Meet the YouTubers and streamers revamping Japan’s online culinary scene

Seiryu Sakoda used to focus on the hospitality industry. He spent time abroad before returning to Japan to manage various accommodations when the pandemic hit, forcing borders to close. Sakoda moved back to his hometown in Kagoshima Prefecture and, with a more experienced eye, realized how much things were changing.

“A candy store I had fond memories of from childhood had closed down permanently,” he says from his office in Fukuoka, adding that the discovery caused him to realize long-running independent shops of all sorts were being shuttered. “I thought, ‘How could I solve this problem?’”

Sakoda turned to YouTube as a way to profile and promote mom-and-pop food ventures, primarily in the Kyushu region. As CEO of media, hospitality and e-commerce group F-Area Ltd., he launched the Japanese Food Craftsman channel in the summer of 2020. The uploads, which present a day-in-the-life style recording of independent eateries featuring English subtitles, have connected with viewers, with many attracting over a million views.

Japanese Food Craftsman is one of a new crop of post-pandemic YouTube channels helmed by creators hoping to offer a fresh take on the country’s culinary scene. Food has long been central to a lot of Japan-focused internet content, from blogs about food trends to J-vloggers focusing on convenience store snacks. With people largely staying at home during the pandemic, even more amateur creators have been inspired to jump in front of the camera.

“I didn’t really start cooking until COVID happened,” says virtual YouTuber OniGiri, speaking from the Tokyo office of her agency, GeeX Plus. What started as an effort to master “homey” Chinese dishes like māpō dōfu (a mix of spicy minced meat and tofu) while locked down in her hometown of Toronto morphed into adopting an anime-style avatar to host livestreams on Twitch where she cooked various dishes — only her black-gloved hands being visible. OniGiri steadily grew a hundreds-thousand-strong following and moved to Japan in early May.

“Now I’m here, and I want to make more food content and diversify,” she says. “I want to show people restaurants (and) just do things I never could have done in Toronto.”

Locally sourced

Sakoda knew Japanese Food Craftsman had real potential once viewers encountered yatai.

“It’s Fukuoka culture,” he says of the city’s ubiquitous portable food stalls. “You have to build it and take it apart every day, plus serve food from it.”

The third video the channel ever uploaded provided a look into the work required to set up a yatai, focusing less on shots of the food and more on everything required to run the business. Viewers loved it, and subsequent yatai videos have been just as successful.

Documentary-style clips about Japanese that center around restaurants are nothing new; creators such as Chris Broad and Paolo from Tokyo do them fairly often. However, those videos primarily feature a narrator — either present on screen or as a voice — moving things along.

Japanese Food Craftsman leans closer to culinary cinema verite: Owners, cooks and customers talk about the restaurants while a five-person crew records and edits the footage. Sakoda says they find locations thanks to a combination of local expertise and social-media monitoring. Besides yatai, the channel has looked at tamagoyaki (egg omelet) pros, bread bakers and Canadian expats running yakitori joints.

“We did a video about a hot dog shop located in a park here in Fukuoka called Imaya Hamburger,” Sakoda says. “The week after we posted it, there was a long line for the store.”

This past spring, Imaya Hamburger opened a second branch in Tokyo’s Ebisu neighborhood.

This type of YouTube video is becoming more common with similar channels featuring subtitles such as SugoUma Japan and Mogu Mogu Food Entertainment. While the visual style — a more authentic way of sharing Japanese food — grows across the platform, Japanese Food Craftsman’s mission to help independent restaurants stands out.

“I want to help sales and help these places find people who can help continue their business so they won’t go away,” Sakoda says.

Experiential dining

Nicholas Pettas, 50, is a former professional fighter who once took part in a K1 tournament final at Tokyo Dome, kickboxing in front of a crowd of 90,000 people. These days, he faces a new challenge with his YouTube channel Junk Food Japan.

“I have goals and dreams with it,” Pettas says, speaking from his CrossFit gym in Nishiazabu. “I’m putting myself out there — stepping outside of my comfort zone.”

Launched in late 2021, the channel finds Pettas learning about and indulging in the types of food a fitness-focused athlete would normally shun: burgers, ramen and booze.

“The definition of junk is if you eat too much, it’s junk,” Pettas says. “If you eat in moderation, you can eat whatever you want. I'm really interested in going and experiencing foods I don’t know.”

The genesis of Junk Food Japan came during the pandemic, when Pettas had to close his gym down. He revisited a YouTube channel he maintained a decade prior, where he filmed himself walking around talking about his life in Japan.

“I’ll be honest ... I was so full of myself,” he says of these past videos he has since removed from public viewing on YouTube. “I was just walking around thinking everyone wanted to hear about my life.”

However, this brush with his past made Pettas realize he could use YouTube to relay a different kind of information to viewers, starting with workout videos. He then learned about editing via a friend and what it takes to run an actual channel. That included the realization that, to properly manage a channel, you should focus on a specific topic. For Pettas, that was food.

“Mos Burger ... my senpai (senior) took me there, and we had the cheeseburger,” Pettas recalls of his first experience with Japanese “junk” food, which came at a time when he was still focused on athletic nutrition and mostly eating raw eggs. “The first time I ever had that, I was like, ‘Holy crap!’ For fast food, it was such an experience.”

On his channel nowadays, Pettas mixes eating experiences with more challenge-based content, such as only having $10 to spend on street food or eating lots of food in a short amount of time (he says his secret to not packing on pounds is being diligent about what he eats when not filming).

Junk Food Japan resembles a style of TV-like YouTube videos common in Japan during the 2010s, and there’s a reason for that. Pettas cites Broad’s Abroad In Japan channel as a major influence (“I call him Dr. Broad, because I’m the Eminem to his Dr. Dre,” Pettas says with a laugh). The two bonded last year after Pettas helped train Broad for a YouTuber-centric boxing event in Los Angeles.

Abroad in Japan’s influence looms large over much Japan-centric YouTube content today, but Junk Food Japan represents a shift in focus playing out in other fields, too. Whereas food used to be just a part of videos that touched on everything from travel to daily life, specificity is becoming more important, especially as more general tourist content creators come back into the country.

Pettas’ focus on food allows him to explore every corner of Japan’s culinary community. While he features familiar staples, he’s also covered Korean and Indian food in Japan, a reflection of his belief that there’s an overlooked world of viewers who want to see how their country’s cuisine is represented in Japan.

“For me, YouTube is an expression of me just having fun,” Pettas says, “and if I have an excuse to eat food, all the better.”

Virtual feast

Virtual YouTubing presents equally endless possibilities, but OniGiri decided to keep things simple when it came to her channel.

“(I cook) because I have no other skills,” she says with a sheepish laugh. “I’m very much like a Boomer lady ... I didn’t grow up playing games.”

OniGiri (who does not share her real name or age for personal reasons but is happy to note her anime persona is 693 years old) grew up watching cooking show staples such as the Japan’s “Ryori no Tetsujin” (“Iron Chef”) alongside anything that appeared on the United States’ Food Network channel.

“If someone is cooking, I will watch that from morning until night,” she says.

In more recent years, YouTubers such as Joshua Weissmen or Binging With Babish offered inspiration and entertainment when it came to culinary content. VTubers, on the other hand, were a bit more jarring. While OniGiri grew up watching “Sailor Moon” and “Pokemon” in Canada, her first encounters with avatar-only streamers like singer Hoshimachi Suisei or English personality Mori Calliope left her, like many others, confused.

“(I thought,) ‘What the heck is that?’” she says. “‘That’s weird ... I’m not sure I like that. I want my anime (to be) anime — I don’t want a human behind it.’”

She continued exploring this world, though, and slowly began to understand the appeal.

“There’s no pressure to dress a certain way (or) look a certain way. You can be whoever you please.”

For OniGiri, that meant adopting the persona of a centuries-old oni (demon) who loves cooking (hopefully the riceball-related pun in her name is clear now). She can’t think of another VTuber devoted to cooking, and what helps her streams and videos stand out is the augmented touch of her gloved hands showing how food is actually prepared, utilizing a blue screen to make it work.

“I used to use a green screen, so all the lettuce and peppers I’d use would be blue,” she says of a technical quirk of the production backdrop. “It’s endearing to look back on it.”

OniGiri’s content and confidence has also leveled up. She frequently collaborates with other prominent VTubers as well as human creators, and has developed a personality that’s both relatable and a tad edgy. She’s also developed a strong community of viewers, who both support and tease her as part of the fun.

“My whole brand now ... much to my dismay is that I burn rice because I did that once,” she says. “Everyone is like, ‘Giri’s a rice burner now.’”

The move to Tokyo has temporarily thrown OniGiri’s content off — she’s looking for permanent housing, so she doesn’t actually have space to cook at the moment — but that has also allowed her to start branching off into other areas, whether it be taste tests or in-real-life streams from the country around her.

OniGiri’s cooking partially offers a reminder of just how much is possible in the world of VTubing, a genre of content sometimes unfairly treated as another example of “wacky Japan.” Ultimately, it’s a new way for people to share their perspective and encourage others..

“I wanted my cooking setup to be an inspiration to people,” she says. “Look at this cool thing I did — you can do it, too.”