That Japanese Man Yuta: From Street Interviews to a Japanese Course

This article is also available in Japanese: Read the Japanese version

On weekends, he heads out to Shibuya with a camera and a microphone and puts questions to people passing by.

That, in essence, is how a 2016 article in The Japan Times opens its picture of That Japanese Man Yuta at work.

That Japanese Man Yuta is a YouTube channel where Yuta, who is Japanese, talks in English about Japanese culture and the Japanese language. In the channel description, he introduces himself as “One of the first English-speaking Japanese YouTubers.”

In this article, we trace Yuta's path through his own website and videos and through articles in English-language media.

What Kind of Channel Is It?

The channel was created in September 2014. The oldest video you can still watch is “Obama in Japanese Accent (2008 Victory Speech),” posted on October 12 of the same year.

When we checked on November 12, 2026, the channel had about 1.31 million subscribers, about 194.23 million total views, and 999 videos. The channel's country is set to Japan.

The description also says, “I talk about Japanese culture, language, and anime.” All of it, in English.

The most-watched video is “How English Sounds to Japanese People,” from February 2022, with about 6.94 million views as of November 12, 2026.

In second place is “Do 'Foreigners' in Tokyo Speak Japanese? (Social Experiment),” from February 2016, with about 5.74 million views as of November 12, 2026. So both of the top two videos are about language.

What Name Does He Go By, and How Old Is He?

The channel description says “You can learn more about me here” and links to his website. The “About Me” page on his website is titled “About Me - That Japanese Man Yuta.”

It opens with the sentence “Yuta Aoki is a Japanese author, blogger and YouTuber.” In other words, Yuta works as an author, blogger and YouTuber under the name Yuta Aoki. We could not find how his name is written in Japanese (kanji) in our research.

His “About Me” page does not mention his age. In June 2016, The Japan Times described Yuta as “The 32-year-old,” meaning he was 32 at the time.

A Homestay at 13, and Teaching Himself English

According to “My brief life story” on his website, Yuta grew up in Hiroshima. At 13, he went to the US on a one-month homestay. Looking back, though, he writes that at the time “I didn’t speak any English.”

He was not chosen for his high school's study abroad program, and he says the disappointment is what led him to start learning English on his own. His method was reading books in English.

At 17, he spent two months traveling alone through South India. It was his first solo trip.

At university, he spent a year in Lyon, France, studying philosophy and literature. On the same page, he writes, “France made me realise I would thrive in a multicultural environment.”

His site says he has been to more than 30 countries. Having learned French on top of English, he seems to be drawing on that background in the language content he makes today.

Street Interviews in Shibuya and Akihabara

Most of the English-language media articles we read for this piece focused on his street interviews with Japanese people.

According to The Japan Times, almost every weekend he took his camera to Shibuya and asked people questions like “Is ‘gaijin’ an offensive term?” and “What do you think of tattoos?” On a good day, the paper reported, “1 in every 10 people will stop to chat.” He then “edits things down into a snappy video package.”

He posted a video on the same theme in August 2015.

In the same article, Yuta says his goal is to present English-speaking people with an even-keel view of Japan. He also tells the paper, “I think my videos help to balance out what people imagine Japan to be like.”

In September 2016, Otaku USA Magazine covered an episode in which he went around Akihabara asking people “what anime do you like?” Akihabara episodes followed in 2019 and 2021 as well.

In the US, the Center for Applied Second Language Studies (CASLS) at the University of Oregon also introduced it in December 2018, as a channel with videos “that Japanese learners can watch.” Unscripted Japanese straight from the street may well have proved useful as learning material, too.

Pushing Back on “Japanese people are so nice”

In January 2018, he released a video giving his opinion on how the popular American YouTuber Logan Paul had behaved in Japan.

SoraNews24, which reported on the video, described Yuta as “One of the country’s most well-known English-speaking Japanese vloggers.”

What the article singled out as “one of the most frank and insightful statements in his entire video” was his objection to people saying “Japanese people are so nice.” In Yuta's words, “Just because somebody doesn’t yell at you and tell you to get lost, it doesn’t mean they like you.”

Back then, there may not have been many people on the Japanese side who could push back like that in English. The video has about 2.77 million views (as of November 12, 2026).

A Book on Intercultural Dating, and His Japanese Course Today

According to his website, Yuta decided to write a book in 2013, while riding the Narita Express airport train on his way to a New Year holiday trip. The theme he chose was intercultural dating in Japan.

The book is titled There's Something I Want to Tell You, and looking back on writing it, he recalls, “My favourite part was interviewing people.” His video descriptions also point viewers to the book.

His recent videos focus mainly on explaining how to learn Japanese. His 2026 uploads include “How to Use って” and “How to Speak Japanese Naturally with Contractions.”

The page for his own Japanese course, “Zero to Natural,” says it teaches “natural, everyday Japanese that the current generation actually speaks” rather than textbook Japanese.

When we counted the videos still public on November 12, 2026, there were 127 from 2024 and 290 from 2025, a sharp rise in output. In both years, most of them are short videos of one minute or less.

On October 15, 2026, he released an easy Japanese song, “見て - Watch.”

You could say that the man who once carried the voices of people on Japan's streets to English-speaking audiences is now bringing them the Japanese language itself.