Mihiro Ono
Founder, Japan Trails · Born and raised in Japan · Creator of the YouTube channel Ono in Japan
The best of Japan should stay with the people who make it
I love the country I grew up in. The smell of dashi in a bowl of soup, a street that changes its face with every season, and people who will pour you a drink the first time they meet you.
The more I travelled abroad, the more I understood that none of this is ordinary. What stays with you after a trip is rarely the scenery. It is the people.
More visitors come to Japan every year. Towns have life in them again, and people are reaching places that were never on anyone’s list. I am glad about that, plainly. But two things worry me.
Two things I could not leave alone
“The first is how much goes unsaid. How to behave at a shrine, how to eat, where a camera is welcome and where it is not. Almost nobody gets these wrong on purpose. They have simply never been told.”
If the person guiding you says nothing, the culture becomes scenery. Telling you is part of the job, not an extra.
The second is where the money goes. In towns with more visitors than ever, I have watched familiar shops close and be replaced by larger operators from somewhere else. Money earned from what makes Japan worth visiting should find its way back to the people who built it. On that one I do not bend.
A once-in-a-lifetime trip is worth getting right
Most of the visitors I meet have spent their days in the entertainment districts — in the venues and the restaurants that exist for visitors. They enjoy it. Then they fly home without having seen the country I actually live in.
I would rather take you to the counter with eight seats and no English menu, and to the shop the neighbourhood has used for forty years. Not because it is unusual, but because it is ordinary here. That is the part worth carrying home and telling people about.
For most families this is a once-in-a-lifetime trip. That is exactly why I would not want it left to chance.
Mihiro’s bio
I run Japan Trails, which is operated by TABICO LLC. On my YouTube channel Ono in Japan I share the things visitors ask me about most — how a place works, what to say, what to skip.
Japan Trails is not only a guiding company. Alongside the tours, we help the people on the receiving side — a town restaurant, a workshop, a small inn — reach visitors and take bookings from abroad on their own. A visitor going home with Japan as a place they want to return to, and the people who hosted them being better off for it: this work only makes sense when both are true.
Talk to someone who lives here
Real knowledge of a place does not come from a few visits. I was born and raised in Japan, I guide the days myself, and I am the one who telephones the restaurant about an allergy or asks whether the lift is working. Tell me who is coming and I will tell you what is realistic.
