An enthusiastic travel article in the Daily Mail could be turned into a marketing lesson for Japanese tourism authorities, showing clearly the hot buttons an experienced opinion-leader presses to engage his audience.

Last month we had more than 6.9m page views from 1.06m unique users. We also had 9,132 contributors producing stories, photos, and videos for us in 11 different languages.

Ever since we ran a story in June 2015 about Airbnb possibly becoming legal, we have had a steady stream of people both in Japan and abroad asking us for more information.

Last night, October 31, 2015, was Halloween here in Tokyo. By around 20:00 the streets on the west side of Shibuya were completely jammed with people, and the police had 800 officers in the area for crowd control.