About Yorimichi

Yorimichi — the word means "a stop along the way" — is a travel guide written in Japan. On our YouTube channel and on this site, Shino and Hinata take up the questions travelers ask while planning a trip and while on the road: Is this place worth the detour? What is that festival about? How do you eat this, and how do you get back afterward?

The Japanese edition of Yorimichi has grown to 106 destinations. This English edition retells those journeys for readers planning a trip to Japan — rewritten for English readers, not translated line by line, because the questions are different: how to change trains at a rural station, when the snow sets in, and why visitors clap four times at Izumo instead of two.

Your guides

Shino reads the history and the signs — the story behind the shrine, the reason for the custom. Hinata asks the questions a first-time visitor asks, out loud, so the answers land before you need them on site. Together they host the Japanese channel Yorimichi Soudan and its English edition, Shino & Hinata's Yorimichi Japan. Shino and Hinata are fictional characters, and their conversations are a creation imagined as a chat before a trip; the facts on each page come from the official sources named there.

How we write

Every destination page on this site is built from official sources — tourism boards, municipalities, shrines and temples, and the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) — and each fact carries its source and the date we checked it. When a place has an English episode, the page carries the video, so you can watch the street before you read the map. If we could not confirm something, the page leaves it out rather than guessing.

Advertising disclosure

This site is reader-supported through affiliate advertising, and we state that plainly:

Ad — Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you book a stay or an experience through them, we may earn a commission from the booking partner, at no extra cost to you. The price you pay is the same as booking directly.

• Pages that contain affiliate links say so at the top, in the Disclosure line, and again above the booking links.
• We only link to booking partners approved for this site, and a link never decides what a page recommends — the writing comes first, and pages without a suitable approved partner simply carry no booking links.
• Links to our own shop, where they appear, are labeled as our own shop. They are the operator's business, and we do not present them as a third party's recommendation.
• Affiliate links on this site are set with rel="sponsored" in the page code.

Questions about this site or a page's sources: please use the contact link in the footer of the Japanese edition, and mention the English page you are writing about.

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