With every department's original stub list now cleared, this update marks a genuine shift: rather than opening new top-level topics, we're going deeper into practical detail and specific sights that didn't make the cut in earlier, broader guides.
What's new this week
- Plan: Wi-Fi & connectivity, luggage forwarding (takkyūbin), and tax-free shopping — three genuinely practical guides that were real gaps.
- Culture: Everyday public etiquette, and a dedicated guide to watching geiko & maiko perform properly.
- Temples & Shrines: Yasaka Shrine and Kifune Shrine — both previously only mentioned in passing within district guides.
- Food: Izakaya — how ordering actually works, including the otoshi convention that catches most first-timers off guard.
What this phase looks like going forward
Expect more of this: specific shrines, restaurants and streets that got a passing mention in an earlier district or department guide, now getting their own full treatment. It's a slower, more granular kind of growth than the department-by-department sprint of the first seven weeks, but it's how the site actually gets to the "thousands of pages" scale over time.
Requests still genuinely shape this. If a specific place or topic mentioned in passing somewhere on the site is something you'd want expanded into its own guide, the contact page is the way to flag it.