Letters from Japan: Feature Update for Paid Subscribers
October 2025: a quick feature announcement.
Good morning,
This is Burcu from the Letters from Japan newsletter.
The reason for my unscheduled drop-in to your mailbox, soon after the recent post about Tokyo eateries, is to mention a dedicated page on my website (outside Substack) for paid newsletter subscribers, where all paid-subscriber-only posts are organized by category (including the five-part Kyoto Trail series): Letters from Japan: Resource Page.
The idea behind this page is to make it easier to review the content—especially if you’re planning your Japan trip—while giving me more flexibility over the design and layout. For example, on Substack, I have to publish the travel diaries as separate posts for each day, which means you need to click through several posts to read the full series. On my website, however, you can find them as single, complete posts with a table of contents.
The page is public, but the posts are password-protected (as notified in the automatic email received immediately after becoming a paid subscriber), followed by a brief preview section.
Below is a quick overview of what’s available on the subscriber-only page of the website.
Travel diaries - as single posts, with a table of contents
Since the travel diaries are posted on Substack as separate entries—sometimes up to eight, as in the Walking Goto Islands series—they can be challenging to review for trip planning. This page lists them all in one place as single posts, each with its own table of contents.
So far, there are four sets of travel diaries available as single posts:
Winter Trip to Hokkaido (January 2025)
Hiking the Kyoto Trail (November 2024)
Walking Goto Islands (March 2024)
Long Weekend in Okinawa (September 2024)
The pages are mobile-friendly, but if you have the option, the desktop version is custom-designed to make these lengthy diaries easier to read. While I will continue posting the travel diary series on Substack, once completed, they will also be continually added to the website as a single post.
Destination Itineraries
These are itinerary-focused posts, offering suggestions for planning a day or multi-day trip, depending on the destination.
Biking the Shimanami Kaido in Two Days
Japan Trip Planning Series
These are logistics-heavy posts, independent of destination, aiming to bring a bit of clarity to Japan trip planning, which often feels unnecessarily confusing (even to me, despite living here).
Japan Trip Planning Q&A: Transportation
Japan Trip Planning Q&A: Accommodation
Japan Trip Planning Q&A: Miscellaneous
Traveling Japan on a Budget (this is a public post, but I still wanted to include it for the relevance)
Tokyo Eateries: the Non-Gourmet Version
Whenever I publish on Substack, I also upload the same content to my website (for the security of hosting it myself), and you can find the paid-subscriber posts appear on the relevant page just a few hours after they’re emailed. I hope you find this feature helpful and that it makes browsing the content a bit easier. The page also displays, at the bottom, all the monthly letters available to all subscribers, regardless of their subscription plan, in chronological order.
Before I go, one more thing (as it always seems to be the case with my e-mails). It has now been a year since I launched the paid option for my newsletter. While I had previously engaged in paid travel writing and photography work for magazines, websites, and tourism offices, this was the first time I had a direct payment relationship with the content’s ultimate audience.
I’m tremendously grateful to all of you who subscribed to a paid plan, especially in this first year, for giving me the courage to continue. My gratitude, however, comes with one small ask. While I deeply appreciate the thoughtfulness behind the apologies many of you include when emailing me with Japan trip questions, there’s absolutely no need for them. That’s what this subscription is for: you can ask me as many questions as you like, and I am fully aware that planning a trip to Japan can be an incredibly (and unnecessarily) complex process, testing the limits of even the most experienced travelers. And if it’s any reassurance, as a lawyer, my tolerance for email correspondence is nearly infinite—and I’ll take travel-related questions any day over those concerning Article 20 of the Code of Obligations.
Once again, thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Until next time,
Burcu