Writing about Japan in English has a specific failure mode: a claim gets made once, gets repeated across a hundred blogs, and becomes “common knowledge” without anyone ever checking the original. We try hard not to be one of those hundred blogs. Here’s how.
Where our facts come from
In rough order of how much weight we give them:
- Japanese primary sources. Government agencies, the Japan National Tourism Organization, railway operators, museum and shrine websites, the Cabinet Office for calendar and era matters. If a fact exists in Japanese from the body responsible for it, that’s the version we use.
- Japanese-language reference works and media. Especially for spellings of foreign names, where established practice matters more than any rule. If NHK and the major papers write a name a particular way, that’s the answer, whatever a transliteration table says.
- Academic and specialist English sources. Linguistics for the writing-system articles, food history for the cuisine ones.
- Our own testing. For anything involving a tool or a process, we run it ourselves before describing it.
What we don’t use: content farms, other people’s listicles, AI summaries, and travel posts that don’t say when they were written. If a claim only exists in English and only on blogs, we either find a Japanese source or we leave it out.
Dating everything that can go stale
A price, a fare, an opening hour, and a visa rule are not facts — they’re facts as of a date. So we write the date into the sentence. “As of 2026” is not filler; it’s the difference between an article you can trust in 2028 and one you can’t.
Pages that contain time-sensitive information go on a review list. Rail-pass pricing, entry requirements, and consumption-tax rules get re-checked at least twice a year and whenever we hear about a change.
Two answers can both be right
This comes up constantly with Japanese, and it’s the single most common reason English-language sources contradict each other.
- Names in katakana. Michael is マイケル. That isn’t derivable from any rule — the rules would give you something closer to マイチャエル — it’s simply the spelling that stuck. Where two spellings are genuinely both in use, we show the common one first and the alternative next to it rather than pretending there’s one answer.
- Romanization. Hepburn, Kunrei, and passport romanization disagree about long vowels and a handful of syllables. We use modified Hepburn throughout and say so, instead of switching systems mid-article.
- Zodiac years. The Chinese zodiac year turns at Lunar New Year, not on January 1. Anyone born in January or early February has a birth year that most Western zodiac calculators get wrong. Ours doesn’t, and the articles explain why.
When the honest answer is “it depends,” we’d rather write “it depends” and explain what it depends on than pick one and sound confident.Editorial standards, house rule 4
Who writes what
Every article carries a byline, and our writers stay in their lanes. Language, writing systems, names, and era conversion sit with one editor; travel, culture, and pop culture with another; food, everyday life, and the phrasebook with a third. When a piece crosses beats, it gets read by both before it goes out. You can see who wrote what on the about page.
Corrections
We fix errors rather than quietly deleting them. When a correction is substantive — a wrong fact, a wrong spelling, a changed rule — we update the text and add a dated note at the bottom of the page saying what changed. Typos and broken links we just fix.
If you spot something, write to hello@japanknowhow.com or use the contact page. You don’t need to be certain. “This looks wrong to me” is enough to make us go and check.
The limits of our tools
Our converters are software, and software applied to a language as irregular as English gets things wrong. We’ve measured how often, we publish the number, and we mark which results come from a hand-checked database and which are generated on the fly. That’s covered in detail on the tools page, and it’s worth reading before you rely on any output for something permanent.
Independence
We may earn a commission on some travel and product links, and we may run advertising. Neither buys a recommendation, a review score, or a place in an article. Nothing on this site is written or approved by an advertiser, and we don’t accept payment for links inside editorial text. If that ever changes, this page changes with it.