Editorial Policy
Last updated: July 2026
Japanese Best publishes English-language guides to products, daily life, and travel in Japan for an international audience. This page explains how our content is created, checked, and corrected.
How We Create Articles
Every article starts from a genuine question an international reader is likely to have about Japan — a product, a custom, a practical detail of daily or family life. We build each article around that question rather than around a product to sell.
Some articles are drafted with the assistance of AI writing tools. No AI-assisted draft is published as-is: our editorial team reviews, edits, fact-checks, and rewrites each article before it goes live. AI is a drafting aid, not a substitute for editorial judgement.
How We Check Our Sources
Where an article makes a factual claim — a price, a statistic, a cultural practice, a product specification — we base it on one or more of the following:
- Publicly available information from manufacturers, retailers, and Japanese government or municipal sources
- Sales rankings and listings from major Japanese retailers (Amazon Japan, Rakuten, Yodobashi Camera)
- Published consumer reviews, in Japanese and English
- Our own first-hand experience living in Japan
We do not publish figures or claims we cannot trace back to a source.
First-Hand Experience vs. Research-Based Recommendations
We distinguish clearly between two kinds of content:
- First-hand: Where a writer has personally used a product or been through an experience described, the article says so directly.
- Research-based: Where a recommendation is based on rankings, published reviews, and specifications rather than personal use, the article is written to reflect that — we do not claim to have personally tested a product we have not used.
If you notice an article that overstates first-hand testing, please contact us — see the correction policy below.
How We Choose Products to Cover
We prioritise products with a genuine track record in Japan’s domestic market — strong sales rankings, sustained availability, and real consumer reviews — over products chosen purely for affiliate commission potential. Being mentioned on Japanese Best is not for sale, and inclusion is never paid for by a manufacturer or retailer.
Correcting Mistakes
We aim to be accurate, but mistakes happen. If you spot outdated information, a factual error, or a broken link, please tell us via our Contact page. We review every report and correct confirmed errors as quickly as we can, noting significant corrections with an updated “last updated” date on the article.