What we do with your email address
Short version: we store your address so we can send you one finding a week, we record where you came from so we know which writing was worth doing, and we give it to nobody unless you tick a box asking us to. That box is off, and leaving it alone costs you nothing. You can be removed by sending one email.
Who we are
ASUNARO CREATE Inc. (株式会社あすなろクリエイト), a company registered in Kyoto, Japan.
380 Komeya-cho, Kawaramachi-dori Shijo-agaru, Nakagyo-ku, Kyoto 604-8026, Japan
〒604-8026 京都府京都市中京区河原町通り四条上る米屋町380
Representative director: Ryoya Tosaka (登阪 亮哉)
Contact, and where to send a complaint about how we handle your data: info@asunaro-create.com
We are the data controller for everything described here. We are independent — not affiliated with any school, agency, or government body.
What we record when you subscribe
- Your email address.
- Where you arrived from — for example "google", "tiktok", "reddit", or "direct". This is derived from the referring website, or from a tag in the link you clicked.
- Which of our pages you were on when you subscribed, and which sections you visited before that.
- Your browser's language setting and time zone.
- A two-letter country code, supplied by our hosting provider from your connection.
That last group exists for one reason. This site is an experiment in whether writing carefully about government statistics reaches people who are considering studying in Japan. Without knowing which article and which country a subscriber came through, we cannot tell which writing was worth doing.
What we do not record
- Your IP address. Our hosting provider sees it in order to serve you the page, as any web server must, but we do not store it.
- Your name, or anything else about you that you have not typed in.
- Advertising or third-party trackers. There are none on this site. No Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, no advertising network.
The site does store a small record in your own browser (in localStorage) so that it remembers where you originally arrived from if you come back later. It never leaves your browser unless you subscribe.
How we count visits
Added 5 August 2026. Until this date we had no idea whether anyone was reading this site at all, which made it impossible to tell a page nobody visits from a page nobody likes. So we started counting — in the smallest way we could find.
When you open a page, your browser sends us three things and nothing else:
- Which page you opened.
- Where you arrived from, if the link you followed said so — "google", "reddit", "tosaka".
- A two-letter country code, which our host derives from your connection.
That is the whole record. No identifier of you is stored with it — no address, no IP, no user agent, no cookie, no session number. Two visits from you and two visits from two strangers are indistinguishable to us afterwards, and that is deliberate.
It is sent at most once per page per day, from your browser's own memory of what it has already sent. So the number we see is "people who opened this page today", not "times this page was opened".
We delete these counts after 90 days. They are not linked to the mailing list, and they are not linked to anything you send us.
What we use it for
One email a week, containing a finding from the data — the same kind of thing published on this site.
To be exact about the present state of things: we have not sent any emails yet. The list is being collected first. When the first one goes out, it will come from this address and will have an unsubscribe link in it.
We will not use your address to sell you anything. We do not pass it to a school, an agency, or anyone else — with one exception, which happens only if you ask for it, and which is described next.
If you tick the introduction box
Added 7 August 2026. Under the subscribe box, and under the question form, there is now a checkbox. It is off. Nothing is pre-selected, and leaving it alone costs you nothing — you still get the weekly email, and we still answer your question.
If you tick it, you are telling us we may pass two things to somebody else:
- Your email address.
- Your country — the one you typed in, or the two-letter code our host derives from your connection if you did not type one.
That is the whole list. Not which articles you read, not where you arrived from, not the text of your question. Those stay with us.
Who receives it. A company in Japan whose business is helping international students find places at Japanese universities, and through them the universities looking for students. The purpose is simple: so that somebody can contact you about a place.
We have not started doing this yet. The box exists so that we have your permission before we begin rather than asking for it afterwards. When it begins, this page will name the company and give the date — and if you are already on the list with the box ticked, we will email you before anything is sent, so you can change your mind first.
We expect this to earn us money. How, and how much, has not been settled. When it is, this page will say so. It changes nothing about what is written on the rest of this site: no school pays us to be mentioned, and every figure comes from a government survey with the source attached.
Changing your mind. Email info@asunaro-create.com and we will untick it. No form, no reason needed. Withdrawing this does not take you off the mailing list — they are separate things. If your address has already gone across, we will tell you that, and tell them to delete it.
If you ask us a question
The one-question form is separate from the mailing list, and it stores one more thing: the text of your question, exactly as you wrote it, along with the two optional fields (where you are in the process, and which country you are applying from).
We keep the question because we have to read it to answer it, and because the pattern of what people ask tells us what to write about next.
Please do not send us passport numbers, residence card numbers, or scans of documents. We do not need them to answer a question, and this form is not the right place for them. If you send them anyway we will delete them.
Asking a question does not put you on the mailing list. Those are two different boxes and we do not move addresses between them.
The introduction checkbox described above also appears on the question form, and works the same way — off by default, and it never passes on the question itself, only your address and your country.
If your question turns out to be one that many people share, we may write an article about the underlying issue. Nothing that identifies you goes into it — not your name, not your address, not your country if that would narrow it down, and not your wording.
Who else can see it
Nobody outside our company, other than the service that stores it for us — and, if and only if you ticked the introduction box, the company described above.
The data sits in Vercel Blob, a private storage service operated by Vercel Inc., on servers in the United States. Vercel processes it on our instructions and does not use it for its own purposes. If you are reading this from outside the United States, that means your address is transferred there — subscribing is your consent to that transfer.
How we keep it safe
Japanese law requires us to say what we actually do, so here it is, without embellishment. This is a small company and these are small measures — but they are real ones.
- The storage is private. Nothing in it is reachable from a public address.
- Reading the list requires a secret key held only as a server-side environment variable. It is not in the code, and it is not in this site's public files.
- Each record is filed under a one-way hash of the address rather than the address itself.
- We do not record your IP address or your browser's user agent, so the data cannot be tied back to a device.
- There are no third-party trackers or advertising scripts anywhere on this site, so nothing leaks sideways.
- Your data is handled outside Japan — in the United States, by Vercel Inc., as described above. We instruct them, we do not let them use it for their own purposes, and we rely on their published security practices, which we review before choosing them and when they change.
Asking us to show, correct or delete what we hold
Email info@asunaro-create.com from the address you subscribed with, and say what you want — a copy of what we hold, a correction, or deletion. Sending from the same address is how we check it is you; if you have lost access to it, tell us and we will find another way.
- We reply within 14 days, and usually much sooner.
- There is no charge for any of it.
- You do not have to give a reason, and you do not have to write well.
How long we keep it
Until you ask us to remove it, or until we stop doing this. If the project ends, the list is deleted rather than passed on.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have a legal right to access, correct, delete, or object to our use of your data — under the EU and UK General Data Protection Regulation, Japan's Act on the Protection of Personal Information, or an equivalent law where you are.
We do not require you to prove which of those applies to you. Ask for any of it and we will do it. That is simpler for both of us than working out which regime you fall under.
If you are in the EU or UK and you think we have handled something badly, you also have the right to complain to your national data protection authority. We would rather you told us first.
Changes to this page
If we change what we collect or what we do with it, this page changes and the date at the top changes with it. If the change is significant and you are already on the list, we will tell you in an email rather than quietly editing this page.