-assisted and editing is human. A draft is generated from the collected source material, then reviewed against those sources by a person before it goes live: claims that could not be substantiated are cut, and anything uncertain is written as uncertain. We say this plainly because the alternative — implying every line was written from a notebook in the field — would be false, and because the review step, not the drafting tool, is what makes a page trustworthy.
What we will not assert
Details in Japan change with the season and with little notice. When we cannot confirm a fact, we say so in the page itself rather than filling the field with a plausible number: you will see wording like "check locally before visiting" instead of an invented opening time. Some information is estimated rather than sourced — travel times from major hubs are calculated from distance where no published figure exists, and seasonal windows written as "late October" are approximate. Estimates are labelled as estimates wherever they appear, and we never present one with more precision than the underlying source supports.
How current the information is
Every article and guide shows its publication date and, where it differs, the date it was last updated. Spot pages carry the date of their most recent revision. We review content on an ongoing basis rather than on a fixed calendar, prioritising pages where the underlying facts move most — seasonal timings, festival dates, fees, and transit access — and we re-run automated checks for broken images and links. Even so, treat hours, fees, and closures as the thing to confirm before you travel, not the thing to rely on.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we want to fix it, and we would rather hear about it from you than not at all. Report it through the contact form or by email and tell us the page and what you found on the ground. Substantive corrections are made to the page itself and, when a correction changes what a reader would do, the update date is moved so the change is visible rather than silent.
Independence and how we make money
The site is funded by optional Premium subscriptions and by display advertising. Neither buys coverage or placement: advertisers have no input into what we cover or how we describe it, and there is no paid, sponsored, or gifted inclusion anywhere on the site. Advertising is labelled where it appears. If we ever add affiliate links, they will be disclosed on the page that carries them — as of the date below, we carry none.
Tell us we're wrong
If you visited somewhere on this site and found the hours, the fee, the access, or the place itself different from what we said, that is the single most useful thing you can send us. Choose the relevant topic on the contact form and it reaches the right place.