Useful Links

This page is the home for a variety of useful websites for planning for and surviving in Japan.

Japanese travel websites

 * Hyperdia

This is the English language version of the Japanese Hyperdia website, which is an online tool for looking up Japanese train, bus, and plane timetables. You can enter your start and destination, and it'll give you up to 5 different routes you can follow, including costs and waiting times. The English website isn't 100% perfect, so if you have to make a vital and strictly timed trip, it's best to double check it against the Diploma Programme.

Language Translators

 * Nifty Language Tools

The Japanese Nifty language translation pos software tools offer one of the best online translations of Japanese text to English. You can both translate from Japanese to English (日本語 > 英語) and the other way around (default selection, so switch first).

Quick access to a translation is available, if you use a direct URL. Just fill the URL of the page which you want to translate into the following link (change the URL_HERE part): " http://nifty.amikai.com/amiweb/browser.jsp?url={URL_HERE}&langpair=2,1&toolbar=no&lang=EN&c_id=nifty&acc=ja "

Users of the Mozilla browsers (SeaMonkey, Firefox) and Opera can use the keyword search bookmark feature to quickly translate a page by just adding a keyword in front of the URL bar and pressing enter. Mozilla Firefox keyword information, Opera keyword information The text translation tool is directly available at http://nifty.amikai.com/amitext/indexUTF8.jsp?langpair=JA,EN&translate=1&sourceText=. You can directly set a to be translated text after the sourceText= part of the URL (useful for another keyword bookmark as mentioned above).

Online Bidding Services
The services listed here were added, because they had been used at least once for buying concert tickets by a foreigner without a bank account in Japan and no contact to the actual auction seller.

You can find personal user experience reports on these services on the Discussion page of Acquiring a ticket in the concert guide.

See the howto page for all information including the fees. One feature of this service is the contact option by instant messenger (ICQ and MSN available), as online auctions often require last minute actions, so can be more useful than deciding days ahead via email. The %-based fee is applied after all other costs (auction, bank, exchange rate, all mailing costs).
 * Bid-Service by Juno Francis

See the fee page for pricing information. Main contact option to celga is via. email. There is also another option available called Celga Gold. For a small price you will get your own Yahoo Japan Auction account and you can bid for as many items you want by yourself. After you win celga takes over for you like any other agent. Since July 2007 Yahoo Japan requires a user to pay a fee per month (294 yen per month) to be able to bid higher than 5000 yen - you will need to pay for these if you have a gold account. The celga fees are depending on the auction ending price and are not affected by any of the other costs.
 * Celga

Rinkya helps you bid on Yahoo Japan Auctions. It is a little confusing in the beginning, but it is a great site to bid on Yahoo Japan. Their fees are a little on the up side, but their service is very good.
 * Rinkya


 * FDJP

Newly opened middleman service site. Their handling fees are among the lowest in the industry. See the Fees & Payment Method for pricing information.
 * Buy Japanese

International Hello!Project Communities
Here are links to web forums and chat channels listed (in alphabetical order) where you can find other English speaking fans. In most of these forums you can find a thread or place dedicated to 'being in Japan' or other related topics where you can ask further questions.


 * Hello!Online
 * jpopmusic.com morning musume/Hello Project section

