I build day-by-day itineraries for families travelling to Japan with children — and, when you want it, my company arranges the whole thing on the ground. Not blog recommendations. Telephone calls, in Japanese, to people who answer.
Start as small as you like. Most people begin with a review and move up when they see how much of this they'd rather not do themselves.
You've built an itinerary. I go through it day by day, tell you which days will break and why, hand back a fixed version, and record a video walking you through every change. No call needed.
See what's included →Built from scratch: routes, walking distances, a rain plan for every day, restaurant and experience shortlists with links and Japanese phone scripts, packing and station notes. You do the booking. Three rounds of revisions.
Enquire →Everything above, plus my company arranges it here in Japan — inns, trains, transfers, guides, private experiences. One point of contact, all communication in Japanese, problems solved from this end.
Enquire →Most Japan trip planning sold to American families is written by people who have visited. Useful, up to a point. The point it stops being useful is when the inn you want doesn't answer email, the experience you found isn't bookable online, and the answer you need only exists at the end of a phone call in Japanese.
My company holds a Japanese travel arrangement licence — 旅行サービス手配業. In practice that means I'm not asking on your behalf as a tourist. I'm asking as a trade counterpart, and I get a different answer.
That's the entire difference, and it's the reason some things on this site are not available to you any other way.
Written up one at a time, as I get round to them. Each of these is a segment of a longer trip, not a standalone tour.
Two nights at a six-room cultural resort inside the Aso caldera — with a hall out back that has a shrine to the kami of the sword and armour along both walls — then an overnight ferry that deletes an entire travel day between Kyushu and Osaka.
Read the whole thing →One night in the houses of working farm families on the floor of the Aso caldera, placed by the foundation that keeps the grassland from turning back into forest. There is no listing and no booking site — and it does not work for one family. It works for two or three.
Read the whole thing →Cormorant fishermen working a river at Hita by firelight, a plum cellar that takes six people at a time, a volcano that is open or shut depending on the volcano, and two hundred dolphins that live off Amakusa all year and do not care what month you come.
Read the whole thing →The highest lift-served snow in Japan, a ski school that teaches in English, and an onsen hotel three minutes' walk from the lift. At half past eleven on the second morning the ski club of the local elementary school comes down to the beginners' run — which is the whole reason to come here rather than Niseko.
Read the whole thing →Ages, dates, and the part you're most worried about. That last one matters more than the first two.
Which cities, in which order, for how many nights. Almost every failed itinerary failed here, before a single restaurant was chosen.
Times, walking distances, a rain plan for each day, and Japanese scripts for anything that needs a call.
On planning tiers you book it yourself with direct links. On Fully Arranged, my company handles it here and you have one contact for everything.
For thirty years I arranged Japan from the other side of the sea.
I started in 1992, in the product-planning department of a travel agency in China. My job was to design Japan itineraries for people who had never been — for families, for companies, for people who had saved a long time for one week here. I did that for thirty years, and I was good at it. I was also, it turns out, the person writing the catalogue.
In 2022 I moved to Tokyo. Within a year I had found things that had never once been offered to me in three decades on the other side: a hall with armour along both walls where a master will correct a nine-year-old's grip; farm families who take guests through a grassland conservation foundation and appear on no website; a ferry cabin that is not on the English booking page. None of it was hidden. It simply does not travel.
So in 2023 I registered a company here and took the licence that lets me ask for these things as a trade counterpart rather than as a tourist — 旅行サービス手配業, with a partner office in Kumamoto.
Then I went to New York to see my daughter, who lives there, and watched American families plan Japan the way my clients in China used to: carefully, expensively, out of the catalogue. That is why this site is in English.
The work itself still happens on the telephone. Which inn will take a four-year-old. Which experience is not bookable online and never will be. Which station has a lift on the side you will be arriving from. None of it is written down in English and none of it can be searched for. It has to be asked, in Japanese, by somebody the person on the other end will talk to.
That is the job. Everything else on this site is downstream of it.
Tell me who's coming, how old they are, and roughly when. I'll tell you whether your dates are realistic, what the trip would cost, and whether you need me at all.
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