Privacy policy

PRIVACY STATEMENT

Last updated: 14 October 2026

NIHONKOSHO (nihonkosho.com) is an online shop for Japanese woodblock prints and old books, based in Japan. We will tell you our postal address and the name of our representative without delay on request. In this policy, “we” and “us” mean NIHONKOSHO. This policy explains what information we collect about you, why we use it, where it is kept, how long we keep it and what choices you have.

SECTION 1 - WHAT DO WE DO WITH YOUR INFORMATION?

When you purchase something from our store, as part of the buying and selling process, we collect the personal information you give us such as your name, address and email address.
When you browse our store, we also automatically receive your computer’s internet protocol (IP) address in order to provide us with information that helps us learn about your browser and operating system.
Email marketing: With your permission, we may send you emails about our store, new products and other updates.

What we collect and why:
- Orders: your name, shipping and billing address, email address, phone number and the items you buy, so that we can process, pack and ship your order, prepare customs documents and answer your questions about it. The contact and delivery details we ask for at checkout are needed to fulfil your order. If you do not provide them, we cannot accept your order.
- Member account: your email address and, if you sign in with Google, the name and email address that Google shares with us. You sign in with a one-time code sent to your email address or with your Google account, so we do not hold a password for you.
- Membership: your membership rank, which we work out automatically from your past orders, and the display name you choose, if any. Your rank decides your member benefits, including how much weight your entries are given in draws: entries from Gold, Platinum and FUJI members are given more weight.
- Draws, holds and your wishlist: which draws you enter and their results, and which items you hold or save and when, so that we can run these features and write to you about them.
- Alerts: the items you ask us to tell you about, for example when an item is back in stock or goes on sale.
- Personal offers for FUJI members: if you turn them on, the note you write about the items you are looking for, so that we can show you matching items before they go on sale.
- Reviews: your rating, your review, any photos you add, your country and the order the review is for. We publish reviews with your initials and country only, and we remove location data from photos before we publish them.
- Emails: your email address, which kinds of email you have chosen to receive, and whether you open our emails and click their links. If you start checkout without finishing it and have agreed to receive our emails, we may send you a reminder about the items in your cart.
- Messages and surveys: what you write to us through our contact page or by email, and your answers to any survey you choose to fill in.
- Browsing: your IP address, browser and device, the pages you visit and what you add to your cart. See Section 7 (Cookies).

SECTION 2 - CONSENT

How do you get my consent?
When you provide us with personal information to complete a transaction, verify your credit card, place an order, arrange for a delivery or return a purchase, we imply that you consent to our collecting it and using it for that specific reason only.
If we ask for your personal information for a secondary reason, like marketing, we will either ask you directly for your expressed consent, or provide you with an opportunity to say no.

How do I withdraw my consent?
If after you opt-in, you change your mind, you may withdraw your consent for us to contact you, for the continued collection, use or disclosure of your information, at anytime, by contacting us through our contact page at https://nihonkosho.com/pages/contact.

How do I choose which emails I receive?
You can stop our marketing emails at any time with the unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email, and choose which kinds of email you receive with the preferences link next to it or, if you are a member, on your account page. Some emails are part of a service you use, such as order and shipping updates, draw results, reminders about items you hold and confirmations about your account. We send these even if you have unsubscribed from our other emails.

How do I delete my account?
If you have a member account, you can delete it yourself at any time from Settings & help → Delete account on your account page.

What happens when I delete my account?
We release any items you are holding, withdraw you from draws, stop all emails from us, and remove your member information, saved addresses and phone number, wishlist, alerts and personal-offer note. This usually happens within a day, and always within one month. Orders you have already placed will still be shipped, and we keep order records as explained in Section 8. If you do not have a member account, or you cannot sign in, contact us and we will do the same for you.

SECTION 3 - DISCLOSURE

We may disclose your personal information if we are required by law to do so or if you violate our Terms of Service.
We also share the information needed to deliver your order with the carrier and, for customs, with the customs authorities of the destination country. We share information with the service providers listed in Section 5 only so that they can provide their services to us.

SECTION 4 - SHOPIFY

Our store is hosted on Shopify Inc. They provide us with the online e-commerce platform that allows us to sell our products and services to you.
Your data is stored through Shopify’s data storage, databases and the general Shopify application. They store your data on a secure server behind a firewall.

Payment:
Payments are handled by Shopify Payments (including Shop Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay) and by PayPal. We do not see or store your full card number.
If you choose a direct payment gateway to complete your purchase, then Shopify stores your credit card data. It is encrypted through the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).
All direct payment gateways adhere to the standards set by PCI-DSS as managed by the PCI Security Standards Council, which is a joint effort of brands like Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover.
PCI-DSS requirements help ensure the secure handling of credit card information by our store and its service providers.
For more insight, you may also want to read Shopify’s Terms of Service (https://www.shopify.com/legal/terms) or Privacy Statement (https://www.shopify.com/legal/privacy).

SECTION 5 - THIRD-PARTY SERVICES AND WHERE YOUR INFORMATION IS KEPT

In general, the third-party providers used by us will only collect, use and disclose your information to the extent necessary to allow them to perform the services they provide to us.
However, certain third-party service providers, such as payment gateways and other payment transaction processors, have their own privacy policies in respect to the information we are required to provide to them for your purchase-related transactions.
For these providers, we recommend that you read their privacy policies so you can understand the manner in which your personal information will be handled by these providers.
In particular, remember that certain providers may be located in or have facilities that are located a different jurisdiction than either you or us. So if you elect to proceed with a transaction that involves the services of a third-party service provider, then your information may become subject to the laws of the jurisdiction(s) in which that service provider or its facilities are located.
Once you leave our store’s website or are redirected to a third-party website or application, you are no longer governed by this Privacy Policy or our website’s Terms of Service.

Where your information is kept:
- Shopify: our shop, checkout, member accounts, orders and published reviews.
- Shopify Payments and PayPal: payments.
- Klaviyo: our emails, your email choices, the alerts you sign up for, and the information our emails are based on, such as your member rank and the items you hold, enter draws for or save.
- Our own servers in Japan: draws, holds, wishlists, alerts and new reviews before they are published. These servers mainly keep your customer number, not your name or postal address.
- Delivery companies and our shipping service: delivering your order.
- Other services we use to run our shop: our email inbox, cloud storage for backup copies, our accounting software, website statistics (Google Analytics), sign-in with Google, online surveys, and services that help us translate our website and reviews, check new reviews before we publish them and read personal-offer notes.
- Meta (Facebook and Instagram): measuring and showing our advertising. If you have signed up for our emails, we may give Meta your email address in a coded form (a hash) so that our ads can be shown to you. If you unsubscribe, we stop giving Meta your email address for this purpose. Advertising measurement is described below.
- Advertising measurement: when you visit our website or buy from us, Google and Meta may receive information about it from our website and from Shopify, including your email address or phone number in a coded form (a hash), so that they can measure our advertising.

Some of these providers keep information outside Japan, for example in the United States or Canada. Japan is recognised by the European Commission and by the United Kingdom as providing an adequate level of protection for personal data. When information goes from us to a provider in another country, we rely on the safeguards in that provider’s data processing terms, such as the standard contractual clauses approved by the European Commission. You can ask for a copy of these safeguards through our contact page at https://nihonkosho.com/pages/contact.

Links
When you click on links on our store, they may direct you away from our site. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of other sites and encourage you to read their privacy statements.

SECTION 6 - SECURITY

To protect your personal information, we take reasonable precautions and follow industry best practices to make sure it is not inappropriately lost, misused, accessed, disclosed, altered or destroyed.

If you provide your credit card information at checkout, the information is encrypted using secure socket layer technology (SSL) and stored by our payment provider with AES-256 encryption. Although no method of transmission over the Internet or electronic storage is 100% secure, we follow all PCI-DSS requirements and implement additional generally accepted industry standards.

SECTION 7 - COOKIES

We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
- to run the store, for example to keep the contents of your cart, your session and your checkout;
- to remember your preferences, such as your language and currency;
- to understand how our website is used (Google Analytics);
- to measure and improve our advertising (Google and Meta; Meta is the company behind Facebook and Instagram);
- to send the emails you have signed up for and to understand how they are used (Klaviyo).
Cookies needed to run the store are set by Shopify. A description of these cookies is available at https://www.shopify.com/legal/cookies.
You can block or delete cookies through your browser settings. If you block the cookies needed to run the store, some parts of it, such as the cart and checkout, may not work.

If you visit from a country where the law requires your consent, we ask for it in a cookie banner before we use cookies that are not needed to run the store. To change your choice later, delete the cookies for our website in your browser, and we will ask you again on your next visit.

SECTION 8 - HOW LONG WE KEEP YOUR INFORMATION

We keep your information only for as long as we need it for the purposes in this policy, or for as long as the law requires.
- Orders: we keep order records, including the name, address and items on each order, in Shopify, in our order management software, in our accounts and in shipping records for as long as Japanese tax and accounting law requires. We keep them even if you delete your account.
- Member account: we keep your member information, saved addresses, draw entries, holds, wishlist, alerts and personal-offer note until you delete your account. We do not delete personal-offer notes after a set time, because finding a particular book or print can take years. You can change or delete your note at any time.
- Draws: after a draw is finished, we keep a record of the order in which entries were drawn, linked to customer numbers, for as long as we need it to show that the draw was run fairly.
- Reviews: we keep published reviews on our website, including after you delete your account. If you would like your review removed, please contact us.
- Emails: if you unsubscribe or delete your account, we keep a record that you do not want our emails, so that we do not email you again.
- Messages and surveys: we keep messages you send us and survey answers for as long as we need them to help you and to improve our shop.
- Website statistics: Google Analytics keeps data for the retention period set in our account.
- Backups: we make a backup copy of our member records every day and keep only the 14 most recent copies.
- Moving to our new website: we delete the files we used to move reviews and wishlists from our previous services 30 days after our new website opens.
- Accounts we have had to close: if we have stopped an account from placing orders, we keep a coded copy (a hash) of its email address so that the account cannot be opened again, even after it is deleted.

SECTION 9 - YOUR RIGHTS IF YOU ARE IN THE EUROPEAN UNION OR THE UNITED KINGDOM

If you are in the European Union (EU), the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom (UK), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the UK GDPR applies to the information we hold about you.

Why we are allowed to use your information:
- to carry out our contract with you: your orders and their delivery, your member account, and the draws, holds, wishlist and alerts you ask for;
- with your consent: marketing emails and, where consent is required, cookies that are not needed to run the store;
- for our legitimate interests: keeping our shop secure, preventing fraud and misuse, checking reviews before we publish them, and improving our shop;
- to meet our legal obligations: keeping tax and accounting records.

Your rights:
- to ask for a copy of the information we hold about you (access);
- to ask us to correct information that is wrong (rectification);
- to ask us to delete your information (erasure);
- to ask us to limit how we use your information (restriction);
- to object to our use of your information, including for direct marketing (objection);
- to receive the information you gave us in a format you can take to another service (portability);
- to withdraw your consent at any time. This does not affect what we did before you withdrew it.

To use these rights, contact us through our contact page at https://nihonkosho.com/pages/contact. We may ask you to confirm that the request comes from you. We will reply within one month.
You also have the right to complain to a data protection authority. In the EU, this is the authority in the country where you live or work, or where you think the problem happened. In the UK, this is the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk).
If you live elsewhere, you can still ask us to access, correct or delete your information, and we will respond in line with the law that applies to us, including Japan’s Act on the Protection of Personal Information.

SECTION 10 - AGE OF CONSENT

By using this site, you represent that you are at least the age of majority in your state or province of residence, or that you are the age of majority in your state or province of residence and you have given us your consent to allow any of your minor dependents to use this site.

SECTION 11 - CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY

We reserve the right to modify this privacy policy at any time, so please review it frequently. Changes and clarifications will take effect immediately upon their posting on the website. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here that it has been updated, so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we use and/or disclose it.
If our store is acquired or merged with another company, your information may be transferred to the new owners so that we may continue to sell products to you.

SECTION 12 - LANGUAGE

This policy is written in English. The versions in other languages on our website are translations made with machine translation and are provided for your convenience. If there is any difference between the English version and a translation, the English version applies.

QUESTIONS AND CONTACT INFORMATION

If you would like to: access, correct, amend or delete any personal information we have about you, register a complaint, or simply want more information contact our Privacy Compliance Officer through our contact page at https://nihonkosho.com/pages/contact.