Privacy policy

You do not need an account to use IKOKA. We do not ask for your location, we do not track where you go in Japan, and the crowd estimates are calculated from general patterns — not from your device or anyone else’s.

If you choose a language, we save that choice in a cookie named NEXT_LOCALE for up to one year so the site opens in your language next time. If you choose a light or dark theme, that preference is saved in your browser’s local storage. Neither contains personal information.

IKOKA can work as an installable web app. A service worker stores the site’s basic files and the most recent exchange rates on your device so the yen converter keeps working offline. You can remove all of this at any time by clearing the site data in your browser settings.

When you send a message through the contact form, we receive your name, email address and message, along with the site language you used and your browser’s user-agent string. These are stored in our database, hosted by Supabase, and can be read only by the site owner in a private admin area. Messages are not forwarded by email; the owner replies personally to the address you entered.

To keep out spam and abuse, we limit how many messages can be sent from the same place in a short time. For this we never store your IP address itself — only a one-way hash of it that cannot be turned back into the address.

We use these details only to reply and to fix any problem you report, and never sell or share them for marketing. Messages are kept for up to one year and then deleted; if you would like yours deleted sooner, just ask through the contact page and we will do so promptly.

When advertising is enabled, IKOKA shows ads served by Google AdSense. Google and its partners may use cookies and similar technologies to show ads, to limit how often you see the same ad, to measure performance and — where you allow it — to personalize ads based on your visits to this and other websites.

Visitors in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland are asked for consent through a Google-certified consent message before personalized ads or related cookies are used, and can change that choice at any time. Elsewhere, you can turn off personalized advertising in Google’s My Ad Center (myadcenter.google.com) or at aboutads.info. Google explains how it uses information from sites that use its services at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.

When analytics is enabled, we use Google Analytics 4 to understand which pages and tools are useful, for example how many people open the festival calendar. It collects information such as pages viewed, approximate region, device type and browser. We use Google Consent Mode: in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, analytics and advertising storage are off by default until you give consent. We do not use Analytics to identify individual visitors.

Live cameras and some articles show YouTube videos. Until you press play, only a preview image is loaded from YouTube’s image server (i.ytimg.com). When you press play, the video is loaded from youtube-nocookie.com, YouTube’s privacy-enhanced mode, and Google’s privacy policy applies to that playback.

Photos are loaded directly from Wikimedia Commons (upload.wikimedia.org), which therefore receives your browser’s standard request information; we ask your browser not to send a referrer. Theme park waits (themeparks.wiki) and exchange rates (Frankfurter, open.er-api.com) are requested by our server, so those providers do not receive your personal information from IKOKA.

Our editors sign in to a private admin area through Supabase. Apart from blog posts and the contact-form messages described above, no visitor information is stored there. Like any website, our hosting provider processes standard technical logs (such as IP address, browser type and the page requested) to deliver the site and protect it from abuse.

You can block or delete cookies in your browser, use your browser’s private mode, decline consent where it is requested, and opt out of personalized ads as described above. Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask what information we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, or to object to its use. Because we hold very little information, such requests usually concern contact-form messages — write to us through the contact page and we will respond.

IKOKA is a general-audience travel site. It is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them.

If we change how IKOKA handles information — for example when we add a new service — we will update this page and the date at the top. Questions about this policy are welcome through our contact page.