This article is also available in Japanese: Read the Japanese version
You may have come across Tokyo Creative, an English-language channel about Japanese food and travel.
So which company actually runs it? Look into it, and the answer turns out to depend on when you ask.
When we checked the official site on October 31, 2026, the company name listed was Redhorse Corporation, and Tokyo Creative was described as its “division.”
In 2018, it was Tokyo Creative Ltd., a company with an address in Shibuya, Tokyo. Below, we follow the records, with their dates, from the days of that company name to the switch to the “division” wording.
The Official Site's Company Name: Redhorse Corporation
As of October 31, 2026, the official site's company page (in Japanese) gives the company name as “Redhorse Corporation” and lists “Tokyo Creative Division” (Tokyo Creative事業部) in the “Business” row (our translation).
Under the division are three lines of business: overseas digital marketing, influencer services for overseas audiences, and strategy and service development for inbound tourism.
Meanwhile, the channel's YouTube description, checked on the same day, says “Tokyo Creative is a media company.” If all you knew was the channel, it would be understandable to assume it was a separate company from Redhorse.
That said, the official site and the channel link to each other, so we were able to confirm that both are run by the same operator.
The Channel's Size (Measured October 31, 2026)
Here are the figures we measured with the YouTube API on October 31, 2026.
The channel had 248,000 subscribers, 44,134,706 total views and 392 videos. It opened on October 11, 2017.
The median view count of its 10 most recent videos was about 12,700. That's about 5% of the subscriber count, which may look modest for a channel this size.
It uploads at an unhurried pace: 14 videos were published from January through September 2026. As of the October 31 measurement, the latest was a video published on September 26.
A May 2, 2026 video features Sembikiya Sohonten, a fruit specialty store. The description says, “We were invited to create videos showcasing their shops!”
It looks like a travel show, but it sits right alongside commissioned work for companies and regions. That, it seems fair to say, is what sets this channel apart.
The Shibuya Years: Odigo
A February 16, 2023 article in Money Gendai, a Kodansha business site (in Japanese), describes the company as founded in 2013.
According to the same article, it was in 2018 that the company began helping convey the appeal of tourist attractions through videos by foreign influencers living in Japan. The channel opened a little before that.
A July 31, 2018 release (in Japanese) on PR TIMES, a Japanese press-release distribution site, gives the company's address at the time as Shibuya, Tokyo, and its representative director as Takahashi (高橋大介). The companies publish their executives' names only in Japanese; the romanizations in this article are ours.
The company was behind Odigo, a travel media site for visitors to Japan, and Odigo47, in which YouTubers living in Japan visited all 47 prefectures and introduced each one.
A Cycling Journey and Videos for Kochi
A cycling project stands out among the company's 2018 work. The Services page of Tokyo Creative's English site says, “Between October and December 2018, Tokyo Creative project managed Journey Across Japan, a two month, 2,000km cycle journey starring Chris Broad.”
Plenty of viewers may remember the series.
In December of that same year, the company announced that its promotional video for the Monobegawa area of Kochi Prefecture (in Japanese) had passed 250,000 views within one month of release.
The project was a collaboration with the Monobegawa DMO Council, and it engaged Life Where I’m From for audiences in Europe, North America and Australia, and MaoMaoTV for Taiwan and Hong Kong. Choosing a different creator for each target region is an interesting touch.
According to the same page, “Since 2018 Tokyo Creative has directly managed Tourism Oita’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.”
In a 2019 Article, the CEO Was Chris Okano
From here, the titles of the people at the top may get a little confusing.
An April 9, 2019 article in Forbes JAPAN (in Japanese) introduced Chris Okano as CEO of Tokyo Creative and a working YouTuber.
Yet the three releases we read from July 2018 through January 2020 (in Japanese) all name Takahashi as representative director. We could not confirm from these sources how the CEO and the representative director were related.
The Forbes article is also worth noting for its business news. It reported that on March 7 the company received about ¥30 million in investment from DeNA and launched an online membership community, “Tokyo Creative LEARN.”
The article's figures, about 4,000 videos and over 1 billion views in total, were for all of the company's influencers at the time. They are not this channel's own numbers, so they need to be read with care.
In January 2020, the company also announced a business partnership with WebTVASIA, saying it had put in place a setup that could handle promotion in Asia as well as Europe, North America and Australia.
A Redhorse Subsidiary from October 2020
The turning point arguably came in the fall of 2020. A November 9, 2020 release (in Japanese) announced that the company had become a subsidiary of Redhorse Corporation as of October 30.
Redhorse's company history page (in Japanese) says Redhorse acquired 69.6% of the issued shares.
That release lists two representative directors, Nakagawa (中川智博) and Onozawa (小野沢隆), and the company is listed at Redhorse's address.
According to the biography in a later release, Nakagawa joined the company in May 2018 and became a representative director in October 2020.
We found no source that explains why the lineup in the representative row changed. A bit of a letdown, perhaps.
The releases kept coming after the company became a subsidiary. A June 17, 2024 release (in Japanese) reported on a lecture Nakagawa gave at Osaka University of Tourism.
It also notes that a video for Fukushima City won an Encouragement Award in the local government category of the Cool Japan Video Contest 2021, and that the company had supported more than 100 local governments and companies.
When the Word “Division” Appeared
So when did the wording change? We went through past copies of the official company page saved by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, in date order (archived copies of the Japanese page).
In the October 9, 2024 copy, the company name is Tokyo Creative Ltd., and the representatives are Nakagawa and Onozawa. Up to this point, the page matches the releases.
The January 14, 2026 copy shows the same company name, but the representative row lists Onozawa alone.
In the May 11, 2026 copy, the company name on the page has changed to Redhorse Corporation, the representative row is gone, and the words “Tokyo Creative Division” appear.
In other words, the official site's wording changed sometime between January 14 and May 11, 2026.
That, however, is as far as the record goes. We could not confirm what became of Tokyo Creative Ltd. as a legal entity, or whether it was a merger or a business transfer.
Tokyo Creative also appears only once in Redhorse's company history, in the single line for October 2020. Nor could we find out why Nakagawa's name disappeared from the page.
Who Leads the Business Now?
No source we could check names the head of the division, either.
The representative directors listed on Redhorse's corporate profile page (in Japanese), as we viewed it on October 31, 2026, are Egashira (江頭哲也) and Yamada (山田健介), but they are the representatives of Redhorse as a whole.
According to the same page, Redhorse was founded in March 1964 and had 426 employees, including part-time staff, as of October 2026. Its businesses include inbound tourism promotion alongside support for regional industries.
A job listing on Redhorse's recruiting page (in Japanese), checked on October 31, 2026, also mentions “its inbound tourism business, ‘Tokyo Creative’” (our translation). So while the official site now uses the word “division” where the company name used to be, Tokyo Creative seems to live on as a brand.
