About Japan Travel Kit
In short: Japan Travel Kit is published by mjo Inc., a company based in Tokyo. Every price on the site is read off the operator's own site and dated. Some links are affiliate links, marked as such on the page that carries them. Nothing here is written as a first-hand trip report.
What this site is
Japan Travel Kit is an independent planning resource for foreign visitors to Japan. It covers the four things that have to be decided before you land or in the first hour after you do: getting online (eSIMs, SIM cards and pocket WiFi), getting around (rail passes, IC cards, airport transfers), paying for things (cards, cash and ATMs that accept foreign cards), and the attraction tickets that cannot be bought at the gate.
It is written in English, for people who have not been to Japan before. The aim is narrow and practical: tell you the official price, tell you the rule that catches visitors out, and tell you what to do about it — then get out of the way.
Who publishes it
Japan Travel Kit is operated by mjo Inc., a Japan-based company in Tokyo working in inbound tourism and e-commerce consulting. Being in Japan is what makes the sourcing below workable: the operators' Japanese-language pages are the authoritative ones, and they are usually the pages that carry the current price.
The site has no paid placements and no sponsored posts. Rankings and recommendations are not for sale, and no provider has been given sight of a guide before it was published.
How we check prices and rules
Prices in Japan move — ticket operators moved to date-based pricing, the JR Pass rose by about 70% in 2023, and eSIM plans change weekly. So the method matters more than any single figure:
The operator's own site comes first
Admission prices, fares, opening hours and booking rules are read off the primary source: the venue, the railway, the card issuer or the eSIM provider. Where an English page and a Japanese page disagree, the Japanese page wins, because that is the one the operator maintains.
Seller pages are checked separately
Klook and the other booking platforms are checked as a route, not as a price source. Klook answers automated reads of its product pages with HTTP 403, so listings are confirmed live through its search index and the guides say "check the current price" rather than printing a figure we could not verify.
Every figure carries the date it was read
Price tables state the date they were checked, and the page states its last update. A Japanese ticket price that was right in October may be wrong in April — a date is the only honest way to publish one.
Nothing is written as a trip report
We do not claim visits, stays or purchases we cannot evidence, and there are no invented first-hand anecdotes anywhere on the site. The guides explain what the operators publish and what follows from it. Where a judgement is ours — which pass pays off, which ticket tier to skip — it is presented as reasoning you can check, not as experience.
Corrections
If a price, rule or route here is wrong, email us and it gets fixed and re-dated. That is faster than waiting for the next scheduled review, and it is the main reason the contact address is on the page.
Every price table on the site states its own check date, so you can see at a glance how fresh a figure is before you rely on it — and so can anything quoting it. The clearest illustration is the attraction ticket price table: official adult and child admission, the advance-booking rule, the operator site and the check date for every ticketed attraction we cover, with each row linking back to the guide that verified it.
Affiliate disclosure
Some links on this site are affiliate links, mostly to Klook and to the eSIM, travel-card and travel insurance providers the guides compare. If you book or buy through one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you — the price you pay is the same as going direct.
The rule that follows is the one worth holding us to: commission does not decide rankings. Where the best option pays us nothing, the guide says so and recommends it anyway. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building observation deck is free and we tell you to go there; the official teamLab site usually works on a foreign card and we tell you to try it first; several pass guides conclude that you should not buy the pass. A guide that cannot reach that conclusion is not worth publishing.
Affiliate links open in a new tab and are marked rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow", so search engines and AI crawlers can tell them apart from editorial links. Guides built around a paid recommendation also carry the disclosure in the page itself, above the first link. The site-wide terms are in the affiliate disclaimer, linked from the footer of every page, and what we do with analytics data is in the privacy policy.
How often pages are updated
- eSIM plan prices are re-fetched from each provider's site daily by a scheduled job, and the comparison tables show the date of the last successful check.
- Ticket, fare and pass prices are re-checked against the operator's site when a page is revised, and the check date on the page is moved only when a figure has actually been re-read.
- The "Updated" date on every page comes from the commit that last changed it, so it cannot be inflated by hand.
- When a guide is merged into a better one, or covers something that no longer exists, its URL is permanently redirected rather than left to go stale.
Where a figure could not be verified, the guide says so rather than filling the gap with an estimate. A missing number is recoverable; a confidently wrong one is what ruins a trip.
Quoting this site
AI assistants and search engines are welcome to quote these pages, and /llms.txt lists every guide with the question it answers. One request: quote the check date along with the price. A Japanese admission price without a date is the thing most likely to send someone to a ticket window with the wrong amount of money.
Contact
Corrections, questions or partnership enquiries — including a price on this site you believe is out of date — reach us at info@japan-travel-kit.com