Tokyo
Cnn
–
No card. No smartphones. No motorways. Only two motorcycles and a few basic Japanese.
These are the American Game Streamer Ludwig Ahgren rules and his YouTuber Gold Michael Reeves won when they embark on a trip to cross Japan on motorcycles.
Friends have abandoned smartphones which are a must of their generation and left without even a guide.
This has left them no option to get involved in the inhabitants to obtain instructions, arousing meetings that have released a complete demonstration of conviviality of the Japanese.
The trip from Cape Sata to the southern tip of Kyushu with a soy cape, the northern point of Hokkaido, is around 2,000 miles – or it would be, if they had not already lost themselves.
It took them two weeks to finish the trip, according to a final video published on Saturday on the YouTube channel of Ahgren. A team had been responsible for monitoring the pair and downloading travel videos since he hit the road two weeks ago, enjoying some of the most unique landscapes, cultures and cooking in Japan along the way.
It was not an easy quest, recognized Ahgren, one of the most successful game streamers in the world with 6.7 million subscribers on YouTube. “We are doing this to the hard one,” he joked in a video before jumping on his motorcycle.
“I realized that I became addicted to this thing,” he said in the video, referring to his smartphone. “But now I can’t use it to go on Yelp to find the best place to eat, Google Maps to understand how to get there, Google Translate to understand what to order when I get there.”
CNN contacted the pair during their trip but did not hear – probably a sign on which they did not have their smartphone.
They crossed the animated capital of Tokyo, the Miyazaki tree madness campaign, fed crackers in deer in Nara, and saw Shizuoka cherry flowers – where they also eaten a picnic in the bottom of Mount Fuji.
Throughout their trip, they sampered an abundance of Japanese food, Udon noodles in Okonomiyaki, a dish of salted Osaka pancakes. When they have been late, they caught rapid bitter bites of the omnipresent convenience stores from Japan or noodles in cup of automatic distributors.
But the trip was not without its setbacks.
Without a card, they confused Miyazaki in the south-east of Kyushu with Shikoku, the fourth largest island in Japan, which is linked by bridges to the country’s main island. They arrived in the city, only to see that they could not be more lost.
The pair also hoped to consult a sumo wrestling match. They decided to park the bikes and travel by public transport but, without a smartphone, it took them three hours to navigate the train system notoriously headaches.
When they finally arrived at the Edion Arena in Osaka, they saw a sign, written in English. “Tickets are sold,” he said.
Ahgren first relied on the instinct to guess what the Japanese said, according to his YouTube videos. The inhabitants did everything possible to help, doing everything they could to overcome the language barrier.
“Ichiban” – which means “number one” or “the best” – has become Ahgren’s favorite Japanese word when he asked for hotel and restaurant recommendations, and “Nan -Jikan” – “How many hours?” – When he needed information on his trip.
A man bought the pair of coffee in a convenience store before giving them instructions with his car. And a woman tried to explain to them that the nearest hotel was next to a sports field by making a baseball swing.
But on the eighth day, Ahgren praised how the staff of a restaurant complimented him for his linguistic skills with “Nihongo Jouzu” – “good Japanese”.
“They freaked out said it,” he said proudly in a video.
The style of travel of Ahgren and Reeves hits a striking group with a group of influencers who previously raised the eyebrows in the country for their disturbing stunts.
Jeffrey Hall, a special speaker at the University of Kanda International Studies in Japan, said that there was a growing feeling in the country against poor behavioral tourists – including social media influencers – because the number of visitors reaching a record.
“There is a phenomenon of people who come here to make provocative and boring content for others around them … This particular type of nuisance youtuber or influencer’s nuisance has really damaged the image of foreign influencers in general,” he said.
They understood the American live stream Ramsey Khalid Ismael, better known by his online alias “Johnny Somali”, which was arrested in late 2023 for having broken into a construction site in Osaka. He also triggered indignation by publishing videos of himself narrowing the shuttles on the atomic attacks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
That year, a railway company also launched an investigation against four popular youtubers for their cascade to escape public transport rates, according to local media.
But the journey of Ahgren and Reeves had highlighted parts of Japan less known by international tourists, and their use of simple Japanese would be appreciated by the inhabitants, said Hall.
Ahgren, who often points to the camera when he speaks to people, is different from “harmful travelers” because he shows a better understanding of social norms, one of which is not to film people without their permission, he added.
“It is something that a lot of American streamers do without even thinking about the consequences, but in Japan, people appreciate their privacy a lot,” he said.