About Anne & Tony

We are Anne and Tony Sutherland-Smith from Australia, travel bloggers at Pretraveller. We love visiting Japan as a family, and write articles to help others plan their trips to Japan. We also run the Japan Travel Planning Facebook Group, the top Facebook group to help people plan their trip to Japan, with over 140,000 members!

We look forward to helping you plan your visit to Japan.  We’ll help you visit all the sights, have unique experiences and have a great visit!

Please subscribe below to join both our Facebook group and email list 🙂

Arigato, Anne and Tony.

As mentioned in:


The Robot Soldier from Castle in the Sky
The Robot Soldier from Castle in the Sky – our family at the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo

Join the Japan Travel Planning Facebook Group or Discord Server

You are also welcome to join our Japan Travel Planning Facebook Group and our Japan Travel Planning Discord Server – they are great resources to enable you to ask questions about your upcoming trip to Japan!

Disclaimer:  This article contains affiliate links.  If you book after clicking on one of these links then we may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Challenges Travelling in Japan

Even with being experienced travellers and all of the research we had done for our first visit we were still caught out by many aspects of travelling in Japan.

We personally had issues with:

  • Learning how to use the public transport system (lesson learned – choose an easy transport option when you first arrive!)
  • Making the grave mistake of not pre-purchasing our tickets and Express Passes for Universal Studios Japan – and as a result, while we still had fun, we definitely regretted not realising that Express Passes existed – by the time we learned about them, they were already sold out 🙁

We also managed to do some things right!

  • Our decision to get off the beaten tourist track and visit the Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route, Nagano and the snow monkeys near Shibu Onsen was a fantastic decision – we managed to get away from the crowds.
  • We really loved seeing the sumo wrestling and baseball while in Tokyo
  • And many more great experiences, big and small!

We subsequently decided to start writing articles to help other people plan their trips to Japan as well as setting up the Japan Travel Planning Facebook Group which has grown immensely since it was initiated – and is a great way to help people plan their trips. And we have now done multiple trips to Japan, so are well positioned to help people plan their trips to Japan!