The honest guide to travelling Japan — written by people who actually live here.

Why this site exists

There is no shortage of information about Japan in English. There’s a shortage of honest information.

Most of what you’ll find online is written to make places sound appealing — by tourism boards, by media companies with regional partnerships, by writers who visited for three days on assignment. It’s not wrong. It’s just incomplete in a specific way: it tells you what’s good, and stays quiet about what’s difficult.

KOAlil is the other half of that. I write about the friction — the unwritten rules on a night bus, the tattoo policy at the bath house, the booking page that rejects your foreign credit card at the final step. The things that don’t make a destination look good, but that will genuinely change how your trip goes.

Who’s writing this

KOAlil is written by one person: me, ko, born and raised in Japan and writing from Niigata. I’m not a foreign resident discovering this place for the first time, and I’m not a newsroom sending writers out on assignment. I grew up with these rules; I just never had to explain them until now.

That turns out to matter. A lot of what confuses visitors — why the bus goes silent after dark, why a hotel really can’t check you in early, why a tattoo policy exists at all — isn’t written down anywhere, because nobody who grew up here thought to write it down. I did, because I noticed what my foreign friends and readers kept asking me.

When I recommend something, it’s because it’s genuinely good, not because it photographs well. When I explain a custom, it’s because I understand why it exists, not just that it does

What I won’t do

I don’t take money from tourism boards, hotels, or local governments in exchange for coverage. That matters, because it’s the only reason I can say a place isn’t worth your time.

I do use affiliate links on some pages — booking sites and services I’m happy to recommend. They cost you nothing and they keep the site running. But they never decide what I recommend, and I don’t write articles for the purpose of placing them.

What you’ll find here

Before you land — passes, SIMs, taxes and cash, sorted before you fly.
Getting around — trains, buses and ferries, honestly costed, including the options nobody mentions.
The unspoken — the customs and expectations behind everyday situations, and why they exist.
Off the map — places I go, not places I was told to write about.

If something here saves you from a mistake I already made, it did its job.