The cookie inventory
This site uses exactly two storage items, and both are listed here in full. There is no third category, no “and similar technologies” clause doing quiet work, and nothing set by advertisers, because there are no advertisers.
| Name | Type | Purpose | Duration | Optional? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| tmo_cookie_choice | Essential (local storage) | Remembers your accept/decline choice so the banner doesn't reappear | Until you clear it | No — required to honor your choice |
| tmo_zone_analytics | Analytics (cookie) | Records which zone pages are visited, anonymously, so we know what readers research most | 12 months | Yes — set only if you accept |
Essential versus analytics
The essential item is the one that stores your consent choice itself. Without it, the banner would return on every page load, which would be worse for everyone and would make declining meaningless. It contains nothing but the word “accept” or “decline” and a date.
The analytics cookie is the optional one, and the banner describes it in plain language: “We use cookies to track which Tokyo microclimate zones visitors research most.” That's the literal truth. The cookie holds an anonymous random identifier, and our aggregate log counts zone-page views. We use the counts to decide what to write next — when the Boso page started outreading the Saitama page two-to-one, the Boso essay got its typhoon section expanded. That is the entire commercial exploitation of this data.
How to accept or decline
The banner appears at the bottom of your first visit. Accept sets the analytics cookie. Decline prevents it from ever being set. Either way, the choice is remembered and the banner goes away. No modal, no dark patterns, no “manage options” labyrinth with forty pre-checked toggles. Two text links, as it should be.
How to change your mind
To revoke consent: clear this site's cookies and local storage in your browser settings, and the banner will reappear on your next visit so you can choose again. Every modern browser offers this under site settings or privacy settings. To accept after declining: same procedure — clear, revisit, accept. We considered building a toggle widget into this page and decided a paragraph of honest instructions beats a widget that does the same thing with more code.
What declining costs you
Nothing. Every page, every figure, every map, the matrix, the live weather boxes — all identical. The analytics cookie informs our editorial planning; it unlocks nothing for the reader. Declining is a full-featured way to use this site, and a meaningful minority of our readers do exactly that.
Third-party requests
Two third-party services receive requests from your browser when you use the site, and neither sets a tracking cookie through us: the Open-Meteo API (live weather data) and Google Fonts (typeface files). Both see a standard HTTPS request from your connection. Their own policies govern those requests; our role is limited to naming them here so nothing reaches a third party unnamed.
Do Not Track
Because the analytics cookie is strictly opt-in, Do Not Track signals require no special handling: if you never accept, you are never tracked, signal or not. We regard that as the correct architecture — consent at the banner, not surveillance with an opt-out.
Questions
Cookie questions go to [email protected]. The related legal documents are the privacy policy and the site terms.
Technical detail for the curious
For readers who like to verify: the consent record lives in your browser's local storage under the key tmo_cookie_choice, and it holds one of two strings — “accept” or “decline.” It is not transmitted to us; it's a note your browser keeps for itself so the banner logic knows not to ask again. The analytics cookie, when accepted, is a first-party cookie named tmo_zone_analytics with a twelve-month expiry, scoped to this domain only. It carries a random identifier generated at acceptance time. There are no session-replay tools, no heatmap trackers, no third-party pixels, and nothing that follows you off this domain. View your browser's storage inspector and you'll see the whole list: two items, matching this page exactly. We wrote the inventory to be checkable, and we welcome the check.
Analytics in aggregate
The counts the analytics cookie feeds look like this in practice: zone page, date, count. No identifiers survive aggregation — the raw cookie values are deleted monthly after the counts roll up. The aggregate table tells us things like “the heat island page doubles its readership every August” and “the corrections page is read by almost nobody,” both of which are useful and neither of which is about any individual. This is the limit of our analytical ambition, and it's stated here so you can hold us to it.
Changes to cookie use
If we ever add a storage item — we have no plans to — three things happen before it goes live: this page is updated with the item's name, purpose, and duration; the banner text is updated to describe it; and the consent record is reset so every visitor chooses again under the new description. Silent scope expansion is the industry habit this architecture is designed to make impossible for us.
Jurisdictional notes
Visitors from jurisdictions with specific cookie-consent regimes will find this site's model familiar: strictly necessary storage by default, everything else by opt-in consent, withdrawal as easy as consent. We apply this single standard worldwide rather than geofencing different consent behaviors, partly for simplicity and partly because the strictest reading of the various regimes converges on roughly what we built. Questions about a specific jurisdiction's rules as applied here are welcome at [email protected].
A plain-language summary for the banner's promise
The banner's single sentence — “We use cookies to track which Tokyo microclimate zones visitors research most. You can decline.” — is a compressed version of this entire page, and we hold the compression to a strict standard: nothing may be true of our cookie use that the banner doesn't imply, and nothing the banner promises may be false in the detail. So, unpacked: “track which zones visitors research most” means aggregate, anonymous zone-page counts, nothing more. “You can decline” means decline is one click, fully effective immediately, and costs no functionality. If our practice ever outgrows either clause, the banner changes first. That ordering — sentence before system — is the control this page exists to document.
Storage versus cookies
A technical clarification for accuracy: the consent record uses browser local storage rather than a cookie proper. The practical difference for you is nil — both are data your browser keeps for this site — but the legal inventories in some jurisdictions count them separately, so we list them separately. Local storage never leaves your browser at all; cookies travel with requests to the domain that set them. Our analytics cookie is first-party, so it travels only to our own servers, and only if you accepted it.
Verifying this page
We encourage verification, in the same spirit as the corrections log. Open your browser's developer tools, inspect storage for this domain, and compare what you find against the inventory table above. If you ever find an item we haven't listed, that's a bug or a breach of our own policy, and it goes on the corrections page with a date. An inventory that invites auditing is harder to fake than one that asks for trust, and this site has a standing preference for the checkable kind.
Retention of consent records
A small operational note: we do not keep a server-side record of who accepted or declined. Your choice lives in your browser and nowhere else. This is deliberate — a consent log would itself be personal data requiring protection, and the simplest way to protect it is never to create it. The consequence is that if you switch browsers or devices, you'll see the banner again and choose again. We regard that minor repetition as the correct price for not maintaining a database of your choices.
The banner's design, and why
The banner is a bar, not a modal, for a reason: a modal that blocks content until you click is a device for manufacturing consent, not requesting it. Our bar sits at the bottom, dismissible by either link, and the site beneath it is fully readable and clickable without touching it. Accept and Decline are the same size, same style, same distance from your cursor. Symmetry in the interface is what “freely given” looks like as a design decision, and this page exists partly so you can verify we kept it that way.