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What is HinoMaple?


HinoMaple is your concierge service helping you plan and enjoy your trip to Tokyo and Japan

HinoMaple helps you with your entire trip to Japan.  Our services begin with HinoMaple’s Guide to Surviving Japan, your definitive personal concierge that will help you survive your daily life in Japan.  With our personal concierge services, you will be teamed up with a personal concierge who will help you plan your trip to Japan as well as help you get around Japan.  Let your personal concierge take the stress out of planning a trip to Japan and let them make your trip as efficient as possible during your trip.

About HinoMaple

HinoMaple focuses on removing the stresses of visiting Japan and finding the things you want to do rather than letting you waste time learning how to do things on your own and combing through various resources.  HinoMaple’s Guidebook provides the basic instructions on how to get into, around, and out of Japan while HinoMaple’s Concierge Services offers several levels of service to personally help you with your trip.  HinoMaple’s main concierge continues to be Dru Tang where he offers his own personal advice to help you travel with ease.

HinoMaple: Dru’s Misadventures

HinoMaple’s concierges have a vast amount of knowledge and experience.  They have travelled to many places in Japan and the founder, Dru, has visited well over half of Japan and this continues to grow with each passing month.  With this vast knowledge, HinoMaple’s concierges aim to help remove the burden of planning a trip to Japan by helping you and being a quick resource to understanding the country.  Dru, as the main concierge, is also available to personally help you get around Tokyo and understand the city so that you don’t lose time looking for the correct train or missing your important appointment with friends, business partners, or even clients.

HinoMaple’s founder, Dru, has been exploring Tokyo and Japan since 2005.  He has visited nearly every corner of Tokyo in his “misadventures” throughout Tokyo.  Getting lost almost every day affords him the ability to learn about various corners of Tokyo that many locals don’t even know about.  He continues to explore Tokyo and Japan discovering new things every day and sharing this knowledge with the other concierges at HinoMaple.

Dru’s Misadventures started in 2008 as a way to promote Japan to all people, both to people in Japan and to those abroad.  Dru focused on writing about his own trips and experiences in Japan and Dru’s Misadventures has blossomed into a great resource into understanding many cities in Japan.  This resource continues to be available to everyone here at HinoMaple and it continues to grow at an amazing pace.  Dru’s Misadventures provides the perfect accompaniment to HinoMaple’s concierge services by providing detailed information on various areas of Japan and allowing you to understand it through the eyes of Dru himself.

By 2010, Dru’s Misadventures developed to the point where Dru wanted to share his vast knowledge with you and everyone else.  HinoMaple was born out of this desire to help open up Japan to the world as well as to help you enjoy yourself without the stresses that he had endured when he first entered Japan.

HinoMaple has published the Guide to Entering & Surviving Japan as your own personal concierge service.  You can take it with you everywhere and use it to understand what you need to do to get into, around, an out of Japan.

HinoMaple continues to provide concierge services.  The services range from helping you plan your trip to personally helping you get to your desired destinations.  Our concierges will be able to help you understand if your itinerary is too busy or too laid back as well as suggesting better ways to accomplish your goals.  If you choose to get personal help during your trip, our concierges will be there to help you get to your destination as well as provide background information on the places you visit as well as information about Japan itself.  You no longer have to worry about what train to take or if you are going to be late for your next destination.  Our airport services can even be more invaluable as jet lag and physical exhaustion can combine to create a stressful environment.  Let our concierges deal with the trouble of buying train passes and getting to your hotel so that you can get your trip started on the right foot.

HinoMaple will help you enjoy your trip rather than stress about what you need to do.

Message from Dru

I love Japan and I love to help people.  Seeing the excitement and wonder people have in their eyes as they travel is a very special moment.  Seeing people stressed as they are lost in the train station and their train leaves within 5 minutes makes me sad.  I created HinoMaple as a way to help you get around and for you to learn from my mistakes.  The HinoMaple team and I worked hard to create services for you so that you don’t have to stress about planning your trip or catching your next train.  We can help you when you are tired and unable to think clearly, specifically at the airport.  If you are visiting for business, we can help you make your meetings on time as well as get those gifts for your family.  If you a Japanese company and need to show a guest a great time, we can definitely help you with the planning as well as helping them directly as well.  If it is your first time, or anytime for that matter, to Japan and you’d like help, HinoMaple can help you have a stress free trip.

-Dru Tang
Founder, HinoMaple

More about HinoMaple's Founder, Dru

Dru was born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, a multicultural city rich in natural beauty.  By 2005, he decided to pick up and move to Tokyo which has been his home ever since.

Tokyo, a large metropolis of over 30 million people, provided an exciting and challenging new adventure for Dru.  Having a travel bug in him, he set out to explore Tokyo in the first 6 months of his life in Tokyo.  He explored every corner of Tokyo and got lost hundreds of times where he gathered a vast knowledge of Tokyo.  He was able to explore more areas of Tokyo than most local residents.  This did not stop in the first 6 months as he continues to explore and re-explore the changing streets of Tokyo every day.

As an avid explorer, Dru set the goal to visit every Prefecture (State) of Japan before he could leave Japan.  With this in mind, he set out to accomplish his mission.  He has currently accomplished over half of this goal and continues to expand on this.  He has explored Japan via every mode of transportation you can imagine from hiking up Mt. Fuji; to cycling along the rivers in Tokyo; to taking the train to Osaka to get some great food; to riding a motorcycle and driving a car in Japan’s beautiful countryside; to flying to Hokkaido to see the great famous Snow Festival.

Through these experiences, Dru’s love of Japan has grown with each trip.  He continues to share these experiences with his blog on HinoMaple: Dru’s Misadventures.  He also wants to help you have a memorable and enjoyable experience in Japan through HinoMaple’s Guidebook and their personal concierges.