Yorimichi (寄り道) means “detour” in Japanese — the small turn off the main road where the good stuff usually is.
Who writes this
One person: a Japanese writer, born and living in Tokyo, who works in advertising as a creative director and copywriter. Not an expat guide, not a content farm. The reason the site exists is that a lot of English-language writing about Japan is assembled by people who have never stood in the station it describes, and it shows — wrong prices, services that closed years ago, advice that no one here would actually follow.
The food writing comes from a Tokyo native’s own eating: the sushi-and-ramen counter in Shimbashi is a place I go to, not a place I researched.
How the facts get checked
Being local doesn’t make you right about a locker price at a station across town, so here is the actual method rather than a claim of omniscience:
- Operator sources first. Prices, hours and rules come from the company that runs the thing — JR East, Tokyo Metro, Tobu, the airport operators, the National Tax Agency — not from other travel sites
- Everything is dated. Every article says the month its figures were checked, because Japanese prices move and most guides never say when they were written
- Uncertainty gets flagged. Where a number comes from a single unofficial source, or where an operator doesn’t publish something, the article says so instead of guessing confidently
- Corrections are the point. If something here is wrong, the contact page is the fastest way to fix it, and it gets fixed
A concrete example of why this matters: nearly every English guide still tells you to leave your suitcase at the Asakusa tourist information centre. That service ended on 31 March 2026.
What the site does
- Decisions — settling the choices every visitor faces (eSIMs, rail passes, where to stay, which teamLab) with numbers instead of adjectives
- Practical Japan — the unglamorous machinery of a trip: luggage, cash, IC cards, tax-free, airports
- Detour Eats — where people here actually eat, one street off the tourist route
Everything we’ve published is listed here.
The rules
- One article settles one decision
- We always say who should skip something, not only who should buy it
- No writing about a restaurant we haven’t eaten at
- No inventing experiences. Where an article is built on research rather than a personal visit, it reads like research
How the site pays for itself
Some links are affiliate links: if you book or buy through one, we earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It never changes what we recommend, and it never buys a place on a list. Affiliate links are disclosed at the top of every article that carries them — and several articles carry none, because nothing relevant was worth linking to.
Contact
Corrections, questions and “you’re wrong about Shibuya” all go to the contact page. Corrections in particular are welcome; a guide that isn’t corrected is just an old guide.