TREK × Japan

A collaborative, in-trip hub for a Japan trip. It mounts as a tab inside a TREK trip planner (a trip-page, TREK 3.2.1+), so it is always scoped to the open trip — and the planning data is shared by every trip member. One person sets the budget, another logs an expense, a third stamps a prefecture, and everyone sees the same board with who did what. Genuinely personal things — your Suica balance, your phrase favourites, your display currency — stay private to you.

What it does

TREK × Japan adds a tab inside the trip planner, sorted into the trip's natural flow — first prep (before you fly), then on the ground (during the trip). Data is either shared with the whole trip or personal to you:

Prep

• Countdown & checklist (shared) — days until departure from the trip's own dates, plus a grouped prep/packing checklist (JR Pass, Pocket WiFi, IC-card app, adapters, cash, eSIMs …). Every item shows which member ticked it.
• Season & events (shared window) — average sakura and kōyō dates for major cities (sorted by bloom date), plus matsuri/hanabi highlighted when they fall inside the trip's dates.
• Spots (reference + planner) — a curated catalogue of must-see sights by city; tap for Maps or add one straight into the shared trip planner (located).
• Transport (shared) — a JR Pass calculator: count the intercity legs you plan to ride and it compares their total fare against the 7/14/21-day passes, plus a shinkansen route/fare reference and regional-pass options.
• Arrival (reference) — a Visit Japan Web walkthrough and an ordered first-day checklist (immigration, JR Pass exchange, IC card, WiFi, airport → city).
• Culture & gomi (reference) — 20 etiquette do's & don'ts (onsen, temple/shrine, dining, train, tipping), a step-by-step onsen guide and a searchable garbage-separation helper (moeru/moenai, PET, cans, bottles …).
• Language (Nihongo) (personal favourites) — a 76-entry travel phrasebook with a phrase of the day, your own favourites, a category filter and tap-to-hear pronunciation, plus a built-in EN/DE ⇄ Japanese translator. Each phrase shows kanji, kana, Hepburn romaji and an English/German translation.

On the ground

• Yen & budget (shared) — the trip's planned budget and a shared expense log (each entry tagged with the member who added it), spent/remaining, and a live ¥ ⇄ your-currency conversion cached from open.er-api.com.
• Tax-Free (calculator) — work out the consumption-tax refund on a purchase (10% general / 8% consumables), with the ¥5,000 minimum, consumables cap and a list of popular tax-free stores.
• IC card (Suica) (personal) — your own balance, charge/spend, a ledger and a warning below your threshold. Every traveller has their own card.
• Food (shared) — konbini/famichiki/ramen/kaiten/gyoza/matcha counters for everything the group eats, plus a menu decoder (search a dish → what it is and dietary notes, with tap-to-hear pronunciation).
• Passport (shared) — a 47-prefecture passport the group stamps together (each stamp shows who added it), plus Onsen/Goshuin/Eki-stamp collections.
• Safety & weather (shared location) — current weather and a 5-day forecast from api.open-meteo.com for the trip's weather location, recent earthquakes from the JMA feed, the latest English-language Japan news headlines, and quick-access emergency phrases.

Deep TREK 3.2.1 integration. Beyond its own shared board, the hub plugs into the trip planner itself: it reads the trip's native packing list and files, mirrors expenses into TREK's native budget (Costs addon) and reads them back, turns a matsuri or city into a planner place (creating days and assignments), pins shared tips and place notes via trip meta, enriches a place's detail panel and raises planner warnings (no weather set, budget exceeded, Golden Week / New Year / Obon crowding), keeps a live activity feed from core trip events, and broadcasts changes to other TREK clients. Every one of these degrades gracefully when an addon or edit-permission is missing.

Everything is local-first: the datasets ship inside the plugin and all state lives in the plugin's own database. Network calls are limited to three free, keyless endpoints and their results are cached, so the tab renders fast. The UI is drawn entirely with inline SVG (no bundled images or web fonts, per TREK's sandbox), follows the host's light/dark theme, and speaks English and German off the TREK locale.

Screenshots

The hub in light and dark, opened on the shared prefecture passport:

Prep

Countdown & checklist — days to departure and a shared prep list showing who ticked each item.

Season & events — sakura/kōyō dates and matsuri inside the trip's window.

Culture & gomi — etiquette cards and a searchable garbage-sorting table.

Language (Nihongo) — phrase of the day, personal favourites and category filter.

On the ground

Yen & budget — shared budget and expenses (tagged per member) with live ¥ ⇄ home-currency FX.

IC card (Suica) — your personal balance, charge/spend, low-balance warning and ledger.

Food — shared konbini/ramen/kaiten counters for everything the group eats.

Passport — the shared 47-prefecture passport (who stamped what) and Onsen/Goshuin/Eki collections.

The passport in dark theme:

Safety & weather — live weather, JMA earthquakes and emergency phrases.

Settings

Settings — personal preferences (currency, IC card) and the trip-shared weather location.

Permissions

This plugin requests the following permissions, each for a specific reason:

Permission	Why it is needed
db:own	Stores everything in the plugin's own private SQLite database: shared, per-trip data (checklist, budget & expenses, food tally, prefecture passport, collections, weather location, activity feed) and personal, per-user data (IC balance & ledger, phrase favourites, display preferences), plus the API response caches.
db:read:trips	Membership-checks the acting user on every shared route (ctx.trips.getById) so only trip members reach that trip's board, reads the trip's dates for the countdown/season window, and lists current planner places (ctx.trips.getPlaces).
db:read:users	Resolves trip co-members' display names for the collaboration labels — the "added by / checked by / stamped by" tags. Returns only you and your trip co-members.
db:read:packing	Shows the trip's native TREK packing list (ctx.packing.list) next to the plugin's prep checklist, scoped to what you may see.
db:read:files	Shows the trip's files/documents (ctx.files.list) — JR Pass voucher, hotel confirmations — in the prep view.
db:read:costs	Reads the trip's native budget items (ctx.costs.getByTrip / listMine) to show them alongside the plugin's shared expenses. Requires the Costs addon.
db:write:costs	Creates/updates/deletes native budget items (ctx.costs.*) and pushes plugin expenses into TREK's real budget. Needs the Costs addon + your budget_edit.
db:write:trips	Optional one-tap "set trip currency to JPY" (ctx.trips.update). Needs your trip_edit.
db:write:places	"Add to planner" creates a place in the trip from a matsuri/city (ctx.places.create / update / delete). Needs your place_edit.
db:write:days	Creates/edits itinerary days when scheduling an added event (ctx.days.*). Needs your day_edit.
db:write:itinerary	Assigns/unassigns an added place to a day (ctx.itinerary.assign / unassign). Needs your day_edit.
db:meta	Pins shared trip tips and tags plugin-created places with a note (ctx.meta.*), stored in the plugin's own namespace on the trip/place.
events:subscribe	Subscribes to core trip events (place:created, file:created, day:updated, …) to build the live activity feed.
ws:broadcast:trip	Notifies the trip's TREK clients when the shared board changes (checklist, expenses, prefectures, pinned tips).
ws:broadcast:user	Notifies your own TREK clients when your personal IC balance changes.
hook:place-detail-provider	Enriches a place's detail panel in the planner with the note the plugin pinned to it (placeDetailProvider.getDetails).
hook:trip-warning-provider	Raises planner warnings from the plugin's state (warningProvider.getWarnings) — e.g. no weather location set, budget exceeded, Golden Week / New Year / Obon crowding.
http:outbound	Base marker declaring outbound HTTP. On its own it reaches no host — the specific hosts below are what open.
http:outbound:api.open-meteo.com	Current weather and the 5-day forecast for the trip's weather location (Open-Meteo, no API key).
http:outbound:open.er-api.com	JPY exchange rates for the live yen ⇄ home-currency conversion (open.er-api.com, no API key).
http:outbound:www.jma.go.jp	The recent-earthquake list from the Japan Meteorological Agency (www.jma.go.jp/bosai/quake/data/list.json, no API key).
http:outbound:japantoday.com	Latest English-language Japan news headlines on the Safety tab (Japan Today national RSS feed, no API key).
http:outbound:api.mymemory.translated.net	On-demand EN/DE ⇄ Japanese translation for the phrasebook's translator (MyMemory API, no API key).

The native-budget features (ctx.costs.*) need TREK's Costs (budget) addon enabled on the trip; everything else works without it and degrades gracefully. Each outbound host is declared both as an http:outbound:<host> permission and in egress[] (identical lists), which is what the runtime network guard and the iframe CSP are built from. All three endpoints are free and keyless. This is a broad permission set — a version that adds still more will require an admin to re-approve the plugin.

Setup

1. Requires TREK 3.2.1+ (the trip-page plugin type). Install the plugin from the plugin store (Admin → Plugins → Discover) and activate it, approving the permissions above.
2. Open any trip in the planner — TREK × Japan appears as a tab inside that trip. Everything is automatically scoped to that trip; there is nothing to link by hand.
3. Open the Settings tab and set your personal preferences: home currency, IC-card type and the low-balance threshold (these are yours alone).
4. Still in Settings, set the trip weather location (latitude/longitude of the destination, e.g. Tokyo 35.68 / 139.76); this is shared and drives the Safety tab for everyone on the trip.
5. That's it — invite your travel companions to the trip and plan together: the checklist, budget, food counters, prefecture passport and collections are all shared and show who did what, while your IC card and phrase favourites stay personal.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.