Abroad in Japan's Chris Broad: Yamagata English Teacher Turned Author
This article is also available in Japanese: Read the Japanese version
There's a YouTube channel that introduces, in English, the little surprises of Japan's regions and everyday life.
It's called Abroad in Japan.
It was created by Chris Broad, who is British.
Since the videos are mainly in English and made for viewers outside Japan, some people living in Japan may know him by name only.
In this article, we sum up Chris's path and where the channel stands now, within what we could confirm by opening the official site, the publisher's official pages and the official YouTube channel ourselves.
Subscriber counts and other figures are the values we measured at about 9:20 p.m. JST on October 29, 2026.
Chris Broad Started It in 2012
Abroad in Japan's official site explains how the channel came about.
It says the channel was created in 2012 by Chris Broad, who moved to Japan to work as an English teacher.
According to the site, he wanted to share his life in Japan with the world, so he put “his dying hobby of filmmaking” to good use once more and began turning “his travels and encounters” into videos.
The official site introduces Chris as a “sarcastic British ex-pat.”
Billing yourself that way on your own official site is a little funny.
As for where he's from, the YouTube channel's description reads, “The happiest British Guy making videos in Japan.” The publisher, Penguin, calls him a “British filmmaker.”
The sources we checked that describe him all call him British.
How Old Is Chris Broad? He Was 22 in August 2012
Chris's date of birth did not appear in the sources we checked.
The clue is an extract from his book that Penguin has posted online (dated August 15, 2023).
Penguin's introduction to it describes Chris “arriving in rural Japan aged 22 for his first teaching placement.”
The text of the extract opens with a single line: “August, 2012.”
If he was 22 in August 2012, he would be 36 or 37 as of October 29, 2026.
That figure is our own back-calculation from the statement that he was 22 in August 2012, not from a date of birth.
His birthday could shift it by a year, so we'll leave it as a range: around 36 to 37.
Life in Japan Began with a Teaching Post in Yamagata
The text of the extract describes the three-day induction in Tokyo coming to an end, his colleagues scattering to places such as Osaka and Kobe, and Chris flying from Haneda airport to Yamagata.
According to the extract, he made the trip to Yamagata with “just one other JET colleague.”
There's also a scene where he keeps returning to a line written by his JET coordinator in Yamagata: “Congratulations, Chris, you've won the Japan location lottery.”
Penguin's book description says he landed in “a rural village in northern Japan” with “no knowledge of the language and zero teaching experience.”
The description frames this as a worry of his own, asking: “was he about to be the most quickly fired English teacher in Japan's history?”
The official YouTube channel was created in April 2012.
That lines up with the official site's statement that it was “created in 2012.”
The channel's creation date comes a little before the August 2012 posting to Yamagata described in the extract.
The Official YouTube Channel at a Glance
The official YouTube channel is named Abroad in Japan, and its handle is @AbroadinJapan.
Its channel ID is UCHL9bfHTxCMi-7vfxQ-AYtg.
The channel linked from the official site's About page has this same ID.
As of October 29, 2026, the official channel had 3.29 million subscribers and 340 public videos.
Total views at the same point were just over 615.46 million.
The latest upload went live at about 11:51 p.m. JST on October 26, 2026, and four videos had been posted in the most recent 90 days.
There can be gaps between uploads, but the channel is still being updated.
The subscriber count is the value YouTube returns, rounded to three significant figures.
The numbers change daily, so don't be surprised if you see something different on the day you look.
Two Books from Penguin
Chris is also an author.
The first book is Abroad in Japan, which shares its name with the channel.
Penguin's page shows the ebook's publication date as August 3, 2023, and its length as 320 pages.
According to the book description, it covers his 10 years living in Japan and all 47 prefectures.
The extract page mentioned earlier introduces it as the “no. 1 Sunday Times bestseller.”
That is best read as the publisher's own description.
The second book is Journey Across Japan.
Penguin's page gives the hardcover's publication date as September 24, 2026, and its length as 480 pages.
Penguin describes it as a book in which Chris, wanting to show that there's “so much more to Japan than Tokyo and Kyoto,” visited the 47 prefectures himself and draws on that experience to show what each region has to offer.
Penguin's author bio also mentions “documentaries on the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.”
So it seems fair to say the channel has taken on heavy subjects as well as fun videos about travel and food.
Three Recent Videos
On October 26, 2026, the channel published I Survived Britain's Cheapest Sleeper Train | Ft. @CDawgVA.
Going by the title, the setting is a sleeper train in Britain rather than Japan, and CDawgVA's name is in the title too.
On October 2 came a video whose title is about cycling across Japan: I Cycled 2,000km Across Japan (It Almost Broke Me).
On September 19 came Inside the Japanese Town Stuck Living in the 1980s.
The title suggests a visit to a Japanese town where time seems to have stopped in the 1980s.
We confirmed on October 29, 2026, that all three are owned by a channel with the same ID as the official channel and that they can be embedded.
YouTube settings can change, so if a video won't open, try searching for its title in the official channel's video list.
Real Name and Marriage: What We Could Not Confirm
The name Chris Broad appears in the same form on the official site and as the author name on both books.
However, within what we checked, we found no source saying whether this is his real name.
As for marriage or relationships, there was nothing on the five pages in total that we checked across the official site, YouTube and Penguin.
Search engines suggest all sorts of terms, but we're not writing about what we could not confirm.
In Short
Abroad in Japan is an English-language YouTube channel created in 2012 by Chris Broad, who is British.
The extract from his first book also describes him coming to Japan at 22 as an English teacher in Yamagata.
As of October 29, 2026, the channel had 3.29 million subscribers and 340 public videos.
His second book, a guide to the 47 prefectures, also appears on Penguin's page with a publication date of September 24, 2026.
A good place to start is any video whose title catches your eye; that should give you a feel for how Chris talks.
