About
Who writes this, and how it makes money
I'm Takumi. I'm Japanese, I live in Tokyo, and I built SplitJapan.
It started with a specific, repeating scene. Friends would visit Japan, and every single trip the same thing happened at dinner: the restaurant wouldn't split the bill, one person put the whole thing on their card or paid cash, and by the end of the trip nobody could remember who had covered what. Meanwhile they were carrying a pocket of coins they couldn't exchange back home, a Suica balance they were about to forfeit, and a vague sense that they'd been quietly losing money somewhere.
None of that is a big problem. All of it is annoying, and all of it is avoidable if someone explains how the system actually works. That's what this site is: a free tool for the splitting part, and a set of guides for everything else.
How the guides are researched
I write these as someone who lives here, but living somewhere isn't the same as being right about it — most Japanese people have never used a Welcome Suica or claimed a tax refund. So the process is:
- Rules and numbers come from primary sources — government announcements, the operators themselves, official fee schedules — and the important ones are linked in the article so you can check them.
- Estimates are labelled as estimates. The cash calculator and budget model are planning tools built on stated assumptions, not quotes. Where I'm giving a range because reality is a range, I say so.
- Traveler experience comes from travelers. The friction I write about — cards failing on booking sites, IC cards that don't work on rural lines, the confusion at ticket machines — comes from what visitors actually report, not from what the official page says should happen.
- Things change. Fees, limits and rules move. Each guide carries the month it was last updated. If something here is out of date or wrong, I'd genuinely rather know.
How this site makes money
Right now: it doesn't. There are no ads, no trackers selling your behaviour, no paid placements, and the splitter is free with no account and no premium tier.
The honest plan is that some guides will eventually carry affiliate links — things like eSIMs or travel cards, where I'd be recommending the same thing anyway. If and when that happens, those links will be marked, and the recommendation won't change because of them. The one product I'll always be biased about is my own: SplitJapan is mentioned in the guides because I built it, and I say so every time rather than pretending to be a neutral reviewer.
What this site is not
It isn't financial advice, tax advice, or a bank. I'm a traveler and a developer explaining how a system works, not a licensed advisor. For anything with real consequences — a large purchase, a tax question specific to your situation — check with the relevant authority or your own bank.
Privacy, briefly
The bill splitter has no servers. Your trip data lives in your own browser and inside the share link you send your friends — it is never uploaded to me, because there is nowhere to upload it to. That's also why I can't recover a trip for you if you lose the link.
Corrections and contact
If a number here is wrong, a rule has changed, or something didn't work the way I said it would, tell me and I'll fix it. Email hello@splitjapan.com, or open an issue on GitHub — the whole site is public there, so you can also see exactly what changed and when. Corrections get made the same week.