Privacy Policy

This policy explains what information Anime Routes Japan collects when you visit this website, why it is collected, and what choices you have. It describes the site as it is actually operated today. Where a service is not in use, we say so rather than describing something that does not exist.

Information We Collect

You do not need to create an account to read this site, and there is no newsletter. The one place where you can choose to give us personal information is the contact form on our Contact page, described in the next section. Certain technical information, such as IP addresses and browser details, may still be recorded automatically in server logs, as described below.

Comments

If commenting is open on an article and you leave a comment, WordPress stores the name, email address, and website address you type into the comment form, together with the comment text, the IP address the comment was sent from, and your browser’s user agent string. This information is stored so that the comment can be displayed and moderated.

The Contact Form

The contact form on our Contact page is provided by Contact Form 7, a WordPress plugin running on this site’s own server. It is not a third-party form service, and nothing you type into it is sent to another company.

When you send a message through that form, we receive and store:

  • the name you type, which is optional and may be left blank;
  • the email address you type, which is required so that we can reply;
  • the subject and the message you type;
  • the date and time the message was sent, and the IP address it was sent from.

We use this only to read and answer your message, and to follow up on anything it raises, such as a correction to a guide or a rights query. We do not use it to send you marketing, we do not add you to a mailing list, and we do not sell, rent or share it with anyone else.

Messages are saved in this site’s own WordPress administration area using the Flamingo plugin, on the same server that hosts the site. The site administrator can read them. Nobody else has an account on this site. The messages are not published, are not readable from the public site or from its public API, and do not appear in site search results.

We have not set an automatic deletion schedule, so we are not going to claim one. Messages are kept for as long as they are useful for the correspondence they belong to, and are deleted by hand once they are no longer needed. You can ask us at any time to delete a message you sent, and we will do it; the quickest way to ask is to use the same form.

Cookies

This site uses Google AdSense code to provide advertising functionality (see the list of third parties below). Google and its partners may use cookies or similar technologies to serve and measure ads, which can include ads based on your visits to this and other websites. The site does not set any advertising cookies of its own.

This site uses Google Analytics 4, and only if you say yes. On your first visit you are asked whether we may measure how the site is used. Nothing analytics-related loads until you choose “Allow analytics”: before that there is no Google Analytics script, no request to Google Analytics and no analytics cookie. This applies to analytics only — the Google AdSense code described above is loaded independently of this choice, so it is not the case that nothing at all is sent to Google. Ignoring the question, or going on reading, is not treated as agreement.

If you allow it, Google sets its own cookies, named _ga and _ga_<id>, to tell repeat visits apart, and analytics_storage is set to granted in Google’s consent mode. If you decline, or change your mind later, measurement stops immediately, Google Analytics is disabled for this site, and those _ga cookies are deleted. Your choice itself is remembered in a small first-party cookie named arj_analytics_consent, which lasts 180 days and is shared between the English, Traditional Chinese and Korean pages so you are only asked once. Consent to advertising is a separate matter and is never treated as consent to analytics.

You can change or withdraw this at any time using the Analytics settings link at the foot of every page.

The language you choose. If you pick English, 繁體中文 or 한국어 in the header, that choice is remembered in this browser as arj_lang (in localStorage and in a first-party cookie that lasts a year). It is used only to show you that edition when you come back to the English front page (/), and it is not sent anywhere. If you have not chosen, the front page reads your browser’s language setting on your own device and offers the Korean edition for Korean, the Traditional Chinese edition for any Chinese setting, and the English page for every other setting. This works whatever you decide about analytics, and nothing is decided by IP address or country.

WordPress itself sets cookies in a small number of situations: if you leave a comment and ask for your details to be remembered, and when a site administrator signs in to manage the site. The theme and plugins used to build the site may also set functional cookies for features such as menus or event listings. You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings, and the site is designed to work without them.

Server Logs

This website runs on a hosted web server. As is normal for web servers, it keeps access logs that record the IP address a request came from, the date and time, the page requested, the referring page where one is sent, and the browser user agent string. These logs are produced and retained by the hosting provider for operational and security purposes. We do not use them to build profiles of individual visitors.

Embedded Content

Articles on this site may include content embedded from other websites, such as maps or videos. Embedded content behaves exactly as if you had visited that other website yourself: the other site may collect data about you, set its own cookies, and monitor your interaction with the embedded content. Its own privacy policy applies to that activity, not this one. Where we embed something, we try to limit it to what a guide genuinely needs.

The Maps in Our Guides

Each route guide has a map of the places it covers. Nothing is loaded from a map service until you press Show interactive map: before that, the page shows only the list of places, which is part of this site. The button says what will happen before you use it.

When you do press it, the map is drawn with Leaflet, which is served from this site, and the map images come from OpenStreetMap. Your browser requests those images directly from openstreetmap.org, so that request carries your IP address and the page you are on, and their own policies apply to it. We do not send them anything else about you, and we do not use the map to measure how the site is used.

Each place also has an Open in Google Maps link. That is an ordinary link: it does nothing until you follow it, and following it takes you to Google, where Google’s privacy policy applies. The link carries the coordinates of the place and nothing about you. This site does not ask for your location, and the analytics choice described below is separate: it is not changed by opening a map.

Affiliate Links

Anime Routes Japan takes part in the Trip.com affiliate programme, and one affiliate link is published on this site: a hotel search link for Tokyo in our Bocchi the Rock! guide to Shimokitazawa, carried on its English, Traditional Chinese and Korean pages. We may add affiliate links for travel services such as accommodation, transport, rental cars, eSIM data and tours in future, and each one will be disclosed where it appears.

When affiliate links are in use and you follow one, the company you are sent to may record that your visit came from this site, usually through a cookie or a parameter in the link, so that a resulting booking can be attributed. What information those companies collect, and how they use it, is determined by their own privacy policies rather than by this one. Our Affiliate Disclosure page explains the commercial side of this in more detail.

Third-Party Services

This website uses no social media tracking scripts. For advertising it uses Google AdSense, whose code is loaded on the site. For understanding how the site is used it uses Google Analytics 4, which runs only with your consent, as described below. The third parties involved in running the site are:

  • The hosting provider, which stores the website files and database and keeps the server logs described above.
  • WordPress, together with the theme and plugins used to build the site, which run on that server.
  • Google, through Google Analytics 4, measurement ID G-8VP35HTYMR, only if you allow analytics. With your consent it records how the site is used — which pages are viewed, how far down a page people scroll, and clicks on links leaving the site, and, for the work search on this site, the number of results, the page’s language, any region chosen, the kind and length of what was typed (never the words themselves), the work opened and its place in the list, and, when you switch language, the languages before and after — with the English, Traditional Chinese and Korean pages counted in one property. Without your consent its script is never loaded. It does not receive the name, email address or message text from the contact form, the site does not give Google an identifier of its own for you, and the tag is configured with Google Analytics’ advertising features switched off (allow_google_signals and allow_ad_personalization_signals are both set to false for this measurement ID).
  • Google, through Google AdSense. The AdSense code is loaded on every page of this site, and where ads are served Google may use cookies or similar technologies to show and measure them. Google explains how it uses information from sites that use its services at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites, and you can manage personalised advertising at adssettings.google.com.

If we later add a service that collects data, we will review and update this policy at that time. Services not present today include another advertising network, a newsletter, and comment spam filtering.

Data Retention

Comments and their metadata are kept indefinitely so that follow-up comments can be recognized and displayed, unless they are deleted. Server logs are retained and rotated by the hosting provider on its own schedule. We do not keep separate copies of visitor data outside the website and its server.

Your Choices

  • You can read this site without providing any personal information.
  • You can block or delete cookies in your browser at any time.
  • You can change the remembered language by choosing another one, or by clearing this site’s data in your browser.
  • You can refuse analytics, and withdraw a consent you gave earlier, using the Analytics settings link at the foot of every page. Refusing or withdrawing stops measurement at once and deletes the analytics cookies. The site works exactly the same either way.
  • If you have left a comment, you can ask us to tell you what information is held about you, to correct it, or to delete it.
  • Requests can be made through the form on our Contact page, which is the site’s only contact channel.

Changes to This Policy

This policy will change as the site grows. In particular, we will update it before or when we introduce further advertising services, a newsletter, or any other third-party service that collects data. The current version always appears on this page.

Contact

Questions about this policy can be sent through the form on our Contact page. That form is the only contact channel for this site; we do not publish a personal email address.