How we decide what to publish

The short version: name the gaps instead of filling them, and make everything about this site checkable by machine rather than by reputation.

The rule the whole site runs on

If the Japanese government has not published something, we say it has not been published. We do not estimate it, we do not repeat another site's estimate, and we do not soften it into "typically" or "usually".

Six things are open right now, and they have their own page so that you can see the whole list at once rather than discovering the gaps one article at a time.

What is confirmed, and what is not

What counts as a source

Government bodies, official statistics and the industry body that administers the scheme. Specifically the Japan Tourism Agency, Japan Customs and the Japan Tax-free Shop Association.

What does not count: other travel media, aggregators, refund companies marketing their own service, and anything we cannot open and read ourselves.

The primary sources we use

What you can check about us

We do not publish bylines, photographs or claimed credentials, because a name on a page is not something a reader can verify. What you can verify is mechanical, and it is on every page:

Last checked. The date we last re-read the primary sources for that page. It moves whether or not anything changed.
The numbers trace. Every figure on this site appears in the confirmed table, which names where it came from.
Nothing loads from elsewhere. No analytics, no fonts, no images, no scripts from another server. You can check this in your browser's network panel.

What we will not write

Invented first-person experience. Nobody on this desk has been through a system that does not start until November 1, 2026.
Case studies about travellers who do not exist.
Fee percentages, waiting times or payout days presented as fact before they are published or measured.
"Duty-free" used to mean tax-free shopping. They are different things.

From November 1, we measure

Announcements answer some of the open questions. The rest are answerable only by observation: what fee is actually deducted, how many days the money takes, how long the customs step takes at Narita, Haneda and Kansai. From the first day the system runs, that is what this site publishes, and it will be labelled as measurement rather than as rule.

Corrections

Send them to press@refund-japan.com. When we change a page because we got something wrong, we say so on the page rather than editing quietly.