Hinato

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 August 31, 2026

Who writes this site

Fudoki Japan is an independent project, not a media company or a tourism board. It is run by one operator rather than a masthead of individually bylined writers, so articles and guides carry a single byline — Hinato — and that byline links to a profile naming who that is, where they live, and which parts of this site are written from experience rather than from public records. The work divides into four functions, all of which the same person holds 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We do not publish invented staff profiles or credentials to look larger than we are.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 — records the source URLs against the page so a reader can check them, and marks what could not be confirmed so it is 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. We do not copy text from other travel sites, and we do not reproduce third-party content behind our paywall.

What “verified” means here, and where it is shown

A spot page is marked verified only when its concrete claims — opening hours, closing days, admission fees, address, and how you get there — have been compared against a source we can cite, and either matched it or been rewritten to match it. When that has happened, the page carries a “Facts verified” line under its heading giving the month of the check and linking to every source used. If that line is absent, no such check has been recorded, and you should treat the page's details as a starting point rather than a confirmation. We do not display a verification date without the sources behind it: a date on its own asserts diligence you cannot check, which is the same problem it is supposed to solve. Because Japanese opening hours and fees change without much notice, the line shows the month rather than the day — it tells you how recently someone looked, not that the detail is true today.

What we do when a claim cannot be sourced

We remove the part we cannot support and keep the part we can, rather than rewording the claim into something vaguer that still asserts it. In practice: an unconfirmed opening time is replaced with wording that tells you to confirm before visiting; a walking or journey time we did not measure is dropped while the station or town it referred to stays (“five minutes from X Station” becomes “near X Station”); a street address is rounded to the municipality, because a wrong building number sends you to the wrong door and a city name cannot; and a founding or construction date we could not confirm is deleted outright rather than softened into “centuries old”. Prices are left as written when they are given as a range or already flagged as approximate, and replaced with a note to check locally when a single unconfirmed figure is all a page has. These rules are applied mechanically across the whole catalogue and are re-run as content changes, so the standard does not depend on anyone remembering it.

How pages are written, and exactly where AI is and is not used

Drafting is AI-assisted; judgement, sourcing and fact-checking are not. Being specific about the boundary matters more than the disclosure itself, so here is the division of labour in full. A person decides what gets covered and why. A person gathers the sources — the operator's own pages, municipal and prefectural tourism bodies, transit operators — and records their URLs. A language model is then used to turn that collected material into readable English prose, and to copy-edit and tighten drafts. A person reviews the result against the sources before it is published, cuts every claim that cannot be substantiated, and decides to publish. Translations into the site's other languages are produced with machine assistance and are marked as such where they have not been reviewed by a person. The model is a drafting and editing tool: it is never treated as a source, it does not decide what a page asserts, and nothing it produces is published without a person having read it against the material it came from. We spell this out because "AI-assisted" is used to cover practices ranging from a spellchecker to unread automated publishing, and because the review step — not the drafting tool — is what makes a page worth trusting.

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, and how often it is checked

Every article and guide shows its publication date and, where it differs, the date it was last updated. Spot pages show a date only where it means something: the month their facts were last checked against a source. They deliberately do not display a generic "last updated" stamp, because a date that moves whenever anything on the page is touched implies a freshness the check does not have. The review cycle in practice: fee, opening-hour and access details are re-checked against their sources on a rolling basis, prioritised by how much traffic a page gets and how specific its claims are, with the aim that no page carrying concrete figures goes more than twelve months without someone looking at it again — pages whose details change often, such as seasonal openings and event dates, are looked at more frequently than that. Automated sweeps run far more often than the human ones and cover the things a machine can settle on its own: dead source links, broken images, and unsourced concrete claims that have crept back in. Seasonal and festival information is refreshed ahead of the season it describes. This is a target we work to rather than a guarantee we can enforce alone, which is why the honest instruction is still the same one: confirm hours, fees and closures with the operator before you travel, and tell us when we are out of date.

Corrections — how to report one, and what we do with it

If something here is wrong, we want to fix it, and we would rather hear about it from you than not at all. How to report it: use the contact form and pick the relevant topic, or write directly to [email protected]. Include the page URL, the sentence or figure you are disputing, and what you found instead — a photograph of the posted hours, the ticket window, or the closed gate settles it fastest, but it is not required, and "the bus route in the access notes no longer exists" is a perfectly useful report on its own. What happens next: we acknowledge reports we can act on, aiming to reply within a few days; we check the claim against the operator's own information; if you are right, the page is corrected and the sources are recorded on it, and its "Facts verified" line then shows that month. If we cannot confirm either version, we remove the claim rather than leave a disputed one standing — an absent detail sends nobody to a closed door. If we think the page is right, we will tell you what we checked and where, so you can judge for yourself rather than take our word for it. Corrections are made to the page itself rather than appended as a note, because a traveller reading it next week needs the right answer and not its history; where a correction changed something material, the source and the month of the recheck are visible on the page, which is the durable record of it.

Advertising, affiliates, and their separation from editorial

The site is funded by optional Premium subscriptions, by display advertising, and by affiliate commissions on accommodation bookings (the "Search Hotels & Stays" link on spot pages, via Stay22). Here is the separation, stated as a rule rather than an intention. Nothing is ever included, excluded, ranked, promoted or reworded because of advertising or affiliate revenue, and no commercial partner sees a page before it is published or has any route to request a change to one. Advertising is served programmatically: we do not choose the advertisers, we have no relationship with them, and their appearance next to a place says nothing about it. Ad slots occupy fixed positions in the page template and are labelled where they appear; they are never woven into the text, and no piece of editorial copy anywhere on this site is an advertisement. Affiliate links are limited to accommodation search, are marked with rel="sponsored", earn a commission only if you book, and cost you nothing extra — and the place was selected, described and ranked before any booking link was attached to it. There is no paid inclusion, no sponsored destination, no gifted or comped travel, and no affiliate relationship with any attraction, operator or venue covered here. If that ever changes, this paragraph changes first and the arrangement is disclosed on the page it affects.

Who is responsible for accuracy

Editorial responsibility for everything published here — including the accuracy of opening hours, fees, access details and the sources recorded against them — rests with the site's operator, named below. Drafting is AI-assisted, as set out above; the decision to publish, and the answer when something turns out to be wrong, are a person's.

Responsible for accuracy: Hinato
Based in: Miyazaki, Japan
Corrections: [email protected]

If you find a mistake, report it through the contact page or by email. Tell us the page, what we say, and what you found — corrections are made to the page itself. Report a mistake →

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.

Report a correction About Fudoki Japan