This article is also available in Japanese: Read the Japanese version
If you heard that a channel centered on walking videos, with no talking and no music, had drawn more than 100 million views in all, you might be a little surprised.
Rambalac is a channel that publishes footage of walks through Japan's towns and mountain roads without doing too much to it.
Asked in a 2021 interview about the questions he gets most, he named “What game is this?” among them.
We trace the rules he films by and how his equipment has changed, using his own descriptions and press coverage. Unless otherwise stated, all numbers were measured on October 30, 2026.
Rambalac's Profile
We'll start with the About page of the YouTube channel.
Its first line reads: “My rambling all over Japan.”
The bio on X is nearly the same line: “Just rambling over Japan.”
The channel's country setting is Japan, and it was created on January 8, 2007.
It stood at 627,000 subscribers, 1,533 videos and about 111.53 million total views.
The About page also says: “I don't use Instagram or Facebook. Anything there has no relation to me.”
So if you come across the same name on those sites, it isn't his.
When Photos Weren't Enough
It seems to have started with photos, not video.
In 2021, in written answers to the U.S. outlet Milwaukee Independent, he looked back: “I bought my first camera, a Panasonic Lumix TZ7, and started shooting photos.”
But he said he always felt that photos “were not enough to capture the visual complexity of some places,” since “a photo can only show a limited space.”
Video wasn't an easy alternative, as he explained: “For video at that time, electronic gimbals were not affordable and steadicams were too big, heavy, and took a lot of time to prepare.”
The oldest video still public is “Gradient Transparency Windows,” from January 2007, which runs 1 minute 41 seconds.
Judging from the title alone, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with walking. “Lumix GH4 quick afterpurchase test - 7,” from April 2014, runs just 12 seconds.
He said as much in the same interview: “Before that I did some camera test videos.”
2016: The First Proper Walk
The turning point was this 37-minute video, published on April 25, 2016, Japan time. Its title ends with “the first proper walk.”
According to the video's description, he walked from the Tama River to Shin-Yurigaoka at a normal pace, also testing the Beholder DS-1 gimbal.
In the interview, he said that until then “the traffic to my videos was almost nothing,” and that then “my YouTube channel got a surprisingly high volume of views and comments in only few days.”
From here on, the videos keep getting longer.
By our count, the median length went from 2.9 minutes in 2015 to 17 minutes in 2016, 56 minutes in 2018 and 77.5 minutes in 2026 through October 30.
We counted 531 videos published before that 2016 walk and 1,002 from it on. Those 1,002 add up to about 1,034 hours.
Some of them aren't walks, but by our math, playing them nonstop would still take 43 days.
Why He Doesn't Talk
The Patreon page gives his reason for starting: “I started filming my walks just for fun and as an additional reason to go outside.”
The same page says: “I don't talk, except when I communicate with people in front of me, I also don't show my face intentionally, I prefer making videos with minimum editing and no sound effects. Somehow these videos got popular, more popular than I expected.”
He gave his reasons for not talking in that same interview. “I didn't like what I saw being produced,” he said, adding, “When people filmed their travel vlogs, it seemed to be all about them.”
He went on: “What can I tell people about a place I do not know much about?”
His reasoning: “I have to google the facts myself. So I felt that a talking video with some Wikipedia reading sounded too silly for me.”
That's a pretty honest answer.
The stock phrases in his video descriptions reflect the same thinking.
By our count, 354 videos from October 2016 on say “Not a vlog,” and 203 videos from November 2023 on say “natural surround sound only.”
“There is no background music and no commentary,” said the 2019 Global Voices piece introducing the channel, picking that out as a defining feature.
That would seem to leave only the sounds of the place itself.
The Most-Watched Video Is a Forest at Night
The most-viewed video is a 45-minute walk through Aokigahara at night, published in April 2018.
It stood at about 7.37 million views, up from 4.24 million at the time of the 2021 interview, so it has clearly kept growing.
Asked in the interview why it was so popular, Rambalac was puzzled: “Why? Not sure.” His guess: “Probably even if anyone filmed there before at night it was in horrible quality and too short.”
According to the video's description, he walked it from a nearby campsite, “on my way to the onsen.”
He also writes: “I wanted to dispel any misconceptions about its eerie reputation.”
It's hard not to laugh at this line: “The scariest thing I encountered that night was... myself, startling deer as I walked.”
The description even includes an apology: “Apologies for the heavy breathing sounds; it was the closest noise source to the mic in the quiet surroundings.” That is probably very much his style.
The No. 2 video, at about 7 million views, is a walk through Tokyo from day into a rainy night. Its description says this one came from a request: “I was asked to walk around Mejiro some time ago.”
Destinations From Viewers
He has walked other routes by request, too.
In the description of a 2019 video from Gujo, in Gifu Prefecture, he wrote: “Funny but most of places I visited I got from viewers, knew nothing about them before.”
The video below, published in 2022, followed the route of Norwegian Wood. “Fan of my videos and Haruki Murakami asked to film a walk along the route from Norwegian Wood novel,” the description says. It starts at Yotsuya Station and runs 2 hours 32 minutes, to Komagome.
His reason for joining Patreon ties into this.
His page there says: “I joined Patreon to make it possible to film walks in remote places of Japan.” He can't go far, he writes, “even to film places people have requested, not without a strong personal reason.”
One fun thing to look for is the chapter list in the description. We counted 233 videos with a “Tea time” or “Teatime” chapter, and 124 with a chapter about a cat.
The description of the latest video as of October 30, 2026, even has a chapter called “No teatime because of ambulance.”
In the interview, he said that what catches his eye is strange vending machines, old houses and unusual cars, which gives you a sense of the walker's tastes.
From the GH4 to the FX3, and a Crashed Drone
The equipment list on the About page shows a Sony FX3 camera, a Sony PZ 1635G lens and a DJI RS4 gimbal, and even gives the settings: 4K 60p.
Going back through the video descriptions, we found the camera was a GH3 at the end of 2012 and a GH4 from 2014, then a GH5 from 2017, before he moved to the FX3 in March 2021.
The gimbal changed too, mainly from the Beholder to the DJI RS2, RS3 and RS4.
Mics are a slightly different story. On October 30, 2026, the channel's About page listed the Sony ECM-M1, but the descriptions of the 71 videos published from September 7, 2025, on all say Audio-Technica AT9946CM.
In August 2023, he also put out a test video comparing the two. By our count, 137 video descriptions after that name the Sony. No reason for the switch in September 2025 is given in the descriptions.
The painful equipment story comes from a December 2024 video. A drone he flew in Hadano, in Kanagawa Prefecture, went down on the way back. “It hit a thin branch and fell from a few meters onto rocks,” the description says, and it was “not repairable.”
The title says “RIP Mavic,” and the description says that in order to film Tohoku, he sought funds on Ko-fi.
A title from March 2025 has the word “flying” again, so aerial filming seems to have continued.
Starting in May 2021, a distance is written after the walking-person emoji. Adding up only the 305 videos that give a number, we get about 1,546 km. Earlier videos and videos with no number are not included.
By our count, 365 videos note a temperature. The coldest is -5°C in Akita, and the hottest is 35°C, in a video published in September 2025.
About One Video a Week, and a Second Channel for Live Streams
Through October 30, 2026, the recent pace was about one video a week. The latest 16 all went up on a Saturday or Sunday, in the 9 p.m. hour JST. There were 79 videos in 2025 and 49 in 2026 through that date.
The second channel is Rambalac Live, with 20,100 subscribers and 184 videos. Its About page says “All streams get recorded in 4K 60p and uploaded” to the main channel.
One example: a Saitama stream began at 3:50 p.m. JST on October 10, 2026, and the description of the main-channel video published on October 24 gives 3:59 p.m. JST on that same day. Judging from those two times, the same walk seems to be shown both as a stream and on the main channel.
In the 2021 interview, he said of streaming that “it seems pointless to film in realtime if I am not talking, or cannot answer anything from viewers in chat directly.”
Even so, in 2026 the live streams have gone on almost every week, through October 25.
As for how many people gather around the channel: Patreon has 215 free members, Ko-fi has 93 supporters and Discord has 2,863 members, all as of October 30, 2026.
That “more popular than I expected” on his Patreon page probably still holds.
Lee Matz, who wrote that Milwaukee Independent piece, walked 1,000 miles indoors on a treadmill over 93 days from December 2020. The videos he watched along the way, he wrote, were mostly Rambalac's.
That is probably another way to use these videos: as something to walk along with.
The lesson Rambalac offered in the interview: “Bad shoes can cause any kind of pain that you would never expect.” As for where he would like to film, he said, “I would like to do a VideoWalk in an abandoned amusement park or old mine, or Gunkanjima.”
