When we started taking our trip to Japan seriously (about 15 seconds after Kitty realised I’d gotten our tickets as our 9th Anniversary Gift) we started looking up all the great resources online to work out the basics of our trip.
A first for us was using YouTube in a big way for this. It wasn’t long before we stumbled across the VLog of Grace Mineta otherwise known as “Texan in Tokyo“. The Channel “About” really tells it all:
Everything here is run by us [Grace and Ryosuke], for fun 😀
It’s just us, though, so keep your expectations for videos low and remember it can take us a while to work through email/messages/etc.
I [Grace] am a Texan author and cartoonist and my husband Ryosuke is Japanese, born and raised in Tokyo. We’re both very happily married, work as freelancers (me writing, him translation), and live in countryside adjacent to Tokyo.
If you like our adventures, please consider supporting us (there is a link to Patron below). We both love making videos about our life in Japan, nothing special, just daily life. We hope our videos make you smile!
They really did make us smile and over the interceding months we’ve enjoyed the videos as they appear. For Kitty and I it’s been a great viewpoint into a culture we’ve been dying to visit for years, the fact that Grace and Ryosuke are extremely likeable and somewhat quirky only drew us in further. I leave it to you to watch the videos and discover the back story about the Poophat.
Grace also writes a Blog and you can find links to places where she publishes her comics there.
I’d been intended on buying Grace’s books one at a time but then they posted this video:
Now at first I thought “ohh nuts, now we’re going to get videos all about what it’s like having a baby in Japan” but fortunately it was really an announcement of a modest Kickstarter campaign to kick off the printing of Grace’s 4th Book “My Life in Japan”. As I write this post they’ve been pledged 10x the original USD4500 goal with 6 days remaining!
So now I’m kicking back looking forward to having my life enriched by the possession of a Genuine Poophat, and the full set of Printed Comic books. Roll on May and our trip to Japan AND the expected arrival of my Poophat!