About
How this is researched, what the illustrations are, and how it makes money.
Most English guides to Japan are organised by place. This one is organised by person — start with a lord, and the castles, graves, battlefields and castle-town inns follow from there. The premise is on the front page: for most of Japanese history the question "who ruled Japan?" has three simultaneous answers, and for a traveller only the third one explains the place in front of you.
What counts as documented
Every guide here separates what is documented from what is retold. That sounds like a small thing and it is the main thing. Japanese popular history is full of claims that have hardened into fact through repetition, and they are printed on signage at the sites themselves.
A worked example. Oguri Tadamasa is universally described as having been executed without trial. It is on the signs. It is in every account. But the new government's own record, the Dajōkan Nisshi, describes Hara Yasutarō questioning him. Whether that amounts to a trial is a matter of judgement — but "no questioning at all" overstates what is known, so the guide says so rather than repeating the line.
The same pass caught two errors of my own before publication: his age at death, and the order of his withdrawal to Gonda relative to the surrender of Edo Castle. Both were wrong in the first draft. Corrections like that are made in the open rather than quietly.
How the lodging is checked
Every inn listed was checked by hand against Rakuten Travel's English site, and each listing carries the date it was checked. Two things follow from that, both of which most guides leave out:
Availability is per-date, not a fixed roster. Re-checking the same towns four months apart returned partly different lists. The counts and prices here say which date they were checked for.
Some of the best inns cannot be booked in English at all. The clearest case is Shimobe, where the inn holding Takeda Shingen's own order about the spring is absent from the English site entirely. That is said plainly on the page, with a suggestion of what to do instead, rather than quietly omitted because it earns nothing.
The illustrations
The pictures are generated illustrations in the manner of the classical eight views, and every one of them is labelled as such, every time. They are there to carry mood. They are never evidence, they never depict a real identifiable person, and they are never captioned as though they showed a real place at a real moment.
Where an image is doing factual work — a portrait, a photograph of a site — it is a genuine archival image in the public domain, and it carries its source and date.
How this makes money
Links to Rakuten Travel are affiliate links. If you book through one, this site earns a commission at no cost to you. That is the entire business model: there is no paid placement, and no inn has paid to appear here or to appear higher up a list.
The lists are ordered by price, lowest first, because that is the ordering a reader wants and the only one that can be evidenced. It is not ordered by what pays best.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, it should be fixed. Every guide shows the date its facts were last checked, and corrections are treated as part of the work rather than an embarrassment.