Our team at Inside Japan Tours

The sun never sets on the InsideJapan Tours team (well, maybe on Sundays) as we have offices in Bristol (UK), Broomfield, (USA), Brisbane (Australia) and Nagoya (Japan). On this page you can meet the people behind our Japan holidays and tours.

We have a wide range of backgrounds and interests, but you can be sure that the one thing that ties us all together is a love of Japan, Japanese culture and a passionate desire to share that with other people.

From the accounts department, through the travel consultant teams to the tour leaders and guides on the ground, you can rest assured that everything we do is to make sure you have the best possible experience of Japan.

Akiko Imaizumi
FIT Operations Manager
Email: [email protected]
Call: JP 052 968 1135
Location (Nagoya, Japan)

Born and bred in Toyohashi City in Aichi Prefecture, Akiko moved to Nagoya to study International Culture at university in 2002.

After taking a holiday to Korea with a friend she was bitten by the travel bug and for her graduation trip decided to head west to Istanbul and Egypt. Visits to Paris and London followed before Akiko decided to head over to Canada to spend six months living in Vancouver.

After returning to Japan for a stint working at an English conversation school, Akiko upped sticks again and moved to Australia's Gold Coast, where she remained for two years working in real estate, drinking beer and eating delicious Aussie BBQ.

In 2009, after having returned to Japan, Akiko joined the InsideJapan team as a temp worker and never left. Now she is our Senior Ops Assistant, and is responsible for making sure that all our clients receive the most up-to-date information with their documents and that all tickets and services are correctly booked and sent.

In her spare time, Akiko loves getting beautiful nail art, catching up on all the latest magazines, and hanging out at izakaya - where she loves to order edamame and yaki soba with a chu-hi.

What is your top tip for visitors to Japan?

"Smile and say arigato (thank you). It makes us very happy and impressed with your Japanese, and you might get free things! (In general, the only people who can speak Japanese are Japanese people, so we are pretty easily impressed if you can actually say something in our language!)"