How MICHI checks what we tell you before you book — Editorial Policy

Book a tea ceremony, a kyudo lesson, or a workshop through MICHI and you are trusting a stranger's word about how much it costs, whether you need experience, and whether the listing is even still running. That trust has to be earned by process, not by a badge on the page. This is the process.

Before a page goes up

A new experience page does not exist because it sounded interesting — it exists because someone confirmed it can actually be booked. Three things have to be true first:

The booking works. We confirm this first-hand: through the host's own site, a booking platform showing open dates, or a direct message with the host — not an old press release.

The practical details come from the host or the venue, not a guess. Price range, whether English is spoken, whether the dojo or studio takes walk-ins or requires advance booking, what to wear — these are the details that ruin a trip when they are wrong, so they are the details we check hardest.

Cultural and etiquette guidance is checked against more than one source. How to bow, when to remove your shoes, whether photography is allowed inside — customs vary by venue even within the same tradition, so a single blog post is not enough to build a page on.

What changes, and how we handle it

Prices rise, dojos move, festivals get rescheduled. Where a fact can go stale — a class fee, a seasonal opening — we date it on the page so you know how recently it was true. When we revisit a page for its seasonal update, we re-confirm those details with the host again rather than copying the old numbers forward.

Corrections

Readers who have actually shown up and found the page wrong are how most of our corrections start, and it happens: a workshop moves rooms, a dojo changes its beginner policy. When that happens we fix the article itself rather than leaving a wrong page live with an apology bolted on, and we note what changed and when.

Our Kyudo experience guides, for example, are re-confirmed with each dojo before every seasonal update — that is the standard every bookable page on this site is held to.

Who checks this

MICHI is written and checked by the MICHI editorial team. We are one of several specialist sites under Jon&Coo covering Japan travel and culture from different angles, and every one of them is held to the same rule: if we cannot confirm it, we say so instead of guessing.