This article is also available in Japanese: Read the Japanese version
Life Where I'm From is a YouTube channel that has been explaining things like Japanese breakfasts, baths, school lunches and small-town life in English.
The person behind the camera is Canadian Greg Lam.
It began with a single video of his family's breakfast and has become a documentary channel that now takes on subjects as far-reaching as homelessness and depopulated towns.
In this article, we look in turn at Lam's background, how the channel began, how the way he makes videos has changed, the small inn he opened in Nikko and his recent upload pace.
Subscriber counts, video counts and other figures are as measured by this site at around 11:49 a.m. JST on October 30, 2026.
What Kind of Channel Is Life Where I'm From?
The description on his YouTube channel opens with one sentence: “Making videos about what life is like around the world... but mostly Japan.”
According to the About page of his official site, the channel started in 2015 and was “created by Canadian Greg Lam”.
The same page also explains where the channel's name came from.
He called it Life Where I'm From because “the plan was to show what life is like around the world”.
But, as he writes himself, “So far I’ve been failing at that”, and the channel has become almost entirely about Japan.
You could say the heart of the channel is explaining, for English-speaking viewers, the everyday things people in Japan take for granted.
Who Is Greg Lam? His Age and Where He's From
Asked where he was from in an interview with the English-language magazine Tokyo Weekender in March 2020, Lam answered “Winnipeg, Canada”.
In an interview published in September 2021 on the English-language site of the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO), he said he grew up on the prairies of Winnipeg and moved to Vancouver as an adult.
According to a December 2024 article in Metropolis, another English-language magazine, he ran a video production company in Vancouver before coming to Japan.
As for his age, we could not find a published date of birth.
The clue is his own remark in the JNTO interview that he moved to Tokyo with his wife and two children when he was 33.
In both the FAQ on his official site and the Tokyo Weekender interview, he says the family moved to Japan in 2013.
Counting back from there, he would be about 45 to 47 as of October 2026.
Depending on when his birthday falls, that could be off by a year, so treat it only as a rough guide.
In the FAQ on his official site, asked whether he is American, he answers that no, he is Canadian.
He explains himself that his parents are from Guyana and Belize, and that further back, his father is of Chinese descent while his mother has Scottish and English roots, among others.
His wife is Japanese and, according to the FAQ, very camera-shy.
Lam himself, as the cameraman, seems to stay off-screen much of the time.
Asked about his Japanese, he answers only a little, and in the JNTO interview he also called learning the language the hardest studying he has ever done.
It Started With a Video of His Family's Breakfast
In the JNTO interview, Lam explained what brought the family to Japan.
When they married, the plan was to live half the time in Canada and half in Japan, but in practice they spent 12 years in Canada.
The big reason for the timing of the move, he says, was the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami: his wife wanted to be near her family.
He also said they wanted their children to grow up with both countries' cultures and languages.
He started the channel, he says, after he sent some footage of Japan to his brother and his nieces became fascinated by perfectly ordinary everyday life there.
His first video was What Japanese Breakfast is Like, published on April 13, 2015.
It is a video of about eight minutes that introduces a Japanese breakfast, with dishes such as miso soup, rice and umeboshi, natto, tako-san wieners (octopus wieners) and tamagoyaki (grilled egg).
In an October 2016 article in The Japan Times, Lam revealed that it began simply because his wife started cooking breakfast and he asked whether it was OK to film it.
In it, his daughter, then in elementary school, explains in English how to make tamagoyaki and how to eat natto.
As of October 30, 2026, the video had just over 21.37 million views, making it the most-watched video on the channel.
He also recalled to Tokyo Weekender: “It was originally just for fun, but after it was shared on Reddit, it kind of blew up.”
In July 2015, HuffPost Japan, the Japanese edition of HuffPost, also covered his episode explaining Japanese baths in English.
According to the same article, Lam first came to Japan in 2000.
Filming Everyday Life, Not “Weird Japan”
Speaking to Metropolis, Lam said that focusing on daily life was “a deliberate choice right from the start”.
The reason: “I really disliked the sensationalized videos that were about ‘weird’ or ‘strange’ Japan.”
He also described a realization: although he had visited Japan many times before moving, “I realized that I still didn’t know much about what ‘real’ life in Japan was like”.
At first, the aim was “to show what everyday life in Japan was like, specifically from a child’s or family’s perspective”.
But then viewers began sending in more involved questions, and, he says, the channel broadened into short documentaries on subjects such as homelessness, school lunch, working life and shokunin (craftspeople).
The channel's second-most-viewed video, What Owning a Ramen Restaurant in Japan is Like (2016), and its third, a 2018 video about school lunch, seem to be part of that same shift.
Metropolis also quotes him saying that the channel “has since grown up, just like my kids have”.
Its subjects now reach as far as Japanese identity, homelessness, public transportation and depopulation.
The length of his videos has changed, too.
When he started on YouTube, he says, anything over five minutes was considered too long, yet he has since made a 60-minute travel video.
Where he once split material across several videos, he now does not hesitate to put it all in one if he thinks it works better that way, and the example he gave was What a Small Town in Japan is Like, published in September 2024.
According to the description, it is set in the town of Kofu in Tottori Prefecture, population 2,500.
It runs over 45 minutes, yet as of October 30, 2026, it had just over 5.75 million views, the most of any video he had published since the start of 2024.
Metropolis describes it as a channel usually filmed and edited by Lam alone, “essentially a small, one-person, self-financed operation”.
On his Patreon, he writes that stories about “what types of homes average people can afford, what working life is like, or what it's like to be homeless simply take time and money”.
At the highest level, supporters get postcards from Japan, he writes, which has a warm, handmade feel to it.
His own words to Metropolis may sum up the channel's style better than anything: “Since I suck at comedy, the way I try to entertain people is by providing information or experiences to them in a way that’s easy to watch and understand.”
Buying Land in Nikko and Opening a Small Inn
In July 2024, Lam posted a video titled How I ended up buying land in “rural” Japan.
Its description reads, “I now own some land in Nikko, Tochigi.”
He told Metropolis that he would open a mini-hotel there and that, for the foreseeable future, he would run it from Nikko while continuing to make YouTube videos.
Nikko is about two hours from Tokyo by train, and since filming takes up only 10 or 20 percent of the time it takes to make a video, he said, the decision to move his base there was easier.
Then, on October 15, 2025, he published a video announcing that his three-unit inn, Silver Daisy Stay Nikko, was finished.
The description says, “We started the journey a couple years ago, and after lots of ups and downs, we finally opened up our 3 unit hotel called Silver Daisy Stay Nikko.”
The descriptions of his videos from 2026 also carried a note about the inn.
Someone who spent years filming life in Japan has now stepped into life in regional Japan himself.
The Channel's Numbers and Its Recent Upload Pace
As of October 30, 2026, the channel had 1.83 million subscribers, just over 309.99 million total views and 242 videos.
The channel's country setting is Japan.
Looking at uploads by year, the busiest was 2017, with 33 videos, and from 2020 to 2025 he published roughly 10 to 21 a year.
There were 10 in 2025, and in 2026, 8 videos had been published by July 21.
The channel's newest video on YouTube was Why Japan Loves Raw Eggs, from July 21, 2026 (JST); as of October 30, it had been 100 days without a newer one.
The median of the 20 gaps before that was 24.5 days, so this gap is clearly longer than usual.
Then again, there was also a 150-day gap between May and October 2025, after which uploads resumed with the video about the finished inn.
We found no announcement of a hiatus or retirement on the channel description, the official site or the public part of his Patreon.
Some recent videos split the filming and editing with a co-producer, and the descriptions show that his videos are also released early on the streaming service Nebula.
We have not checked whether newer videos have appeared on Nebula.
Less-edited footage that didn't make the main videos went on his second channel, Life Where I'm From X.
As of this writing (October 30, 2026), its newest video was from December 2023.
From that one breakfast video in 2015 onward, you could say this is a channel that has kept explaining in English what people in Japan take for granted.
