What We Are
We're not a tour company. We don't take bookings. We don't plan trips or reserve restaurants or arrange airport pickups. We're a tiny editorial team that walks around Japanese cities and writes down what we find. Sometimes it's a great bar. Sometimes it's a terrible meal. Sometimes it's just an observation about how the light hits a particular alley at 5pm in October. We write it all down because that's what writers do. We process the world through words, and Japan gives us a lot to process.
Sora Cast started because we were tired of Japan guidebooks written by people who visited for a week and stayed in business hotels. We wanted a resource for travelers like us: people who want to explore neighborhoods on foot, eat at places with no English menu, and figure out the train system without a private guide. We wanted specifics, not generalities. Honest opinions, not marketing copy. Real experiences, not curated Instagram moments. So we built it ourselves, because if you want something to exist, sometimes you have to make it.
Our Team
Alex Castillo — Founder
Alex moved to Tokyo in 2021 after burning out as a line cook in Austin, Texas. He'd saved enough money for six months and planned to learn about Japanese cuisine. Three years later, he's still in Tokyo, still learning, and has walked approximately 600 kilometers across the city's neighborhoods tracking every interesting alley and questionable food stall he could find. He wasn't trying to start a website. He was just trying to understand the city he now lives in. The website happened because his notes got too extensive to keep to himself.
He lives in Koenji, a Tokyo neighborhood he chose after one evening in Harmonica Yokocho. His apartment is 28 square meters, which he insists is "actually pretty big by Tokyo standards." He writes most of the neighborhood guides, handles the transit content, and is the person who updates things when restaurants close or train schedules change. He's also the one who deals with emails, technical issues, and the general administrative work that comes with running a website. It's not glamorous, but someone has to do it.
Alex's hot take is that the best ramen in Tokyo is in a mall food court in Ikebukuro. He will argue about this for longer than is socially acceptable. He also believes that convenience store egg sandwiches are a legitimate food group and that anyone who disagrees hasn't had a Lawson egg salad sandwich at 11pm after missing the last train. He's probably right about the sandwich, at least.
Mei Tanaka — Co-Founder
Mei was born and raised in Fukuoka, on the southern island of Kyushu. She left for university in Tokyo, worked in marketing for five years, and then decided she'd rather write about food than sell it. She handles all of our Fukuoka and Kyushu content, contributes to the Osaka guides, and knows every yatai owner along the Naka River by first name. She's our southern Japan expert, and she takes that responsibility seriously. Ask her about Fukuoka ramen and settle in for a long conversation.
Mei refuses to use Google Maps. She navigates Tokyo by memory and instinct, which sometimes leads to spectacular discoveries and sometimes leads to the team walking in circles for twenty minutes. She claims this is "part of the experience." The rest of us are less convinced but too polite to say so. We've learned to just follow her and trust that we'll end up somewhere interesting. We usually do.
Mei's opinions are strong and numerous. Conveyor belt sushi is perfectly fine for lunch. Anyone who says Fukuoka ramen isn't the best in Japan has simply never had good Fukuoka ramen. And the yatai stalls along the river are the best dining experience in the country, full stop. She will physically guide you to her favorite stall if you mention you're visiting Fukuoka. We've seen her do it with strangers on trains. She's passionate, and passion is what this site runs on.
Sam Okonkwo — Contributor
Sam is our photographer, and he only shoots on 35mm film. Not for aesthetic reasons, though the aesthetic is undeniable. Sam says digital makes neon look "too clean" and that film "captures the grit." We're not entirely sure what this means, but his photos are consistently our most popular content, so we don't argue. He also shoots exclusively with natural or available light, which means a lot of our nighttime photos are taken at the exact moment when the fluorescent tubes are doing something interesting.
He specializes in fluorescent-lit alley shots, which is a niche we didn't know existed until we saw his work. Sam can spend an hour in a narrow backstreet waiting for the exact moment when a person walks through the frame at just the right speed. The rest of us drink beer and wait. It's a good system. We've learned to bring a book when we're shooting with Sam, because patience is required.
Sam visits Japan three or four times a year, shooting in Tokyo, Osaka, and wherever else we send him. He's based in London, which makes him our European perspective and our most jet-lagged team member. He claims the jet lag helps him shoot at odd hours, which is when the best light apparently happens. We're just glad he keeps coming back, because the site wouldn't look the same without his photos.
What We Believe
Honest writing matters. If a place is overrated, we say so. If we had a bad meal, we say so. If a neighborhood has changed and isn't what it used to be, we update our guide and explain what happened. Travel writing that only says positive things is advertising, not journalism. We're not journalists either, but we try to tell the truth about our experiences. That's the minimum standard we hold ourselves to.
First-hand experience is non-negotiable. Every place in our guides has been visited by at least one of us. We pay our own way. We don't accept free meals, sponsored stays, or press trips. When we recommend something, it's because we genuinely liked it, not because someone asked us to. This limits what we can cover, because we can't write about places we haven't been. But it means what we do cover is real.
Specifics are more useful than generalities. We give you train lines and exit numbers. We tell you which konbini chain has the best fried chicken. We note which bars are cash-only and which ones have English menus. The small details are what make the difference between a good trip and a great one. Anyone can tell you to "explore Shibuya." We'll tell you to take the Hachiko exit, turn left at the Uniqlo, and walk until you find the standing bar with the red lantern.
What We're Not
We're not travel agents. We can't book your hotel or plan your itinerary. We're not a booking platform. We don't sell tours or experiences. We're not a podcast, despite what our name might suggest. "Sora" means sky in Japanese, and "Cast" refers to casting a wide net. The name made sense at the time. We were going to call it "Tokyo Walks" but that domain was taken by a guided tour company, which is exactly the kind of business we're not.
We're also not infallible. Restaurants close. Shops move. Neighborhoods change. We do our best to keep everything current, but we make mistakes. We keep a corrections page publicly listing every error we've found and fixed. Check it if you want to see our failures. We think transparency builds trust. Most travel sites quietly delete outdated information. We document our failures because that's how trust works.
How We Make Money
We sell a downloadable PDF guide called "Tokyo Backstreets" for $14. It's a curated collection of our favorite alleys, bars, and food stalls across the city, with maps and practical details. It's the only thing we sell, and we're proud of it. The guide is approximately 45 pages and includes information that isn't on the website, including detailed walking routes and a few secret spots that we don't publish online.
We don't run ads. We don't have affiliate links unless we genuinely use the service ourselves, and we always disclose them. We don't take sponsorships for our neighborhood guides. The site is funded entirely by PDF sales and the occasional freelance writing gig. This means we don't make much money. That's fine. We didn't start Sora Cast to get rich. We started it because we wanted a better Japan travel resource to exist, and we figured we might as well be the ones to build it.
Contact
Got a tip about a great neighborhood? Found a mistake in one of our guides? Want to propose a collaboration? You can reach us at hey@soracast-jp.com. We're a tiny team, so replies take 4-6 days. We don't plan trips or book restaurants, but we're always happy to hear about places we should check out. If you send us a tip and we use it, we'll credit you. If you correct our mistake, we'll thank you publicly on our corrections page.
Why We Do This
The internet doesn't need another Japan travel blog. What it needs is honest, specific, first-hand information about what it's actually like to explore Japanese cities as a regular person. Not as a luxury traveler. Not as a backpacker on a shoestring. As someone who wants to eat good food, walk interesting streets, and figure out the train system without hiring a guide. That's who we write for. That's who we are.
We started Sora Cast because we were frustrated. Frustrated with guidebooks that recommended places that had closed years ago. Frustrated with travel blogs that were clearly written by people who had never been to Japan. Frustrated with the same five "hidden gems" appearing on every list, none of which were hidden and some of which weren't even gems. We thought we could do better. We hope we have.
Our Approach
Every article on this site starts with a walk. Sometimes we have a destination in mind. Sometimes we just pick a train line and get off at a random stop. We take notes, we take photos, we eat things, we talk to people. Then we go home and write about it. There's no editorial calendar, no content strategy, no SEO team optimizing our headlines. We write about what interests us, when it interests us, and we publish when we think it's ready.
This means we publish slowly. We don't have daily updates or weekly newsletters. We might go a month without publishing anything new, then publish three articles in a week. That's just how it works when you're a tiny team doing everything yourself. We'd rather publish one great guide than ten mediocre ones. Quality over quantity isn't a marketing slogan for us. It's the only way we can operate. We have no investors demanding growth, no advertisers demanding impressions, and no boss demanding output. Just us, our notebooks, and the streets of Tokyo. We answer to our readers, and we try to make them proud. That's the only metric that truly matters to us here at Sora Cast.