I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, and now it’s finally happening: yesterday, Japan Forward launched a new monthly podcast called Japan Banter Club, and I’m co-hosting it with George—better known online as お喋りじょーじ, “Chatty George.”
George is a rising British YouTuber who’s lived in Japan for over a decade, speaks the language fluently, and has built a following by talking about life in Japan the way he actually sees it. He has over 50,000 followers on Instagram and over 100,000 subscribers on YouTube.
What It Is
Each month, George and I sit down and talk about Japan. That’s really the whole premise. We pick a theme—safety, work culture, food, tourism, what it means to actually belong here as a foreigner—and talk it through from our own experience, including where we disagree. Just two lovely lads who’ve built their lives in Japan, working through what they actually think!
Why We’re Doing This
Anyone who’s spent time listening to English-language podcasts about Japan has probably noticed the same problem I have: most of them sit at one extreme or the other. Either it’s uncritical love—Japan as an idealized, almost mythical place with no rough edges—or it swings the other way into cynicism, treating every quirk as something to mock or complain about. Neither is honest, and neither is particularly useful if you actually want to understand the country.
That’s the gap Japan Banter Club is trying to fill, and it’s very much in line with what Japan Forward already does: an honest look at Japanese culture, society, and politics—the good and the difficult—without waxing lyrical and without being needlessly critical for its own sake. We’re not trying to sell Japan or take it down. We’re trying to describe it accurately, based on actually living here.
Why George and I
Between us, George and I have put in over twenty years living in Japan—more than a decade each—and we both speak the language fluently (George is way better, though). Neither of us is talking about Japan from the outside looking in, or from six months of novelty. We live here, we work here, we pay (lots of) taxes here.
George. (©Japan Forward)
But we’ve come at it from completely different directions. George started as a Japanese corporate employee before building a successful YouTube channel from scratch. I’ve moved through teaching and tour management, and now into journalism and media at Japan Forward. Different industries, different circles, different versions of “integrated into” Japan.
Episode One: Why Japan Still Surprises Us
For the first episode, George and I talked about the things that still catch us off guard, even after all these years here.
We got into how homelessness looks and is handled in Japan compared to what we both grew up with, the country’s hard line on drugs and how that plays out—or doesn’t—in everyday life, and some of the stranger quirks of Japanese housing and renting that even long-term residents run into.
It’s less an introduction to Japan and more an introduction to how the two of us actually see it, which is really what the whole show is built on.
Available on YouTube, Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Author: Daniel Manning
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