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. 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
Contact: 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.
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, and we will not pass it to a school, an agency, or anyone else.
Who else can see it
Nobody outside our company, other than the service that stores it for us.
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 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.
How to be removed
Email info@asunaro-create.com and say which address to remove. You do not have to explain why, and you do not have to write in Japanese or English particularly well — we will work it out.
We will delete it and reply to confirm. If you would rather have a copy of what we hold about you first, ask for that in the same email.
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.