What We Sell
Sora Cast Media LLC sells one product: a downloadable PDF guide titled "Tokyo Backstreets." It costs $14 USD. It is a digital product delivered via email after purchase. There are no physical products, no subscriptions, and no recurring charges. You pay once, you get the PDF, that's it. The guide is approximately 45 pages and includes our curated recommendations for Tokyo neighborhoods, bars, food stalls, and practical transit details. It also includes maps that we drew ourselves, which means they are charmingly imperfect but functionally accurate. We update the guide periodically, and purchasers receive updates at no additional cost.
Refund Policy
We want you to be happy with your purchase. If you're not, we'll give you your money back. Here's how it works, broken down by time since purchase:
30 days or more since purchase: Full refund, no questions asked. We don't need a reason. We don't make you jump through hoops. Just email us with your order number and we'll process the refund within 5 business days. We believe that if you've had our guide for over a month and want your money back, you probably have a good reason, and we respect that. Maybe you didn't find it useful. Maybe your trip got canceled. Maybe you just changed your mind. It doesn't matter to us. We'll refund you.
14 to 29 days since purchase: 50% refund. At this point, you've had the guide for a while and have presumably gotten some value from it. We think a partial refund is fair. Again, email us with your order number and we'll process it. We won't ask why you want the refund, though we're always curious if you want to tell us. Your feedback helps us improve the guide for future purchasers.
Under 14 days: No refund. We believe that two weeks is sufficient time to evaluate a digital product. After this period, all sales are final. This policy exists because digital products can't be returned in the traditional sense, and we need to protect ourselves from abuse. We've never actually had someone abuse our refund policy, but we need to have a boundary just in case. If you have extraordinary circumstances, contact us and we'll consider them. We're reasonable people.
Delivery Failure
If you purchase the guide and do not receive the download email within 24 hours, you are entitled to an automatic full refund, regardless of when you report the issue. This is our fault, not yours, and we won't make you wait while we figure out what went wrong. We'll refund you immediately and you can decide whether to try purchasing again.
Before requesting a refund for delivery failure, please check your spam folder. Our download emails sometimes end up there, especially with Gmail's aggressive filtering. If it's not in your spam folder, then yes, something went wrong, and we'll fix it. We've had emails get caught in spam filters, corporate firewalls, and overzealous inbox organizers. Technology isn't perfect, and we account for that in our policy.
How to Request a Refund
Email us at hey@soracast-jp.com with the following information:
- Your order number (from your purchase confirmation email)
- The email address you used to purchase
- The reason for your refund request (optional, but helpful for us)
We'll process your refund within 5 business days. The refund will be issued to the original payment method. Depending on your bank or card issuer, it may take an additional 5 to 10 business days for the refund to appear in your account. This is outside our control. We process refunds as quickly as we can on our end, but banks have their own timelines.
No Subscriptions
We want to be very clear about this: we do not offer subscriptions. There are no recurring charges. You will never be billed monthly or annually by Sora Cast. The $14 PDF purchase is a one-time payment. If you see a charge from Sora Cast Media LLC that you don't recognize, please contact us immediately, because it shouldn't exist. We don't have your payment information on file. We process payments through a third-party provider, and we can't charge you again even if we wanted to.
Product Updates
When we update the Tokyo Backstreets guide, we send the new version to all previous purchasers at no additional cost. This is not a subscription. It's our way of saying thank you for buying the guide and making sure you have the most current information. Updates typically happen 2 to 3 times per year, usually when we've discovered enough changes to justify a new version. If a restaurant closes or a train line changes, we note it on the website immediately. The PDF updates are for more substantial revisions.
If you purchased the guide and are not receiving updates, check your spam folder or contact us. Sometimes email addresses change, or our messages get filtered. We'll make sure you get every update you're entitled to. We keep a list of all purchasers and their email addresses specifically for this purpose. We don't use that list for marketing. We only use it to send you the updated guide files.
Why Our Policy Is What It Is
We sell a digital product, which means we can't physically take it back from you. Once you have the PDF, you have it. Our refund policy is designed to be fair to both you and us. The 30-day full refund window exists because we want people to feel confident buying our guide. The 50% refund for 14-29 days exists because we think partial credit is fair when you've had the product for a while. The no-refund under 14 days policy exists because we need some protection against abuse. So far, nobody has abused it. Our readers are good people.
We've given refunds outside our stated policy when the circumstances warranted it. Someone bought the guide and then their trip got canceled due to a family emergency. We refunded them, even though it was technically outside the window. Someone else accidentally bought the guide twice because they clicked the button twice. We refunded the duplicate immediately. Use common sense, treat us fairly, and we'll do the same. That's the kind of business relationship we want to have with our readers.
What the Guide Includes
The Tokyo Backstreets PDF is approximately 45 pages and includes detailed information on six Tokyo neighborhoods. Each neighborhood section includes how to get there, what to expect, specific restaurant and bar recommendations with prices, walking routes that we've personally tested, and practical tips that only come from lived experience. The guide also includes hand-drawn maps that show the locations of our recommended spots relative to train stations and major landmarks.
The guide is updated two to three times per year. When you purchase, you're buying the current version plus all future updates at no additional cost. We email updates to all purchasers when they're released. The guide covers Shimokitazawa, Koenji, Yanaka, Golden Gai, Omoide Yokocho, and Nakameguro. Each section is written in the same direct, opinionated style as our website. No fluff, no filler, just practical information from people who actually walk these streets.
Payment and Security
We process payments through a secure third-party payment processor. We do not store your credit card information on our servers. We never see your full card number. The payment processor handles everything and simply tells us whether the payment succeeded or failed. If you have concerns about payment security, contact us and we can explain our setup in more detail. We take security seriously because we take your trust seriously. Your financial data is safer with our processor than it would be if we tried to handle payments ourselves.
Questions
If you have questions about our refund policy, or if your situation doesn't fit neatly into the categories above, email us. We're reasonable people, and we'll try to find a solution that works for everyone. Our email is hey@soracast-jp.com. We've never had a refund request that we couldn't resolve amicably, and we intend to keep that record. Life is complicated. Policies are simple. We apply the policy with flexibility and common sense. If you're unhappy with your purchase, talk to us. We'll make it right. We value every reader who supports our work, and we want you to feel genuinely good about buying our guide. If you don't, we haven't done our job properly. A happy reader is worth more than fourteen dollars. That's our business philosophy in a single sentence. We genuinely mean it, and we live by it every single day.
Gift Purchases
If you bought our guide as a gift for someone else and need a refund for any reason, the same policy applies. Just include the gift recipient's email address in your refund request so we can deactivate their copy. We trust our customers to be honest about gift purchases, and we've never had anyone abuse this system. Buy the guide, gift it to a friend, and if something goes wrong, we'll sort it out.