This article is also available in Japanese: Read the Japanese version
Someone is out driving Japan's mountain passes and circuits and telling the rest of the world about it in English, from inside Japan. He's Alexi Smith of the YouTube channel noriyaro.
He's well known among car fans outside Japan, but introductions written in Japanese are hard to find. So we went through his video descriptions and captions, a show he appeared on and articles in English-language car media. The numbers here are as of October 31, 2026, measured by this site through the YouTube API. We checked what's in the videos through their captions, and quotes from videos come from the English captions.
Who Is noriyaro? His Name and Where He's From
As of October 31, 2026, the channel had 742,000 subscribers, about 106.49 million total views and 292 videos. “Videos for the Japan car culture website Noriyaro.com” is how the channel's YouTube description puts it. When we opened that site on October 31, though, no articles appeared. YouTube seems to be the center of things now.
“Alexi Smith” is the display name on his X account. The profile there is one line: “Doing all the car stuff in Japan.” We did not check it against any official records, but it is the name he goes by.
As for where he's from, he said on the show Trash Taste that it's Sydney, Australia. We found no date of birth. But in a talk episode published in 2025, he says “So I was 24” about a shoot from around 2004. Working back from that, our estimate is that he was born around 1980.
Told to “go live there”: The Road to His 2008 Move
The fullest account comes from episode 27 of Trash Taste, where he appeared in December 2020. Over about two hours, he answered the hosts' questions and walked through his career.
University didn't suit him, he said on the show. He started learning hand-drawn animation on paper: “The actual like physical with pieces of paper.” From there he moved on to 3D animation and made it his job. He stayed with it for about five or six years, he said. While he worked, he kept Japanese lessons playing through his headphones and learned by ear.
Eventually, worn out by the work, he came to Japan as a tourist. On the show, he put that at around 2005. In the 2025 talk episode, though, he says “I'd already been to Japan once” by the time of the 2004 shoot. His own accounts differ a little, so the mid-2000s is probably the safest way to put it.
The turning point was a circuit in Fukushima, which he traveled to alone by train. He asked an acquaintance who worked at a magazine how to get there and ended up being asked to write an article too. He shot it, he said, on his mother's little digital camera with a 32 MB memory card. About a month after that article, he was offered a magazine job. Already “sick of doing 3D,” as he put it, he made the switch.
From then on, he came to Japan on vacation, took photos and wrote articles to sell. Looking back in a 2023 video, he says he was “getting paid to go on holiday” back then.
He talked about Japan so much, he said, that his car friends told him, in blunter words than these, to shut up and “go live there” already. So he chose an 18-month working holiday visa. The plan seems to have been to quit everything, sell everything, stay a year and a half and, as he put it, “get it out of my system.”
The phrase “before I moved to Japan in 2008” in the captions of the 2023 video gives the year of the move. On the show, he put his visits up to then at six or seven times. The channel was opened on November 28, 2008, so the timing fits too.
From Magazines to YouTube, and One Month in 2011
After the move, he sold his stories to magazines around the world, in English. Around the same time, he started a WordPress blog. The oldest video still public is a run at Bihoku Circuit from March 17, 2009. But there was less and less money in magazines, so he moved over. In his own words: “YouTube pays money, let's do YouTube.”
As his working holiday visa was running out, a friend in Sendai suggested the journalist visa, and with a magazine contract in hand he switched to it.
The big event was the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011. With no fuel to be had, he could not do his car reporting. He says he had “a regular column in a Japanese magazine” and that month he went online with a request: “Hey, everyone, send me a picture of your foreign drift car.” That filled the column, he says. In effect, he got his readers to make the article for him. Not letting the column stop even when he couldn't run a car feels like the instinct of someone who has been a writer for a long time.
His Most-Viewed Video Is a Tofu Delivery
Sort his videos by views and the top one is “Real Initial D!” from December 2016, at 6.51 million views as of October 31, 2026. In it, he rides in a replica of the tofu shop's 86 from Initial D and carries tofu to the top of Mt Haruna.
The numbered “Noriyaro Ep.” series began in May 2015. Episode 2, in which he drifts an AE86 he impulse-bought, had 2.18 million views as of October 31, 2026. He admits in the episode, though, that “it is actually an 85” after all.
By our count, 28 video titles include AE86, and 9 include itasha, cars decorated with anime characters. The 2017 video among those had 2.40 million views on the same date. And “I entered Japan's biggest ITASHA show” is a video he put out as recently as February 2026. Just lining up the titles shows how many of his videos have him stepping in among Japan's car fans.
Some of his titles are in Japanese: 17 of the 292, concentrated between 2011 and 2015. The Japanese subtitles on the tofu video include a line that made us smile a little: まだメイク中。土曜日までお待ちく！ (translated: roughly, “Still being made. Please wait until Saturday!”). The last word is cut short, お待ちく for お待ちください.
His Reputation Outside Japan, and D1GP Commentary
Articles outside Japan were naming him early on. A February 2017 article in The Drive introduced the “renowned YouTube drift channel Noriyaro” to its readers. A January 2019 Jalopnik article wrote, “NoriYaro is still the big name in english-language coverage of Japan, at least on video.” A January 2025 Drifted article says he's “known for providing English commentary for some of Japan's biggest drifting events, such as D1GP.”
On Trash Taste, he described the competition he first saw in Fukushima as “a big competition, which I now do the commentary for,” and that was in 2020. We could not confirm whether he still does it. For more on the show that ran that episode, see our Trash Taste article.
Is He Married? His 2026 So Far
On marriage, “now I'm married with kids” is how he put it on the show in 2020. Beyond that, nothing came up in our research.
The channel's 2026 uploads stood at 12 as of October 31, 2026. The latest is the “1JZ Meeting” video from September 24, which leaves a gap of 37 days as of October 31. But there were two gaps of more than 40 days in spring 2026, and in the captions of that latest video he says “I bought another car” and points to an upcoming video. It doesn't look as if the channel has stopped.
The August 18 video, though, was a slightly sad one. In it he films what he calls “the very, very, very last day” for drifting on the Fuji Speedway short course. He gives the reason as “maintenance and that sort of thing” and says: “I believe by the end of this month, drifting will be completely banned on this track.” He also says “there is a bit of good news coming out of this situation” but leaves that for another video.
There is also a second channel, noriyaro2, with 109,000 subscribers and 86 videos as of October 31, 2026. His Twitch is listed in the channel's links, but we could not confirm how often he streams now. A July 2024 Jalopnik article says he used to live stream cars in Shibuya.
On the Japanese drifting side, there is also our FDJ3 article (in Japanese) about Muneo of the Japanese YouTube channel Tsuriyoka Deshou (釣りよかでしょう。), who entered the competition. Read together, the two may show you the same world from another side.
