About

Who runs this

This site is run by Locals Japan (an individual).

Edited by Rakutaro (Tokyo, Japan). I have lived in Tokyo for 20 years, and I bring you the local side of Japan that never makes it into the guidebooks.

What this site is

Locals Japan surfaces what Japanese locals actually say about where to eat, stay, and which sights to skip — pulled from their own comments on Japanese YouTube and translated into English.

Our goal is to give visitors to Japan the local consensus, not a guidebook. We excerpt and translate real comments, keep the like counts intact, and always link back to the source video.

How we do it

Each article is an edited work: from the most-liked comments under a Japanese YouTube video we pick the ones that carry concrete place names, first-hand experience and — where they exist — local-knowledge signals ("as a local," "I live here"), then excerpt and translate them. The story is the aggregated consensus itself — how many people agreed, and how many likes the top voice earned.

We label each article by whose voice it carries. "Locals" means at least a third of the excerpted comments identify themselves as local; otherwise we say "Japanese visitors" (people who went there) or "Japanese people" (for nationwide rules and customs). The label is set by counting, not by taste.

We are not another tourist reviewing a restaurant. We are the translated consensus of locals, shown with the receipts. See the Methodology & sourcing page below for the full details of how we source, select, translate, and count.

What we don’t do

We do not review places ourselves. We do not scrape or republish Google Maps or Tabelog reviews. We never invent numbers — every count you see is the real like count. And we always link back to the source video.

Copyright & quotation

Each digest is an edited work of excerpts, translation, and source links — not a full reproduction. Copyright in the works and in source content belongs to the respective rights holders. For any inquiries about content, please use the contact form.

Contact

For feedback, removal requests, or press inquiries, please use the contact form.