Terms of use
The agreement between you and us when you use this site: what you may do with the content, what we do not promise, and whose law applies.
Agreeing to these terms
By using this site you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use it. If you use the site on behalf of a company or other organisation, you confirm you may bind it, and “you” then means both you and that organisation.
You must be old enough to enter into a contract where you live. The site assumes an adult audience making decisions about their own money.
What this service is — and what it is not
This site is a bilingual, source-backed educational library about money in Japan, plus calculators and planners that show you the arithmetic of your own assumptions. It is general information, published for a broad audience.
How you may use the site
Read it, use the tools, and share links freely. Beyond that, these are the limits.
- Do not use the site unlawfully, or to break any law or regulation that applies to you.
- Do not scrape, crawl or otherwise extract the library in bulk, and do not evade the rate limits, caching or access controls that protect it. The structured library export exists precisely so you do not have to: use it under the terms below.
- Do not interfere with the site: no attempts to gain unauthorised access, no probing of infrastructure beyond good-faith vulnerability research reported to the security contact, no malware, no load that degrades the service for others.
- Do not republish our content as your own, sell it, or use it to train a machine-learning model without our written permission.
- Do not present anything from this site as advice given to a specific person, and do not use it in a way that suggests we endorse a product, a provider or you.
We may limit, suspend or block access if we reasonably believe use is breaching these terms or harming the service or other readers. Where it is practical and lawful to do so, we will say why.
Content, trademarks and the library export
The text, structure, editorial judgements, illustrations and code of this site are ours or our licensors’, and are protected by copyright. You may read and print pages for your own use, and you may quote a short passage for comment, criticism, teaching or journalism if you attribute it to us and link to the page you took it from. Anything more — wholesale copying, translation of a whole page, systematic reproduction, or commercial redistribution — needs our written permission.
Bank, card, issuer and provider names, logos and card images belong to those companies. We show them to identify the product being described, which is not a claim of affiliation, sponsorship or endorsement in either direction. If you own such a mark and object to how it appears, write to the legal contact and we will look at it promptly.
The structured library export is published so that people and answer engines can cite the library accurately. You may read and cite it, including in an AI answer, provided you name MoneyInJapan as the source, link to the page the statement came from, do not present it as your own research, do not remove the verification dates or disclaimers attached to a statement, and do not use it to train a model. Facts themselves are not ours to own — our selection, wording, structure and verification are.
Corrections and anything else you send us
When you send us a correction, a source or a suggestion, you give us a free, worldwide, perpetual licence to use it to improve the library, including publishing the corrected content. You keep whatever rights you had in what you sent. Please send only material you are entitled to share, and do not send confidential information, personal data about other people, or anything you would mind us publishing in edited form.
We are not obliged to publish or act on a submission, and we may edit it. We check corrections against sources before content changes, so a submission is not a promise of a change.
Links, providers and affiliate relationships
The site links to banks, brokers, card issuers, insurers, government bodies and other third parties. We do not control those sites, we are not responsible for their content, products, terms, decisions or privacy practices, and a link is not a recommendation to apply. Any contract you enter is between you and that company.
Some outbound links may earn us a commission. Where they do, we label them, and commission never determines what we recommend, what facts we publish, or the order of products. The advertising and affiliate disclosure explains this in detail and forms part of these terms.
The Ask-the-library assistant
The assistant answers from this library using a large language model. Like any such model it can be wrong, out of date, or confidently incomplete, and it can misread your question. Treat its answers as a starting point, check the sources it cites, and never rely on it for a decision without confirming the underlying facts at the official source.
Do not enter personal details, account numbers, identification numbers or confidential information into it — your message is sent to our AI processor to generate the answer, as described in the privacy policy. Do not use the assistant to generate unlawful content, to attack the model or the service, or as an interface for bulk extraction of the library.
Availability and changes
The site is free and provided as it is. We may change, add, withdraw or discontinue any part of it, including tools and data exports, and we do not promise uninterrupted availability, that a page will stay at the same address, or that content will remain available for any period. Published figures, rates and rules change constantly; a verification date tells you when we last checked, not that the figure is still current.
We may update these terms. The current version, its effective date and what changed are published on the legal hub. Material changes take effect on the stated date, and continuing to use the site after that date means you accept them; if you do not, stop using the site.
No warranties
To the fullest extent the law allows, the site and its content are provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind — including any implied warranty of accuracy, completeness, currency, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement. We work hard on accuracy and cite our sources, but we do not warrant that a figure, rule, fee or eligibility condition is correct or current at the moment you read it.
Limits on our liability
To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, for lost profits, savings, investment returns or opportunities, for tax, penalties or interest you incur, or for any decision you take based on this site. Where liability cannot be excluded, our total liability to you for all claims is limited to JPY 10,000 or the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, whichever is greater.
If you use the site in the course of a business and your use breaches these terms or the law, you will cover the reasonable costs, damages and claims that arise from that use.
Governing law and where disputes go
These terms are governed by the laws of Japan. We will try to resolve any dispute by writing to each other first — email the legal contact and we will respond. If that fails, the Tokyo District Court has jurisdiction.
If you are a consumer, this does not take away your right to bring a claim in the courts of the place where you live, or to rely on the mandatory consumer protections of that place.
These documents are published in English and Japanese. The Japanese text is the governing version; the English is provided for convenience, and if the two conflict, the Japanese text prevails except where mandatory law where you live provides otherwise.
General
If a provision of these terms is unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Our not enforcing a term is not a waiver of it. You may not transfer your rights under these terms; we may transfer ours to a successor who takes over the site, on the same terms. These terms, together with the privacy policy, the cookie policy, the financial disclaimer and the advertising disclosure, are the whole agreement between us about the site.