About Nippon Rain

The Origin Story (It's Short)

Nippon Rain started with a single, very wet week in September 2019. David Park, our founder, had planned a perfect Osaka-Kyoto-Tokyo trip. He'd researched temples, booked restaurants, mapped out train routes. What he hadn't researched was the fact that September is typhoon season, that Osaka gets more rain than London, and that a $5 drugstore umbrella wouldn't survive a Japanese thunderstorm.

By day three, David had thrown out three broken umbrellas, ruined a pair of leather shoes, missed two outdoor activities, and spent an entire afternoon in a Don Quijote buying clothes because everything else was damp. By day five, he was laughing about it — because what else can you do when you're eating ramen in a shopping arcade while rain hammers the roof?

On the flight home, he started writing notes. Those notes became a blog post. That blog post became surprisingly popular among travel forums. And eventually, those notes grew into this site — a practical, no-nonsense guide to rain in Japan based on actual experience rather than weather database exports.

We launched Nippon Rain in early 2022, right when Japan finally reopened to tourism after the pandemic. The timing wasn't intentional — we'd been working on the content for months — but it turned out a lot of people were planning postponed trips and wanted real advice. Traffic grew faster than expected. Emails started coming in with questions, corrections, and hilarious rain stories of readers' own. We realized we'd found our niche.

What We Actually Do

Nippon Rain is an editorial travel site. We research, we write, we travel to Japan regularly to verify our advice still holds up. We're not a weather service — we don't have radar maps or live forecasts. We're not a booking platform — we don't sell tours, hotel rooms, or train passes. We're not influencers — we don't do sponsored posts or paid partnerships.

What we do is write detailed, honest guides about what to expect when it rains in Japan. We cover seasonal patterns, city-by-city differences, and practical packing advice based on gear we've personally tested. We make money through a single downloadable PDF rain guide that consolidates our best advice into a printable format you can take on your trip. That's it. No ads, no affiliate links, no tracking beyond basic anonymous analytics.

Our editorial process is simple: one of us visits Japan, experiences some form of rain, takes notes, cross-references our observations with historical weather data, and writes a guide. Another team member reviews it for accuracy. We update existing guides when our experiences or new data contradict previous advice. We're not perfect, but we care about getting things right.

Who Writes This Stuff

Our Editorial Standards

We have a few rules that govern what we publish:

We only write about places we've been. You'll never find a Nippon Rain guide written from desk research alone. Every city guide, every product recommendation, every piece of packing advice comes from direct experience. If we haven't been somewhere in the rain, we don't cover it.

We don't take free stuff. No sponsored trips, no complimentary gear, no press rates. We pay our own way and buy our own products. This means we can say when something is terrible without worrying about offending a sponsor. It also means we're genuinely broke most of the time.

We correct our mistakes. Weather patterns change. Our experiences in one year might not hold true the next. When readers point out errors — and they do — we investigate and update. Every page shows the last updated date, and we do a full content review twice yearly.

We don't use AI to write content. Every word on this site was written by a human who has been rained on in Japan. We use spell-checkers like everyone else, but the actual content comes from brains, not language models. We think the difference shows in the details.

How We Make Money

We're transparent about this because we think travel publishing has a trust problem. Here's exactly how Nippon Rain generates revenue:

Digital PDF Guide: We sell a downloadable PDF called "The Complete Rain-Ready Japan Guide" for $9. It consolidates our month-by-month advice, city comparisons, and packing checklists into a printable format optimized for travelers. About 1 in 200 site visitors buys it. That's it. No recurring billing, no upsells, no membership tiers.

No advertising: We don't run display ads, sponsored content, or native advertising. The site loads faster and looks cleaner without them. More importantly, we don't have to worry about an ad network's tracking code violating your privacy.

No affiliate links: We don't earn commissions from linking to products or services. When we recommend Uniqlo Blocktech or Montbell gear, it's because we've used it, not because we get a cut. We don't have accounts with Booking.com, Rakuten, Amazon Associates, or any other affiliate program.

This business model means we're never optimizing for clicks or commissions. We're optimizing for usefulness. If our advice is genuinely helpful, maybe you'll buy the PDF. If not, no hard feelings. The content is free either way.

The Honest Disclosure

We're not meteorologists. We don't have degrees in climatology or atmospheric science. We're travelers who got wet, got curious, and started taking notes. Our rainfall data comes from publicly available sources like the Japan Meteorological Agency and various municipal observation stations. We present averages, not guarantees.

Weather is inherently unpredictable. Averages tell you what usually happens, not what will happen on your specific trip. We've visited Kyoto in June and had five perfect sunny days. We've visited Sapporo in July and gotten rained on for a week straight. The data gives you odds, not certainties.

What we offer is practical, experience-based advice from people who've actually dealt with Japan's rain across multiple seasons and cities. We think that's valuable. But if you need a weather forecast for next Thursday in Tokyo, check the JMA website. They know more than we do.

How We Work

People often ask how we actually create content. The process is less glamorous than you might imagine and involves a lot of spreadsheets.

Every article starts with a trip. One of us visits Japan, experiences some weather, takes detailed notes on conditions, gear performance, and practical observations. We record rainfall amounts from local weather reports, photograph wet conditions (when cameras aren't fogged up), and document what worked and what didn't.

After the trip, we compile our notes and cross-reference them with historical data from the Japan Meteorological Agency. We look for patterns across multiple visits — if David noticed something in Osaka and Yuki confirms the same pattern from her visits, we know it's real and not a one-off experience.

The writing process takes several drafts. We aim for a specific tone — knowledgeable but not preachy, honest but not cynical, detailed but not overwhelming. Every article gets read by at least one other team member before publication. Yuki fact-checks anything related to Japanese culture or language. Rachel verifies outdoor and hiking advice. David does a final edit for consistency and tone.

We update existing content at least twice a year, usually in January and July. These updates include checking that mentioned businesses are still open, verifying that rainfall data hasn't shifted significantly, and adding new insights from recent trips. If a reader reports something outdated, we'll investigate and update sooner.

Our office situation is about as casual as it gets. David works from coffee shops in Seattle. Yuki splits time between her apartment in Namba and coworking spaces in Umeda. Rachel writes from a standing desk in Vancouver with a cat on her keyboard half the time. We communicate via email and occasional video calls across three time zones. There's no office. No water cooler. Just three people who care about helping travelers stay dry.

Why We Don't Do More

Readers sometimes ask why we don't expand into other destinations (Seoul gets rain too!), add video content, start a podcast, or build a mobile app. The honest answer: we don't want to. We're good at this one very specific thing, and diluting our focus would make us worse at it.

We've also intentionally kept the team small. No interns, no freelance writers, no content mills. Every word on this site was written by someone who has been rained on in Japan. That personal experience is what makes the content valuable, and we can't scale it without losing what makes it good.

Maybe one day we'll add coverage of another destination. Maybe we'll hire a fourth person. But for now, we're happy being the best resource for one very specific question: how do I deal with rain in Japan? If we can answer that better than anyone else, we've done our job.