This article is also available in Japanese: Read the Japanese version
Ask Japanese is a channel that has been asking people questions on Tokyo street corners and bringing their answers to the world in English.
The people answering are passers-by, and the topics range widely, from love and romance to how people see foreigners to food.
Plenty of people may know the channel's name, but who actually makes it is probably not that widely known.
So we went looking for clues to who runs it, looked into CathyCat, the channel's reporter since 2015, and broke down its more than 1,900 videos.
The figures are values we measured with the YouTube API on October 30, 2026.
Ask Japanese at a Glance
The channel's YouTube description calls it “Street interviews of Japanese people” on subjects such as Japan, Japanese culture, foreigners living in Japan, anime and manga, and tourism.
The channel was created on April 11, 2014, Japan time. Its country setting is Japan, and as of October 30, 2026, it had 587,000 subscribers.
As of that date, it had about 142.84 million total views and 1,965 videos. Of those, 59 were members-only, so the breakdowns below cover the 1,906 videos that anyone can watch.
As of that date, the audio language setting was English on 1,849 of them. Video descriptions up to 2022 said, “Our reporter and YouTuber Cathy Cat interviews people in Japanese, English and sometimes German!”
Who Runs It? The “Business Partnership” Note on WAO's Page
Follow the channel's contact details as of October 30, 2026, and they lead to WAO AGENCY. Both the contact form in the channel's description and the WAO AGENCY entry in the channel's links point there.
WAO AGENCY is the contact point that introduces the talent and YouTube channels of WAO Corporation (in Japanese). Founded in 1976, the company is also known in Japan for its Nokai Center cram schools.
The company's business page lists, among its entertainment businesses, a YouTube business that sends Japanese culture to audiences outside Japan (in Japanese; our translation).
The ties go back a long way. The official WAO-RYU! TV site, as saved in November 2016, lists Ask Japanese and names WAO Corporation as the site's operating company (the English on the same link reads “Mother company WAO CORPORATION official site”).
Yet on WAO AGENCY's page (in Japanese) as of October 30, 2026, Ask Japanese carries the note “business partnership” (業務提携 in the original; our translation).
We could not confirm who the partner is, or when the partnership began. On the other hand, as of October 30, 2026, 133 videos carry the line “Produced by WAO AGENCY” in their descriptions.
Most of them are from 2017 and 2018, and the most recent was published in April 2025. Even so, as of October 30, 2026, nothing in the channel's description identifies an operator.
So our answer is this: the channel is strongly tied to WAO, but we cannot state outright that it is run in-house by WAO. We could not confirm the personal name of anyone who plans the videos, either.
It Started with a Canned-Coffee Tasting
The oldest video, published on April 11, 2014, was a project trying 70 kinds of canned coffee in one go. It was not a street interview.
Its description includes the line “A WAORYU production.” That year, the channel seems to have tried all sorts of things, from origami tutorials to night drives through Tokyo.
The first video with “Ask Japanese” in its title came on August 11, 2014, and asked people about manga and anime.
Its description makes for a fun read: “We interview Japanese people in the street to bring you fresh and unbiased (while unscientific) information from Japan from the very mouth of anyone who accepts to answer our questions.”
Note the “(while unscientific)” slipped in there. Presumably the channel was making clear that these are voices heard on the spot, not statistics.
Who Is Reporter CathyCat?
The face of the channel is CathyCat. Her name first appears in a video description on October 17, 2015, and the next month a description calls her “Ask Japanese Reporter Cathy Cat.”
The channel's anniversary announcement says, “She has interviewed thousands of people on the streets of Tokyo since 2015,” and gives her title as the “Flashy Fashion Reporter.”
On July 26, 2025, there was also a stream celebrating her 10 years as a “street reporter.” According to its description, it looks back at “some of the most iconic videos and scenes.”
The profile from her agency (in Japanese) introduces her as a native of Munich, Germany, and a trilingual speaker of Japanese, English and German.
According to her official site, she earned a master's in Drama in Education at the University of Chester in the UK and a master's in Science Fiction studies at Liverpool University. The Japanese version of her bio (in Japanese; our translation) adds that she first took a bachelor's degree in English literature at Chester.
After that, the Japanese bio says, she moved her base to Japan and started out as a German YouTuber introducing Harajuku fashion. A master's in Science Fiction studies may come as a bit of a surprise.
Her personal channel was created in August 2011, Japan time, so it is older than Ask Japanese. As of October 30, 2026, it had 81,400 subscribers and 852 videos.
She also does plenty of TV work. Her official site, which we checked on October 30, 2026, describes her as currently “the joint host” of Japan Railway Journal on NHK World.
Beyond the street, some videos have CathyCat herself as the one talking. A 2021 video on apologizing is one: its description asks, “Why do Japanese people apologize so much?” and says CathyCat “will talk about how Japanese people apologise.”
What Does the Channel Ask About?
We counted the words in the video titles. The largest group is about foreigners: as of October 30, 2026, 391 of the 1,906 titles contained “foreign.”
As of that date, 204 titles contained words about dating or marriage, 89 about anime, manga or cosplay, and 82 about food.
These are machine counts of words, so please treat them as a rough guide. Even so, they show a channel asking about the things people outside Japan want to know.
One example is the question of what people envy about foreigners. As of October 30, 2026, 35 videos had “envy” in their titles, counting ones about men and women envying each other and ones with the roles reversed.
A 2017 video on this theme had about 4.1 million views as of October 30, 2026, and it also sits at the top of the channel's home page. It seems to have become a standard question.
It works the other way, too: some videos ask foreigners who have come to Japan what surprised them in Japan. A November 2016 video had about 1.76 million views as of that date, so the channel is not only talking to Japanese people.
WAO's description of the channel (in Japanese; our translation) likewise says it interviews Japanese people and foreigners visiting Japan, and that it sometimes tries things out in regional Japan.
The Vertical Videos That Drove Views, and the Friday Schedule of 2026
Output peaked at 254 videos in 2016 and 255 in 2018, a pace of nearly five a week.
In views, 2023 stands out. As of October 30, 2026, the videos published that year had a combined 40.98 million views, nearly 30 percent of the channel's total.
What pushed them up were vertical videos 60 seconds or shorter. As of that date, 65 such videos from 2023 had 33.79 million views between them, and a single 14-second one with a romance tag accounted for 25.3 million.
Yet after the 112 videos of January to March 2024, not one video 60 seconds or shorter had been published as of October 30, 2026. We found no explanation of why they stopped.
As of October 2026, the channel had settled into one video a week. Of the 124 videos from April 2024 through October 30, 2026, 105 were published on Fridays, Japan time. In all, the channel published 51 videos in 2025 and 41 in 2026 through October 30.
The latest video when we measured was published on October 30, 2026. According to its description, it features cosplayers interviewed at Magnificon, an event in Poland.
According to her official site, CathyCat appeared as an official guest at Magnificon 2026. Whether the video was filmed on the same occasion is not stated.
So the questions that began on street corners had, by 2026, made their way to event venues outside Japan. For another English-language channel about Japan, take a look at our Abroad in Japan article, too.
