Last updated: August 9, 2026
Editorial and fact-checking policy for Central Japan Travel Guide.
Why this page exists
The most damaging thing a travel guide can do is be wrong. You take the train to a restaurant that closed last year. You count out coins at the ticket machine and the fare is different. You board a train and find out mid-journey that it does not stop where you need it to.
I have lived in Nagoya for 35 years and my name is on every article here. So the factual parts of this site — prices, opening hours, closed days, addresses, access routes, fares — do not get written from memory. Here is what actually happens instead.
Where my facts come from
Different kinds of facts get checked against different sources, in a fixed order.
| What I’m checking | First choice | If that fails |
|---|---|---|
| Restaurants | The shop’s own website or official social account | Tabelog, then Google Maps and major food media |
| Hotels and ryokan | The property’s official site | Rakuten Travel, Booking.com, Tripadvisor listings |
| Attractions, shrines, parks | The facility’s official site | City and prefectural tourism boards (nagoya-info.jp, aichi-now.jp), then JNTO |
| Train and bus fares, journey times, timetables | The operator’s official site only | — |
Transport is the strict one. Fares and journey times come from the railway or bus company itself, and nowhere else. If I cannot confirm a fare on the operator’s own site, I do not print a number. An approximate fare is worse than no fare when you are standing at a ticket machine.
I also read the Japanese version of an official page before the English one. Japanese facilities often leave their English pages untouched for years after updating the Japanese.
Every fact carries the date I checked it
For each price and opening time on this site, I keep a record of the source URL, the line on that page that supports it, and the date I looked. Article text is written from that record. If a number is not in the record, it does not go in the article.
The record does not sit still:
- Prices, opening hours and fares get re-checked before use once they are more than 90 days old.
- Whether a place is still open gets re-checked every single time I revise an article that mentions it. Closures, long renovations and relocations have caught me before.
- Festival and event dates get re-checked every year. Dates move, and some years an event is cancelled outright.
“It was correct when I checked last year” is not something I am willing to publish on.
When sources disagree
They disagree often. A facility’s official site says one closing time and the city tourism portal says another. An official access page still names a station that was renamed. My rules:
- For a place, the place’s own official page wins.
- For station names, fares and journey times, the transport operator wins — facility access pages go stale.
- If something only exists in a secondary source, I attribute it in the text rather than stating it flatly.
- If I cannot settle it, I say so, or I leave it out.
Numbers get copied and pasted from the source. Reading a figure and retyping it is how you lose the last digit.
Writing and checking are separate jobs
A finished draft is not a publishable draft. Before anything goes live, it goes through a separate checking pass whose job is to assume the draft is wrong and try to prove it — not to confirm it. Looking for mistakes finds more of them than looking for confirmation does.
One number usually appears in several places in the same article: the summary at the top, a comparison table, an itinerary, the FAQ, the cost breakdown. Fixing one instance and not the others leaves the article contradicting itself, so a correction means finding every occurrence and changing all of them together.
Where I have actually been
The restaurants and places on this site are, as a rule, places I have been to — usually many times over many years, not once on a press trip. When I write about somewhere I have not been myself, I say so in the article. That is the only honest way I know to handle it.
If I get something wrong, tell me
I still get things wrong. A price can change the week after I publish.
If you find an error or something out of date, please tell me through the contact form. If you are travelling soon, say so and I will look at it first. When a reader reports something, I go back to the original source and check it again, and if I was wrong I correct the article — including when the correction is inconvenient for me. When an article changes, the “Last updated” date at the top of it changes with it.
About the money
This site carries affiliate links to booking sites and tour operators, and it carries display advertising. If you book through a link, I earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
To be blunt about it: commission does not buy a place on this site. I have never recommended a restaurant or a hotel because the payout was higher, and small family-run places that offer me no affiliate link at all are recommended here constantly. Full details of how the site earns and who the partners are is on the affiliate disclosure page.
One last thing
None of this exists because I am careful by nature. It exists because I have been wrong before — I have listed a place that had already closed, missed an admission price increase, and confused a restaurant’s main shop with its branch. Every rule above was added after something went wrong.
— Yuu, Osu, Nagoya