How a card gets checked, and what that is worth
Accuracy is the entire product here, so this page says which checks have been done and which have not. One of the three has not been done on any card. That is why nothing here is for sale yet.
The state of it
What is checked today, and what is not
There are 23 cards. Every one carries the month it was written and a version history, and every one has had its ritual claim checked — the procedure, the order, the prices. 23 of the 23 have not had a native-speaker register check, which is the check that catches a sentence that is grammatical and still wrong in the room. Until that is done, the packs are free and there is no price on them.
That is also why the paid date moved from August 25 to September 15. A card that is wrong in a way you cannot detect is the one failure this site cannot have, and shipping the check late is cheaper than shipping the mistake. The move is logged in the changelog with a date, like everything else.
The site deliberately carries no review count and no rating. Seeded social proof is common on products like this one, and on a product whose entire claim is “this is what actually happens”, inventing proof would contradict the thing being sold.
What we want instead is field reports. The cards are free until September 15 — download them, use them at a real counter, and tell us how they went: [email protected]. If you read Japanese and will check register on a set of cards, that is the single most useful email this site can get.
The three checks
What each check catches, and whether it has happened
| Check | What it catches | State |
|---|---|---|
| The ritual claim | Whether the procedure is right: that you really do pay the machine first, that the door really does open itself, that the charge really is for the seat. Sourced, and re-checked at each dated revision. | Done on all 23 cards. |
| The Japanese line | Whether the sentence is correct — grammatical, unambiguous, and actually the thing you would say in that room. | Drafted, not checked. Written from standard, high-frequency phrasing only, on purpose, so that a checker can audit it quickly. No Japanese speaker has read it. |
| Register | Whether it is polite without being stiff. Machine translation gets this wrong in a way that is invisible to a non-speaker and obvious to the person reading the card across a counter. | Not done on any card. This is the gate: it is what stands between these drafts and a price. |
The gate
How the missing check gets done
Every Japanese line on every card — the line you hold up, the two or three replies underneath it, and the answers to those — is exported to one sheet with the room it is used in, so a reviewer sees the context rather than a list of sentences. It is a small corpus: roughly a thousand words across 23 cards.
The reviewer is a native speaker, briefed on register rather than grammar, and paid. When it is done, each card in cards.json carries the reviewer and the date, this page says who did it, and the corrections appear in the changelog line by line. Not before.
Until then the packs are free, the prices on this site are struck through, and there is no checkout. If you download before September 15: you keep every card you took, and every correction to those cards, forever. That was the promise and it stands — nothing is taken back and nothing expires. Cards released after September 15 are part of the paid packs, for everyone.
Dating
Why every card carries a month
Japan changes these details more often than guidebooks admit. Machines get replaced, seat charges get added, tax-free thresholds move, and tattoo policies relax one bath at a time.
So every card has the month it was checked printed on it, and every revision is written down in the changelog. A card without a date is a card you cannot judge.
Where something genuinely varies, the cards and the guides say so instead of picking a number. “The threshold has moved twice — read the sign at the counter” is an answer. A confident wrong number is not.
Corrections
If we got something wrong
Tell us: the contact page has the address. Corrections are free, they go out to everyone who bought the pack, and they are logged in public with a date.
You keep your money either way — the refund window is thirty days and is not conditional on anything.