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When you write to us using the form on the contact page, we receive the following.

• Full Name (required)
• Email Address (required)
• Phone (optional)
• Enquiry (optional)
• Your Message (required)
• The display language of the page you were reading

We use this only to answer your enquiry and to correspond with you about it.

What you submit through the form is not written to our web server or to any database. The information is composed into a single email message and delivered to our enquiries mailbox; no copy of it is retained on the web server.

Your message therefore exists only in mailboxes under our own control. It may be forwarded to a colleague so that your enquiry can be dealt with, but any such forwarding stays within our own mailboxes on the same domain.

So that we can reply to you, the Reply-To field of that email is set to the address you provided.

Separately from what you submit, the systems of the company that hosts this website keep a record of the request itself, such as the time and the IP address it came from, for a limited period. This is described under Hosting below.

The contents of the form are delivered to our enquiries address through the mail server of SiteGround, the hosting provider we use for our mail. That mail server is located in Singapore.

As a record that a message was sent, we log the message identifier and the response returned by the mail server. Your name, your email address and the text of your message are never written to that log.

The subscription form on our news pages sends us the following.

• Your email address (required)
• The display language of the page
• The page the request was sent from

We do not operate our own mailing platform. This form stores nothing either: it is delivered to our staff by email as a request to receive our news. If you would like us to start or stop sending it, please tell us through the contact form or by replying to a message from us.

To prevent the forms from being submitted repeatedly, we use the IP address of the connection at the moment of submission, and only to count how many submissions have arrived from it within a window of five minutes. The IP address and that count are held together in the server's temporary memory and are discarded once that window has passed. They are not written to a database.

The forms also contain a field that is not shown on screen, used to recognise automated submissions. Any submission in which that field has been completed is discarded, and no email is sent.

To understand how this site is used, we use Vercel Web Analytics, a service provided by Vercel Inc.

This analytics does not use cookies, and it stores no identifier in your browser through localStorage, sessionStorage or similar. Visitors are told apart by a hash created from the incoming request, and Vercel states that a visitor session is automatically discarded after 24 hours, so the same visitor cannot be followed beyond that period.

The following information is sent:

• The time of the visit
• The URL of the page being viewed, including any query parameters, which are filtered before being stored
• The route pattern behind that URL, such as /blog/[slug]
• The referring URL, if you have arrived from another site
• The country, region and city you are in (for example, US, California, San Francisco)
• The operating system of your device and its version (for example, Android 10)
• Your browser and its version (for example, Chrome 86 (Blink))
• The type of device (mobile, desktop or tablet)
• The version of the analytics script

The location, the device and the browser are worked out from the IP address and the User-Agent that accompany the request, and the hash that stands for a visitor is likewise generated from that request. Vercel states that these data points are recorded without being tied to or associated with any individual, customer or IP address.

Nothing that identifies you personally, such as your name or your email address, is sent to the analytics service, and nothing you type into our forms is sent there either.

The recipient is Vercel Inc., in the United States. Vercel states that a minimal amount of data is collected and that it is used for aggregated statistics only, so that we can see how this site is being used; it also states that no personal identifiers which track and cross-check end users across different applications or websites are collected, and that it does not collect or store information that would allow a browsing session to be reconstructed or an end user to be personally identified.

Vercel's own handling of that information is described in its privacy policy (https://vercel.com/legal/privacy-policy) and in its privacy notice for Vercel Web Analytics (https://vercel.com/docs/analytics/privacy-policy).

We set no cookies on this website. The language you are reading is decided by the address of the page (/en, /ja and so on) and is not kept in a cookie.

Our articles carry links for sharing on X, Facebook, LinkedIn and LINE. We do not load those companies' embedded scripts, so nothing is sent to them merely because the links are on the page. Information reaches them only if you follow a link to their site.

Once you leave this site, through a source link in an article for example, the policy of the site you arrive at applies.

This website is hosted by Vercel Inc., in the United States. Displaying a page therefore involves communication with that company's servers.

Vercel's systems keep a record of those requests for a limited period, so that the service can be run and faults investigated. The fields recorded include the HTTP method, the path requested, the time, the HTTP status code, the host name, the browser User-Agent, the query parameters and the region in which the request was handled; the IP address of the connection is handled as well. How long these records are kept is set by Vercel and depends on the plan the site is hosted under.

For questions about this policy, or about how we handle personal information, please write to us at the registered office below, or use the contact form on this site.

We may revise this policy from time to time. The date of the most recent revision is shown at the top of this page.