Why this site exists
If you live in Japan, you end up looking up the same kind of information again and again — a visa form, a moving-out procedure, the commute logic of a particular city, the etiquette of a temple visit. Answers are scattered across social posts, blogs, and government pages. What you find today gets buried by the feed tomorrow, and the next time you need it you start from scratch.
There is no shortage of Chinese-language writing about Japan, but most of it is organized as "recommendations": one shop, one route, one packaged itinerary. Structural explanations — how a system actually works, why a city grew the way it did, what the full sequence of a procedure looks like — are rarely maintained over time.
comejp started as a way to solve my own problem: to turn the things I kept looking up into stable entry points. Along the way it became clear that people around me needed the same index, so I made it public.
How the information is organized
The site uses three orthogonal axes: topic, place, and task.
The topic axis is five channels — Culture, Life, Cities, Food, Study & Work. Each channel maintains its own topic index and long-running editorial queue, answering "what is this whole area actually about".
The place axis is the city pages. Under entries like Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Fukuoka, the housing, transit, cultural routes, and local industry of one city are grouped together, answering "what does living and moving here actually look like".
The task axis is the guides. First-time-in-Japan procedures — transit basics, visa, SIM, opening a bank account — are pulled out of topics and cities and given their own numbered entry, so you can come in by errand.
A single article often sits on more than one axis at the same time. A piece about Odori in Sapporo belongs to "cities" and to "regional food", and may also appear under "guides". That overlap is intentional — readers should be able to land from whichever angle they come in.
Editorial principles
Background and process come before recommendations. Why a shop is known, why a rule is shaped the way it is, where a procedure goes next — these tend to outlast "top N must-visit" lists.
Content involving systems, visas, tax, or healthcare — things that change over time — is dated and revisited when the rules move. Readers deserve to know when a piece was written and whether it still holds.
