This article is also available in Japanese: Read the Japanese version
From vending machines and pizza to a hotel with cats and an abandoned house she cleared out, Canadian YouTuber Sharla has been filming the finer details of life in Japan, in English.
The oldest of her videos you can still watch dates from 2011: a short clip she shot in Japanese while attending a university in Japan.
This article looks in turn at how Sharla came to Japan, how YouTube became her job, how her two personal channels relate to each other and, finally, her stationery shop and a place to stay in Tokyo.
Figures such as subscriber and video counts are ones we measured at around 12:50 p.m. JST on October 30, 2026.
Who Is Sharla? Where She's From and How Old She Is
The description on her main channel opens with the greeting “Hi I'm Sharla”.
The next line reads: “I'm Canadian but spend my time between Japan and England”.
In other words, Japan isn't her only base these days.
She grew up in “Victoria, BC - an island city on the west coast of Canada”.
That is how she put it in an interview on the UK edition of Travel Japan, the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO)'s site, published in March 2021.
As for her age, a livestream she held in April 2021 was titled Sharla's 35th Birthday Stream!
Counting from there, she would be around 40 as of October 2026.
That could be off by a year depending on when her birthday falls, so treat it as a rough guide.
As for her name, we could not find any name for her other than “Sharla”, the name she goes by.
A 2017 article in The Japan Times says she asked the paper not to publish her last name for privacy reasons.
Anyone who was hoping for a full name may be a little disappointed.
Choosing Japanese at 13, Then On to Iwate
Her connection to Japan began with a third language at school.
In a July 2014 interview with Cheer up! English (in Japanese; quotes here are our translation), she said she first studied Japanese at 13 and picked it simply because it seemed like it might be interesting.
In the JNTO interview, too, she said she could choose from three languages (Russian, Spanish or Japanese) and that she went for something unfamiliar: “I wanted something completely different to anything I was familiar with”.
She first came to Japan at 17.
According to the Cheer up! English article, that first visit was a two-week homestay in Iwate.
As she put it in the JNTO article, “Morioka is actually the sister city to my hometown Victoria”.
Later, on a working holiday, she taught English at various schools around Iwate.
Her time living in Iwate is given as “a total of two years” in the 2014 interview and “3 years” in the 2021 article; the two accounts count it differently.
She went back to university in Canada for a while; then, after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, she grew worried about her friends in Iwate and came to Japan that September, she says.
She stayed on and transferred to a university in Japan.
This, too, seems to show how much Iwate means to her.
A YouTube Channel That Began as Japanese Practice
The oldest video still public on her other channel, Sharla in Japan, is one from September 9, 2011.
In its description, she writes that she is finishing her “bachelor's degree in International Communication and Languages at a university in Tokyo”, adding, “I make blogs every week in Japanese”.
Speaking to Cheer up! English, she recalled that she started for the sake of studying Japanese, and that at first everything was in Japanese, with no English subtitles at all.
The JNTO article, on the other hand, has her own account: “It actually started as a homework project for my university.” She was asked to keep a blog for students thinking about studying abroad in Japan and, being “absolutely horrible at writing”, asked if she could make videos instead.
Both are her own words about how it all began.
As of 2014, she was posting about once a week, and said it took about eight hours to finish a video, subtitles included.
After graduating, she seems to have made videos while working at a company; a February 2015 profile in The Japan Times described her as “a video producer by day and vlogger by night”.
According to the paper's 2017 article, she worked at “a startup tech company”, with long hours and, as she put it, “not getting paid for overtime”.
The article also says she eventually realized her YouTube channel was “actually pulling in about the same amount of money as her tech work”.
Two Channels, and Her Most-Watched Video
Sharla has two channels of her own.
Her main channel has the handle @sharlainjapan, and its channel name is Sharmeleon.
By our measurement on October 30, 2026, it had 790,000 subscribers and 627 videos.
The other, Sharla in Japan, has the handle @heyitssharla; measured the same day, it had 580,000 subscribers and 280 videos.
With the names and handles crossed like that, it can get a little confusing.
In November 2019, she announced on Sharla in Japan that edited videos would go up on the other channel and that this one would be for livestreams only.
When we checked on October 30, 2026, the Sharla in Japan channel, which is for livestreams, had not posted a new video since May 20, 2021.
The main channel's name was SHARMANDER in her own 2014 description and Sharmeleon in the March 2021 JNTO article. We could not confirm when she changed it.
The most-watched video on her main channel (Sharmeleon) is one from November 2020 in which she stays at a cat hotel.
As of October 30, 2026, it had more than 2.69 million views, followed by a 2017 video from an ear-cleaning salon.
By year, 2016 has the most uploads, at 132 videos, so you could say that was when she was posting most energetically.
Morioka, England, Then Tokyo
Where she lives has changed several times.
In March 2019, she announced she was going back to Japan in a video titled Why I'm Moving Back to Japan.
In March 2021, when the JNTO interview came out, she said she was living in Morioka, a city she loved.
In October that year, she posted a video explaining how she came to leave Japan to have surgery for a thyroid tumor.
In May 2022 came Goodbye Japan… (for now), and with it a move to England.
Her August 2023 video WE MOVED TO TOKYO! was the first vlog from her new home in Tokyo.
A video she posted in May 2025, in which she clears out an abandoned house with its belongings still inside, had more than 430,000 views as of October 30, 2026.
Its description notes that in Japan, “often when you purchase an old property like this it will be sold as-is with lots of belongings inside”. It is a very Sharla way of looking at everyday life.
Of the 20 videos from January 2025 through October 18, 2026, four have the name of Chris Broad's channel, Abroad in Japan, in their titles.
In March 2023, she also posted a Q&A video answering questions about the relationship between the two of them.
Her Stationery Shop Neko Neko Post and a Place to Stay in Tokyo
Away from her videos, Sharla also has a shop.
According to Neko Neko Post's About page, the shop was started by two people: Sharla and Ushka, who runs it with her.
The two describe themselves as “stationery-loving cat moms” who send Japanese stationery to fellow stationery lovers around the world. “All orders are hand packed by the two of us”, the page adds.
In October 2025, she announced a pop-up shop in Hibiya, Tokyo, in a video description, and the following month she posted a video titled We Opened a Shop in Tokyo!
The links section of her channel page also lists one more link: a page for a place to stay in Tokyo, under the label “My Tokyo AirBnb”.
So she isn't just filming Japan; she has gone into business there, too.
Why I Left Youtube After Half a Year, and Where Things Stand Now
After November 16, 2025, the main channel went about half a year (just over 181 days) without a new video.
The video she came back with, on May 17, 2026 (JST), was titled Why I Left Youtube.
The description's text is a single line, “Why I've been gone so long!!!” We have not checked what the video says.
Still, the uploads continued after that: from the May 17 video through October 18, six videos went up in all.
As of October 30, 2026, when we checked, the newest was the October 18 video about seeing a ghost at an old pub in England.
In the September 2021 issue of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan (FCCJ) magazine, Number 1 Shimbun, Sharla said, “When I left Canada the only things anyone knew about Japan were sushi, samurai, and anime.”
She also said she “just wanted to show everyone the small things that make Japan so great”, things such as “the amazing train system, the vending machines, the ridiculous assortment of snacks available”.
The pace has slowed, but that eye for small things may well still be there in her videos today.
