01 What we collect
Two things. If you write to us through the contact form, we receive what you type into it: your name, your email address, the subject you chose, and your message. Nothing else on the site asks you for anything — there is no account to create, no mailing list, and no field anywhere that asks for your address or payment details. Beyond the form, the only trace you leave is the ordinary server log, the page count, and the analytics described below.
02 What we do not collect
We do not run advertising networks, behavioural advertising profiles, or cross-site advertising cookies. We do not buy audience data, and we do not sell, rent, or share what little we hold with anyone who wants to market to you. We use one outside measurement service, Google Analytics, set out in the next section; its advertising features are switched off, and nothing we send it may be used to advertise to you. Writing to us does not put you on a list. We do not send newsletters, and we do not use an address you gave us for anything except answering the message you sent.
03 Traffic measurement
Our servers keep ordinary web logs — the page requested, the time, a truncated IP address, and the browser string — for a short period, so that we can find broken pages and detect abuse.
We also count page views ourselves, using a small script served from this domain. It sets no cookie and writes nothing to your device. For each view it records the page, the site you arrived from, the width of your screen, the family of browser you use, any campaign tag in the address, and how long the page stayed open. To tell one visit from another without identifying you, it derives a short code from your IP address and browser string; that code changes every day and cannot be turned back into either. The IP address itself is not stored. That counter runs on the same server as this site, under the same roof as the logs above, and the figures are read only by the desk.
Since 9 August 2026 we have also used Google Analytics, because our own counter cannot tell us which countries our readers are in. This is a publication about coming to Japan, and where our readers actually live decides what we write next. It records the pages you look at, the country you are in — worked out from your IP address, which Google discards rather than stores — the kind of device and browser you use, the site you arrived from, and how far down a page you read. Google handles this on our instructions and may not use it for its own purposes. The advertising features are switched off: we run no Google advertising, and the data may not be used to build an advertising profile or to personalise anything you are shown elsewhere.
For readers in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, we instruct Google Analytics not to write a cookie or store anything on the device at all. Those visits are counted without one. If you would rather not be counted anywhere, any tracker-blocking extension will stop it, and the site reads exactly the same either way.
None of this is linked to an email address, and none of it is used to build a profile of you.
04 Cookies
Nothing we write sets a cookie. Our own page counter stores nothing on your device, and there is no login, no preference, and no consent state for us to keep.
Outside the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, Google Analytics sets its own cookies to tell one visit from another. They belong to this domain, expire on their own, and are not used for advertising. Inside those regions we instruct it to set none, as described above. If a preference cookie of our own is ever added, it will store a setting you chose and nothing else, and this page will say so before it ships.
05 Who else sees your data
Our hosting provider, which stores the server logs described above on our instructions and is not permitted to use them for its own purposes. Google, which processes the analytics in section 03 on the same terms, and which also carries our email: a message sent through the contact form is delivered to a mailbox that Google hosts for us, so it passes through their systems in the ordinary way that email does. No one else.
06 How long we keep it
Server logs are discarded on a rolling basis. The event-level analytics in section 03 are held for two months and then deleted, which is the shortest period Google offers. A message sent through the contact form is kept on our own server for ninety days and then deleted automatically; the copy that reaches our mailbox is kept for as long as we need it to deal with what you wrote, and we delete it when we are done. Published corrections record what changed in an article, not who told us.
07 Your rights
Readers in the EU and UK have rights of access, correction and erasure under the GDPR; readers in Japan have comparable rights under the Act on the Protection of Personal Information. We extend the same treatment to everyone regardless of where they live, because operating two standards is harder than operating one. In practice there is little to exercise them against: no account, no mailing list, no profile. If you have written to us through the contact form, the message and the address you sent it from are records about you, and you may ask us for a copy of them or ask us to delete them. Otherwise the only records that touch you at all are the short-lived server log above, held with a truncated IP address, and the analytics in section 03, which for readers in the EU, the UK and Switzerland are kept without a cookie or any identifier stored on the device. Neither is linked to anything that would let us identify you. If you want to exercise any of these rights, the address is in the next section.
08 How to reach us about your data
Write to privacy@thesushijournal.com. This is the address for access, correction and erasure requests, and for anything else about the handling of personal data described on this page. We aim to reply within one month, which is the period the GDPR allows.
For anything else — a correction to an article, a question about permission and licensing, or a general enquiry — there is a contact form. It asks for four things: your name, your email address, the subject, and the message. We use them to answer you and for nothing else.
09 Children
This publication is written for a general adult readership and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 16.
10 Changes to this page
If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect or who sees it, we will say so on this page and record the change in the corrections and updates log rather than swapping the text silently. Three changes have been made so far: the page counter described in section 03, on 2 August 2026; the addition of Google Analytics, on 9 August 2026; and the contact form described in sections 01 and 08, on 9 August 2026. All are logged there.
