Hinato

I am Hinato. I live in Japan, in Miyazaki Prefecture on the eastern side of Kyushu, and I run Fudoki Japan on my own. There is no company behind this site, no editorial staff, no tourism board, and no investor. When you read a page here, one person researched it, wrote it, and decided to publish it — and that person is reachable at the address at the bottom of this page.

I am not a travel journalist and I do not present myself as one. What I am is someone who lives here, reads Japanese, and got tired of watching the English-language internet answer questions about this country with the same twenty places. Miyazaki is a useful vantage point for that frustration: it is a prefecture with a coastline, a mountain range, a shrine circuit and a food culture that most English guidebooks dispose of in half a page, if they mention it at all.

The gap that started it is easy to describe. Search in English for almost any place in Japan outside the Tokyo–Kyoto–Osaka corridor and you get one of three results: nothing at all, a machine-translated municipal page that assumes you already know where you are, or a listicle that mentions the place in one line as a way of getting to Kyoto. Meanwhile the Japanese-language internet has plenty about these places — municipal pages, prefectural tourism sites, the operators' own notices — it simply never crosses over.

So the site is, in the most literal sense, a translation and organisation project. The name comes from the fudoki (風土記), the provincial gazetteers compiled more than a thousand years ago to record the land, the customs and the local stories of each province, one province at a time. That is the shape of the work: write down what is there, prefecture by prefecture, in a language the people who might want to visit can actually read.

Coverage is deliberately spread across all 47 prefectures rather than deepened in the few that already have it. That decision costs the site traffic — nobody searches for the places nobody has written about — and it is the reason the site exists, so it stays.

Every page starts as a set of sources rather than as prose. I collect what the operator, the municipality, the prefectural tourism organisation and the transit companies publish about a place, in Japanese, and record the URLs. Where those sources disagree — and on opening hours and admission fees they disagree constantly — the operator's own statement wins.

Drafting is AI-assisted. I want to be exact about what that means, because the phrase is used to cover a range of practices: I use a language model to turn collected source material into readable English prose, and I then review that prose against the sources before anything is published. The model does not decide what gets covered, does not decide what a page claims, and is not treated as a source. Fact-checking is mine.

Anything I cannot substantiate is removed rather than softened. That rule is enforced mechanically as well as by hand: the repository this site is built from carries a pass that finds concrete unsourced assertions — a venue's opening time, a street address, a walking time in minutes, a founding year, a single admission figure — and strips or generalises them, keeping the part that is safe. A station name survives; the "five minutes' walk" from it does not, unless something published says so. That is why some pages here read as less specific than a guidebook would. The specificity a guidebook has is frequently invented, and I would rather be visibly less confident than quietly wrong.

Where a page's facts have been checked against a citable source, it says so under its heading, with the month of the check and links to every source used. If that line is absent, no such check has been recorded, and you should treat the details as a starting point.

This is the part that matters most, so I will be blunt about it rather than leave you to infer it from tone.

Living in Miyazaki means the Miyazaki and wider Kyushu material starts from somewhere real: I know how the local trains and buses behave in practice as opposed to on the timetable, what the rainy season and the typhoon months actually do to a travel plan here, which coastal roads are worth the detour, and how far apart things really are in a prefecture where the map flatters the driving times. Where a page reflects that, it is because I live with it.

The rest of the site — the great majority of it, covering the other 46 prefectures — is compiled from public and official sources, and I do not claim to have stood in every place I have written about. Nobody credible could make that claim about a catalogue of this size, and a claim like that is exactly the kind of thing that collapses the first time someone tests it. What I do claim is that each of those pages is traceable: assembled from sources I can name, with the parts I could not confirm taken out rather than guessed at.

The practical consequence for you: use the lived-experience material for judgement calls — is this worth the detour, when is it unpleasant, what will the journey actually feel like — and treat every concrete figure on the site, mine included, as something to confirm with the operator before you travel. Hours and fees in Japan change without much notice, and the site is honest about how recently anyone looked.

I do not accept payment for coverage. Nothing on this site is here because someone paid, sponsored, gifted or comped it, and there is no arrangement under which that could happen without this line changing first.

I do not invent staff. There is no editorial board, no team of correspondents, and no contributor bios other than this one, because there is no one else.

I do not write travel I have not done. If a page reads as though someone was standing there, that is a writing failure and I would like to know about it.