“I do not love being famous”: Why PewDiePie Stays in Japan
This article is also available in Japanese: Read the Japanese version
Who is the most famous individual on all of YouTube? For a long time, the answer has been PewDiePie, from Sweden. The man who reached the top with gaming videos appears to still be living in Japan as of October 2026.
Why Japan? Has he already gone home, as Japanese search suggestions hint? What is he doing now? Plenty of you are probably wondering.
So we went through the descriptions and captions of his own videos, along with reporting from Japan and abroad. Numbers are as of October 31, 2026, measured by this site with the YouTube API.
We checked what the videos say through their captions. His quotes come from the English captions, most of them auto-generated. Apart from adding punctuation and capitalization, removing filler sounds and caption tags, and putting our own words in [square brackets], we did not change the words.
Who Is PewDiePie? Real Name and Age
As of October 31, 2026, the channel had 109 million subscribers, about 29.56 billion total views, and 4,668 videos.
His real name is Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, which is also how an article from the Japanese outlet KAI-YOU introduces him. Japanese outlets seem to write the surname a few different ways in katakana. Wikipedia lists his birth date as October 24, 1989, and his birthplace as Gothenburg, Sweden. That would make him 37 as of October 31, 2026, though we could not confirm the birth date from another source.
The channel was created on April 29, 2010, and the oldest video still public is a Minecraft Let's Play from October 3 of that year. In August 2019, it became the first channel run by an individual to pass 100 million subscribers, according to the Japanese tech site GIGAZINE. His most-viewed video is the 2018 song video “bitch lasagna,” at about 328.88 million views as of October 31, 2026.
Why Japan? Why the Move Took More Than Four Years
He declared he was heading to Japan in the fall of 2019. According to an article on the Japanese YouTube-news site Yutura, several visits had deepened his interest in the country.
But getting in took a long time. In a December 2021 update video, he told viewers, “you may have noticed I am not in Japan.” By then, he said, he had been trying to move there “for quite a while, four years.” “It's 700 emails,” he said of the back-and-forth over the paperwork. He had a company and a house in Japan, he explained, but the border was closed and he could not get in.
The move finally came in 2022. His May 10, 2022 (JST) video “It finally happened!” covers the whole journey, from getting the visas to taking his dogs to Japan.
So why Japan? In a video the month after the move, he dodged the question: “It's complicated. I just like it here, okay?”
A clearer answer comes a year later, in his review video.
What he points to there is “feeling like I don't get recognized.”
A September 2026 video goes further. “I do not love being famous. I actually kind of hate it,” he says, adding, “in Japan, I love it so much because I can just sort of do whatever here.”
For a man whose face is known around the world, a country where he could walk around unnoticed was probably something special.
Then again, in that same review video he says “a lot of the reasons I enjoy Japan is very specific to me,” and he doesn't pitch it as an easy place for everyone: “not everyone's gonna enjoy living here.”
Does He Still Live in Japan? The “Gone Home” Question in Japanese Searches
The short answer: as of October 2026, it looks safe to say he still lives in Japan. That's because in his October 23 video he says, “I lived here way too long to not speak the language better,” and we take “here” to mean Japan. The line comes as he owns up to being embarrassed that his Japanese hasn't improved.
We found two stories that could pass for a return home, the idea that comes up in Japanese searches.
The first is the March 2025 video “We finally decided.” He reveals he had long been torn over “staying in Japan or moving back to Europe,” then reports: “we finally decided and we decided that we're staying.” The following month, he announced a land purchase in Japan. The plan was to build a house, but we could not confirm whether it has been finished.
The second is a trip home to Europe in summer 2026. The video covers 6 weeks in Sweden, Switzerland, and Italy and runs all the way through to the return to Japan.
We can't say which of these, if either, the Japanese search suggestion 帰国 (“returning home”) refers to. But in his own videos and the press coverage we looked at, we found no report that he has moved back.
As for where he lives, The Japan Times wrote in 2022 that he had “relocated to an undisclosed area near Tokyo.” Since this touches on his family's daily life, we won't go into any more detail than that.
Who Is His Wife? A Little About His Family
His wife is Marzia Bisognin, who grew up in Italy. They married on August 19, 2019, and he posted footage of the ceremony in a video.
A September 2026 video includes a moment marking the couple's milestone: “it's me and Marzia's 15-year anniversary.” In an October video, he put the search suggestion “Is PewDiePie still dating Marzia?” to Marzia herself. “Are we still dating?” he asked, then reported, “She says yes.” That's this couple all over.
The September 2026 video also mentions that Marzia has opened preorders for a cookbook. It apparently features Swedish and Italian recipes.
In February 2023, he announced that Marzia was pregnant. As of the September 2026 video, they appear to have one child.
The End of the Family Vlog, and What “Retirement” Really Means
The family vlog, which showed the couple's daily life, reached its end on September 22, 2026, with “Thank you and Goodbye.”
He had announced the ending back in May: “we have decided that we are going to end the vlogs in September.” The reason he gave was their child. He said: “If [the child] wants to be part of [it], that should be [their] choice later.” We imagine he wanted to leave the question of being filmed up to the child.
This was the end of the family vlog, though, not the end of the channel. He has kept posting since, with videos on October 1 and October 23.
So what about “retirement”? This is where his answer gets fun.
In this video, where he answers search suggestions about himself, he takes on “Is PewDiePie retired?” and at first replies, “Yes. Yes, I am.” Later in the same video, though, he adds: “So, I just wanted to do YouTube for fun and that's why I say I'm retired even though I'm not.”
We take this to mean he has quit the addiction-like way of working he kept up for 15 years. The whole video is loose and relaxed: a search suggestion about his height gets “Dude, I am not 175.”
The word “retired” isn't new for him. In a November 2020 Q&A video, he also said, “I've already retired. I decided a couple months ago,” explaining that what he had decided was to slow his pace.
Past Controversies, and How He Responded
Any account of PewDiePie has to deal with a few controversies.
In February 2017, The Wall Street Journal pointed to nine videos containing anti-Semitic jokes and similar material, and Disney ended its relationship with him. NPR reported how it unfolded. On Tumblr, he wrote to “anyone unsure on my standpoint regarding hate-based groups: No, I don't support these people in any way.” An official at an anti-discrimination organization, however, told the Journal the apologies were insufficient, according to NPR.
In September of that same year, he used a racial slur during a stream. The fallout included a game developer moving to have videos featuring its game taken down. In an apology video, he acknowledged that “there are no excuses for it,” a statement Game Informer also reported.
In March 2019, the gunman in the New Zealand mosque shooting spoke his name. PewDiePie reacted in strong terms: according to NME, he said, “I feel absolutely sickened having my name uttered by this person.”
In September of that same year, according to his own video, he drew criticism over the recipient of a donation marking 100 million subscribers, and changed it: “I said I'm gonna still donate just to another charity.”
AI and Manga Now? How His Videos Have Changed
Over the past few years, his videos have gone beyond gaming. In October 2024, he shared a record of drawing every day for 365 days. In an April 2025 video, he talked about installing Linux on his PC, prefacing it with “I am not a tech guy.”
By 2026, that had led all the way to Odysseus, his self-hosted AI workspace, and the AI model Ajax built for it. The story was picked up by the tech site Interesting Engineering. Even so, as of October 23 he says “the AI model Ajax that I made is not finished yet.”
In June 2026, he also put out a video of himself drawing his own manga. His verdict on being a mangaka (a professional manga artist): “I do feel like I am never gonna be a mangaka because this is such hard work, man.” Still, he seemed to enjoy drawing it. Maybe it's the kind of challenge you take on because you live in Japan.
And his Japanese? In an October video, he took on “Is PewDiePie fluent in Japanese?” and answered candidly: “No, no I'm not and I'm actually really embarrassed about that.” He also said, “I am working on it,” so we can't help looking forward to the next video.
