About

Written from Tokyo

Otacrazy is written by one person living in Japan. I'm Japanese, based in Tokyo, and I read the official Japanese-language sources that most English travel guides never touch.

Why this site exists

The hard part of a first trip to Japan usually isn't deciding what to see. It's the machinery around it: tickets that only go on sale one day a month, prices that change depending on the date, festival schedules that exist in full only on a Japanese-language page. That information is public, but it's scattered, and it goes stale quietly.

Plenty of sites will tell you a place is worth visiting. Far fewer will tell you that you cannot buy a ticket at the door, or that the English version of an official site is a year out of date. That gap is what this site is for.

How every guide is written

• Sourced, then dated. Every price, opening time, and booking rule comes from the operator's own site, and each guide carries the date it was last checked. Nothing is written from memory.
• Japanese sources, checked directly. Where the English page disagrees with the Japanese one — which happens more than you'd expect — the Japanese page wins, and the guide says so.
• No invented experience. If I haven't been somewhere, I don't describe it as though I have. Practical detail doesn't require pretending.
• Decisions over descriptions. Comparisons, checklists, and booking timelines, rather than another list of things to see.

How it's funded

Some links earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Whether a link pays has no bearing on what gets recommended — the Affiliate Disclosure explains the arrangement in full.

Corrections

Things change: prices rise, festivals move, booking systems get replaced. If you find something on this site that's out of date or wrong, it's worth telling me — a dated guide is only useful if the date means something.