Tokyo Notes is a travel site about Tokyo, written for people visiting from abroad. It's run by one person, not a company or a content agency.
Who writes this
My name is Satoru Amano. I was born and raised in Tokyo, and for more than twenty years my work has taken me on foot through neighbourhoods all over the city — not the handful of districts that appear in guidebooks, but the ordinary ones in between.
I'm Japanese, and I write here in English, which is not my first language. You may occasionally find a sentence that a native speaker would have phrased differently. What I can promise instead is that the facts have been checked.
Why this site exists
There is no shortage of English-language advice about Tokyo. A lot of it is old, and some of it was never right.
While preparing the first article on this site, I went through several well-ranked guides about IC cards. More than one still recommends buying a card that was discontinued in 2024. Someone following that advice would land at the airport, join a queue, and ask a staff member for something that no longer exists.
That's a small failure with a real cost — time, confusion, and the particular unease of being lost in a country whose language you don't read. Travel is expensive, and a trip is planned for months. Getting the details wrong for someone in that position isn't acceptable to me.
So this site is an attempt at something narrower than a guidebook: fewer articles, each one verified.
How things get checked
Every factual claim here — a fare, a deposit, an expiry date, where a counter is — is checked against the operator's own page before publication. JR East for Suica. PASMO for Pasmo. Apple for anything involving iPhones. Not another travel blog, which may simply be repeating the same error.
Where I can't verify something, I say so, or I leave it out. Where something comes from my own experience rather than an official source — how long a queue tends to be, what locals actually do — the article says that plainly, so you can weigh it accordingly.
Articles carry the date they were last checked. Rules in Japan change more often than travellers expect, and a date lets you judge how much weight to give what you're reading.
How this site is paid for
Some articles contain affiliate links, and a purchase made through one may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I don't publish sponsored articles, and no commission has ever changed what an article says. The privacy policy sets this out in more detail.
If something here is wrong
Then I'd like to know. Prices change, counters move, cards get discontinued — a page that was accurate in August may not be by December. If you find something out of date, please tell me, and I'll check it against the source and correct it.
I would much rather fix a page than have someone stand at a ticket gate holding advice that stopped being true.