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Japan by Food is an English-language YouTube channel that introduces Japan's chefs and craftspeople, and the back streets worth eating your way through.
The byFood in the channel's name is also the name of a site where travelers visiting Japan book food experiences.
You may well be wondering who is actually behind it.
So we looked into the company that runs it, how the site came about and what is in the more than 600 videos the channel had as of October 2026.
The figures are ones we measured through YouTube's API on October 31, 2026.
Japan by Food: The Profile
The channel description on YouTube reads: “ByFood makes videos that spotlight Japanese chefs and craftspeople, seasonal food trends, and local Japanese culture (with a few fun food challenges thrown into the mix)!”
That aside at the end makes for a pretty relaxed introduction.
The channel opened on September 3, 2017, and its country setting is Japan. As of October 31, 2026, it had 257,000 subscribers, about 30.89 million total views and 638 videos.
The channel's links list byfood.com along with Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Which Company Runs It?
The short answer: it is run by Tablecross Inc. of Tokyo.
The Company Information page on byFood lists the company name as Tablecross Inc., the date of establishment as June 25, 2014, and the management as Kaoru Joho (CEO) and Serkan Toso (COO).
The address it gives is WeWork Link Square Shinjuku, 16th floor, in Sendagaya in Tokyo's Shibuya ward. A Tokyo Government travel agency registration number appears on the same page.
We took the Corporate Number shown on that page to Japan's National Tax Agency's Corporate Number Publication Site (in Japanese), a government lookup for registered companies. The name came back as 株式会社テーブルクロス, and the address also matched the WeWork at Link Square Shinjuku.
The record's change history shows the registered head office moving through Yotsuya and Tomihisacho in Shinjuku ward, then Ginza in Chuo ward, before reaching its present location in July 2023.
The site's footer also carries the name “Tablecross Inc.” and the words “Made in Japan,” so it seems fair to call this a channel from a Japanese company broadcasting in English from Japan.
A Booking Site That Began as “Tokyo by Food”
According to byFood's About Us page, it started in January 2018 as “Tokyo by Food,” a booking platform for food experiences in Tokyo.
It was started by Toso, now the COO, who built in a donation system, “pledging to give 10 school lunches to children in Cambodia for each person who booked a food experience.”
The same page says that in April 2018, One Young World chose this effort as “one of the world’s top social initiatives.”
Around the same time, the page says, Joho of Tablecross was developing a restaurant reservation app that donated school lunch meals to children in developing countries.
The two businesses rested on a similar idea, and in the page's words, Joho and Toso “decided to merge.” The launch as byFood came in July 2019.
Today byFood handles bookings for cooking classes and food tours, restaurant reservations you can make without using Japanese, and orders for gourmet products from local businesses.
The donations continue. “For every booking, we donate 10 meals” is the wording in the description of a video from October 2026.
When this site counted on October 31, 2026, that exact line appeared in the descriptions of 120 of the 638 public videos. So the videos seem to double as a way into the booking site.
2019: Visiting a Sushi Chef's Restaurant
The oldest video anyone can watch today came out on April 17, 2019, and introduces three historic wagashi (traditional Japanese sweets) shops in Tokyo.
No public video falls between the channel's opening in 2017 and that date.
In July of the same year came an episode visiting Gento Imai (今井彦人), the third-generation sushi chef at Imayoshi (今よし), a sushi restaurant in Otemachi.
According to the video description, Imai is a chef who keeps up with the need for Halal, vegetarian and vegan sushi while “staying true to his family’s traditional sushi making techniques.”
In this episode, the description says, he serves brown rice sushi and, toward the end of the meal, brings out his Edo kiriko sake cups.
Doing the eating is Shizuka Anderson, introduced in the description as a “byFood host.” Going by the titles, many videos from this period visit craftspeople and shops.
A Salaryman's Night and Japanese Table Manners
The most-viewed video is “A Night as a Salaryman in Tokyo!” from October 16, 2023, with more than 1.08 million views as of October 31, 2026.
According to the description, Shizuka explores Yurakucho guided by “a real Japanese salaryman” and joins an after-work “nomikai,” or drinking party.
At the top of the description is a link to book a tour of Shinbashi with this same guide.
The third most-viewed is a video explaining Japanese table manners, published in August 2023, with about 530,000 views as of October 31, 2026.
What people in Japan take for granted every day may be among the things you most want to know before a trip.
In 2026: New Videos on Mondays at 10 a.m. Japan Time
Counted by year, uploads grew sharply: 73 in 2021, then 144 in 2024.
Of those 144, 77 were short videos of three minutes or less, up from 19 the year before, so 2024 looks like the year the channel stepped up its short videos in earnest.
From January 1 through October 26, 2026, the channel published 137 videos, 44 of them longer than three minutes. Of those 44, 43 went up on a Monday in the 10 a.m. hour, Japan time.
From October 27, 2025, through October 26, 2026, a new video longer than three minutes came out in the Monday 10 a.m. hour for 53 weeks in a row.
A new series, Hidden Bites, began on July 6, 2026. The video description presents it as a series “where we explore hidden food gems in different neighborhoods with a local expert.”
The first episode, its description says, heads to Hatagaya, about five minutes from Shinjuku, where a ramen expert leads the way to three stops, including a ramen shop. As of October 31, 2026, it had more than 830,000 views, making it the second most-viewed video.
From the July 27 episode on, descriptions also carry the name Itadakimasu, a series where “we cook and share classic Japanese dishes with locals in their home kitchens.”
The October 19 episode, going by its description, makes an autumn Mont Blanc cake. Among videos longer than three minutes from July 6 through October 26, 2026, Hidden Bites is named in 5 descriptions and Itadakimasu in 4.
The descriptions of the episodes we checked carried links to book tours and classes with the guides and teachers.
You can meet the people from the videos on your own trip, and to us that seems very much like byFood.
