I looked down at my slides, then back at the faces across the boardroom. It was my turn to speak, but my mind was blank. I used to practise presentations to the point of boredom to prevent this from happening. With enough preparation, I could pitch regardless of how I felt. But this time, the lines would not come. My colleague, sensing the silence, took over and carried the meeting to its conclusion. Afterwards, he asked what had happened.
After three years in marketing, I’d become accustomed to selling things I did not care about. I was unsettled by the contents of this presentation, though. We were proposing that a tourism board distribute its campaign through a low-grade ad network, packaged as going viral. Commercial internet virality had developed through forwarded emails, social-bookmarking sites and community-ranked news aggregators. By 2009, the term had become industry shorthand, with scant regard for the voluntary peer-to-peer spread that made something genuinely viral. I found it hollow and vaguely dishonest.
It already took considerable effort for me not to zone out during pitch presentations. There in the boardroom, as I fought my own judgement in real time, the mismatch between my stated position and actual values seemed to trigger a temporary loss of executive function. The experience made me consider the turns that had taken me from growing up as an artistic kid to doing this for a living.
The company director was not surprised when I handed in my notice. ‘Going to Japan alone, I thought you must have been soul-searching,’ he said. It was true. Soon after the failed presentation, I’d used the last of my holiday allowance and what remained of my overdraft to visit Tokyo for the first time.
During the trip, I found the courage to quit my job, but I also found something else: a city I wanted to live in. Tokyo, it turned out, was the place for me. More than 100 archived editions of this newsletter offer some explanation as to why. I put my affairs in order in London and moved that autumn.
I did not immediately arrive at self-discovery in Japan. The ‘digital-nomad’ ideal of location independence had appealed to me as a route to personal freedom, but it did not account for the pressures of ordinary life becoming digital. Those pressures could now fit inside a laptop-sized box and follow their owner anywhere. In any case, remaining unrooted for too long had never suited my temperament. Instead, I established myself in another major urban centre. During the 2010s, modern life in Tokyo became increasingly mobile and digitally mediated, as it did elsewhere. Smartphones crossed the threshold into ubiquity, algorithmic feeds increasingly determined what people saw, and infinite scroll became a standard interface.
Partway through the decade, illness in the family brought me back to the United Kingdom. I missed Japan and returned as often as I could, now travelling through the country as a visitor again. Aspects of tourism that had once been irrelevant became familiar: freshening up in the hotel lobby bathroom and overcoming jet lag until the 3 p.m. check-in; booking what appeared to be an unauthorised Airbnb, with a note instructing me to pose as a friend of the host; feeling the compulsion to fit sights, shopping and snaps into a time-limited itinerary; and seeing how Japan reproduces for visitors a version of itself assembled from familiar cultural motifs. As a former resident, I felt adjacent to the main tourist stream: not quite part of it, but close enough to observe it.
Meanwhile online, influencer marketing had matured into a recognisable industry. By 2017, travel content was a distinct social media genre, much of it aspirational and oriented towards luxury. Terms such as ‘Instagrammable’ were entering common usage, and visitors replicating the same poses and compositions at ‘Instagram hotspots’ became a conspicuous phenomenon. ‘Instagram tourism’ soon became a media trope associated with overtourism. Over the same period, international arrivals to Japan increased, reaching a record of almost 32 million in 2019.
By then, TikTok was becoming part of everyday media use in the UK. I had been skeptical of Instagram tourism, but its staged photographs now seemed innocuous beside short-form video. Travel content began circulating at scale in something close to the manner we had promised in the boardroom ten years earlier. Replicated photos gave way to replicated videos. Ordinary travellers adopted the creator template and filmed the same places, sometimes reaching audiences as large as those of the accounts that had inspired them.
From early 2020, Japan progressively imposed COVID-19 border restrictions, halting inbound tourism for more than two years. TikTok, however, continued to advance, and Instagram launched Reels. Concern about smartphone addiction had been building for years, and during the pandemic lockdowns, screens became the primary channel for work, school, socialising and entertainment for many people. The claim that devices were occupying more and more of daily life became harder to treat as hypothetical.
Global restrictions left the travel-minded longing to move freely again. Japan had already been a desirable destination, and its prolonged border closure appeared to intensify that demand, amplified by a constant stream of short-form videos. The country frequently topped pandemic-era travel wish lists. I looked forward to going back too and spent those years reading about urbanism, architecture and anthropology, cultivating anticipation in my own way.
In April 2022, I entered Japan on a business visa and took what felt like a final look at the country before the pressure was released. The borders reopened fully to independent international tourism in October, and travel resumed. Japan recorded just over 25 million visitor arrivals in 2023, several of them mine. Over a number of trips that year, negotiating tourist congestion became a feature of decision-making. The trajectory seemed likely to continue.
I thought about the subset of people who would arrive in Japan as I had in 2010, seeking neither to complete an established itinerary nor to make a point of going ‘off the beaten track’. They would want, I imagined, to engage with the country on its own terms: to tread lightly, learn deeply and find inspiration. I thought about how the proliferation of information and opinions on social media would make that easier in some respects but more difficult in others.
That December, I drafted the first Tokyothèque newsletter, to be sent in January. I wanted to write about Tokyo coolly: no bucket lists, no hidden gems, no tourist gaze. At the same time, I did not intend to be anti-tourism, anti-technology or automatically nostalgic. I hoped to help readers perceive the city more carefully rather than maximise what they could fit into a day; to ask what material and historical conditions produced this extraordinary metropolis; and to understand why it affects people as it does.
By this time, content creation had professionalised, and the techniques of hook writing were being widely taught. Creators layered curiosity gaps, foreshadowing and direct callouts to stop the scroll and generate the engagement rewarded by recommendation systems. Organisations adopted the same methods. Individuals from all fields hoping to be discovered through social platforms were increasingly required to master the hook and become adept at talking about or demonstrating their process on camera. I pictured a new generation of artistic kids considering the turns that had taken them here.
The cumulative effect is a violent feed of fast-moving cuts, fast-talking heads and visual disorder. I suspect many people do not enjoy contributing to it but accept it as the price of admission. I turned to the plainer photographs and videos I liked to make of urban environments and decided on a programme of mentally undemanding short videos—an Ozu- and Kore-eda-inspired oasis amid the overstimulation. Anyone who followed these breadcrumbs would arrive at Tokyothèque: a white page with minimal typography and no images. I knew progress would be slower this way but hoped it would be meaningful.
Japan surpassed its pre-pandemic record in 2024, receiving more than 36 million international arrivals. As it did so, I woke early each morning to write and edit before work, publishing one newsletter and one video a week. As a reader, you may well have accounted for one of those arrivals and may be among the small fraction who found their way here from Instagram. By the end of the year, enough of us had gathered to tell me that my gut had been right and that there was important work ahead. For the second time in my life, Tokyo had given me reason to hand in my notice. I would now work on this project full-time.
During 2025, the team grew by one when Kiara joined, and we completed our first guidebook. We began to break down the metropolis one neighbourhood at a time, using places to go and things to see as a structure for seeing the city as it is, without overwhelming it or yourself. We continue to publish weekly essays, drawing lessons from Tokyo’s culture and urban form while reflecting on our own travels to illuminate a path for others. It is the beginning of a search for a sincere, considered way to travel and engage with culture at a time when many destinations are receiving visitor numbers that place increasing pressure on residents, infrastructure and the environment.
My interest extends to cities more broadly. Features of today’s narrative arc are not unique to Tokyo, but it provides a particularly clear example, and one I can speak on. Wherever I go, I see places under varying degrees of strain from forces that now extend beyond impulsive smartphone use and algorithmically favoured itineraries. But if we can learn a metropolis as vast as Tokyo carefully, one neighbourhood at a time, we can surely come to know Japan in much the same way, city by city and town by town. From there, it no longer seems far-fetched to approach the wider world at the same measured tempo, hearts racing beneath the composure.
Until we meet in Tokyo,
AJ
It is incredibly difficult to do what we do in the counterintuitive way we do it. At every turn, it is clear that we could grow faster by posting more, hooking harder and speaking louder. But the newsletter, our books and even our social media are designed as quiet, focused spaces. After all these years, we do not object to going viral, but not at the cost of exploiting people’s impulses and insecurities. We are also ad-free, and very few sponsorships or affiliations would make sense for us. We want to make this work possible by earning the custom and backing of people who feel like we feel. If that sounds like you, consider joining us along the way.