About Starna

Starna is a free guide to using public transit abroad, published in English and Japanese. It covers how to actually ride — buying, paying, and getting through the gate — in each city we write about.

• Site — Starna
• Operator — Starna Studio, the trade name of an individual sole proprietor based in Japan
• Contact — Contact
• Postal address — not published here; it is provided without undue delay on request (see Privacy)

Why this site exists

Getting from A to B abroad is mostly a solved problem. Open a map app and it will tell you which line to take and where to change. The part that still catches people out comes after that. Where do you buy the ticket? Will the machine take a foreign card? Do you tap your own contactless card at the gate, or do you need a local stored-value card first? You find out while standing in the queue, which is the worst possible moment.

Starna writes only that part: fares, payment methods, how to buy, how to get through the gate, and the local rules that carry fines. It is deliberately narrow, because this is the information that is hardest to find in advance and most expensive to get wrong.

It is also information that goes stale quietly. Fares are revised, accepted card networks change, ticket machines get replaced — and undated pages keep ranking in search results long after they stopped being true. So Starna treats showing how fresh a page is as part of being accurate. Every guide displays the date it was last updated and links to the operator's own page.

About the photographs

Photos of ticket machines, gates and signage are a mix of first-hand material taken on location by the operator and their family, and openly licensed photos from sources such as Wikimedia Commons. Third-party photos always carry the photographer, the licence and a link to the source right next to the image. A way for readers to submit their own photos is in the works, planned for launch.

Editorial and verification policy

Official operator data and official operator websites come first; third-party sites are used only to cross-check. Card acceptance is recorded in three states — accepted, not accepted, and unverified — so that something unconfirmed is never presented as unavailable. AI is used to extract information from long official pages and to draft guides. Before publication, we combine automated validation with human review.

The full policy is on How we verify.

How Starna makes money

Starna is free to read and is funded solely by contextual affiliate links. There is no subscription and nothing is sold directly. Placement and assessments are not influenced by commission rates.

Getting in touch

Corrections, reports of things that did not match on the ground, and press or partnership enquiries are all welcome via Contact. If something here does not match what you found, please tell us. Every report is read, checked, and acted on.

How personal data is handled is set out in the Privacy Policy; cookies and data sent to third parties in Cookies; the terms for using the site in the Terms of Use.