worldofxtra's Stan Fukase: Japanese to English, Drag Name to Tokyo Brand

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

Stan Fukase shows his everyday life in Tokyo in English-language videos. Some of you may have come across him on TikTok or in Shorts. His channel is worldofxtra. As of October 31, 2026, it had 1.08 million subscribers.

Who is he? What does XTRA mean? Is he still doing drag? Plenty of you are probably wondering.

Digging in, we found that what he described in 2026 as his “full-time job” wasn't the videos. It was running his own clothing brand.

So we went through his interviews and his video descriptions. Subscriber and view counts are our own measurements, taken with the YouTube API.

We have not checked the content of the videos themselves; anything we say about a video comes only from its title and description. Quotes from English-language interviews and video descriptions are given in the original English; quotes from Japanese-language sources are our own translations.

Who Is Stan Fukase? Where He Was Born and Raised

His name is written Stan Fukase. In katakana, the Japanese fashion outlet WWDJAPAN writes it スタン・フカセ in its interview with him (article in Japanese), while the Japanese edition of Waseda Weekly writes 深瀬スタン, surname first.

According to WWDJAPAN, he was born in 1998 in Japan and raised in the Philippines.

In the description of a March 2023 video, he writes, “I am half-Japanese half-Filipino.” His father is Filipino and his mother is Japanese, and he says he spent half of his life in the Philippines. The place he visits in the video as where he grew up is Cebu.

He moved to Tokyo in 2017 to attend Waseda University, and is a graduate of its School of International Liberal Studies.

The number of languages he speaks is striking, too. In a 2022 interview, he said that besides English and Japanese he speaks Tagalog and Cebuano, and that he has also studied Chinese and Spanish.

Being gay is the very subject of his channel. In a December 2024 interview with the Tokyo English-language magazine Metropolis, he said that living in Japan, being openly gay, being mixed, and growing up Catholic, among other things, all layer together to make his content “even more enjoyable.”

Why English? Why He Stopped Posting in Japanese

It started on TikTok. He began posting there early in the pandemic, in 2020, “because I had time on my hands, for no particular reason,” he told WWDJAPAN (translated from the Japanese interview). A June 2021 article in The Japan Times also quotes him: “I was never expecting to be famous or anything.”

His first posts were in Japanese. But he has said that the abuse he received, with discriminatory slurs aimed at him for being gay and mixed, was severe. In October 2021, he told Metropolis, “I even got death threats.”

So he switched to posting only in English. As of 2022, he said, he used Japanese only when appearing with his mother, and even then the titles and subtitles were in English.

His audience is mostly overseas, too. By his own account in 2022, the largest share was in the U.S., followed by the Philippines, Brazil, the UK, and Australia, with Japan at around tenth.

Current figures by country are not public, so we could not check them. In the December 2024 interview, he again said that “most of my audience is overseas,” adding that he can walk around his neighborhood in his PJs without anyone asking for pictures.

Still, he went on: “Occasionally, I do get recognized in Japan, but it’s mostly been pleasant experiences in the city centers like Shibuya and Shinjuku.” His own neighborhood, it seems, is a different story.

He told WWDJAPAN that most people posting in English from Japan focus on tourism or traditional culture, while he wants to show his everyday life.

And what he shows is indeed different from ANTON IN JAPAN, which fixes up vacant houses in Tokyo, or Tokyo Cheapo, which shows viewers around the city. He seems to see it this way: few people cover LGBTQ+ life in Japan in English, so that is where viewers' interest gathers.

What Is XTRA? How He Got Into Drag

XTRA is the stage name Stan has used when doing drag. In katakana, WWDJAPAN writes it エクストラ (“extra”).

As of October 31, 2026, the channel description says, “I started this channel originally to showcase my life as a drag artist in Japan named XTRA!”

His reason for taking up drag was a little unexpected. It was, he said, an excuse to enjoy clothes classed as “womenswear.”

He worried that people might look at him strangely if a man wore them. So, he thought, why not wear them as a female persona who wasn't himself? The clothes came first, in other words.

In 2021, Metropolis passed along a joke from Tokyo's drag scene: if you dress up as a woman on Halloween, you'll become a drag queen. The article writes it as if the Stan of 2019 was a case in point.

According to the same article, when Stan first came to Tokyo he was surprised that most of the gay people he met didn't know what drag was.

People often compared drag with kabuki's onnagata, the male actors who play female roles, it seems. “Onnagata is a role played by men,” he explained, “whereas drag is an expression of identity.”

The details from the scene are concrete, too. At Tokyo shows, the article explains, small bills are replaced by fake notes called “YAASS yen,” bought in sets of five for ¥1,000 and handed out as tips.

Still, he also said at the time, “I don’t know any drag queens who do drag full time yet.” It wasn't much of a moneymaker, it seems.

A July 2021 video shows him preparing for and performing in a Tokyo show. Its description says he had been doing drag for about two years and wanted to keep at it for as long as his body allowed.

Is He Still Doing Drag? The Hiatus in His Own Words

This is probably what many of you want to know. Let's start with the December 2024 Metropolis interview.

“But honestly, I haven’t performed as XTRA for two years now, so it’s been difficult to identify as her,” he told the magazine. At the same time, he said, “I always say XTRA lives within me.” He calls this period a “drag hiatus”: “During this drag hiatus, I feel like Stan and XTRA have become one.”

The most recent explanation in his own words that we could confirm is in the description of a May 2025 video, in which he went out around Tokyo in drag.

There he writes in the past tense, “I was a drag queen in the past,” and calls drag “this hobby,” saying it's been fun to revisit. He also asks viewers to tell him what he should do in drag next.

More videos have come out since: “We Dressed as Women in Japan for 24 Hours” in July 2025 and “We Dressed as Women in Rural Japan for 24 Hours” in January 2026. The January 2026 description calls it “the third installment” in the series. All of these are video projects, and we could not confirm whether any of them was a stage performance as XTRA.

As far as we searched, we found no account of a return to the stage. Nor did we find the word “retired.” What he writes goes only this far: he did drag in the past, and enjoyed it again as a hobby. A bit of an anticlimax, perhaps.

Apart from the stage, though, there is one place where the name XTRA lives on.

What Is byXTRA? Where the Name Comes From

That place is his clothing brand, byXTRA. In June 2022, WWDJAPAN said it had started “last year,” which puts its start in 2021.

The official site describes it as “a Tokyo-based genderless clothing brand designed by Stan Fukase.” When we visited on October 31, 2026, the site read “EST. TOKYO” and “We Ship Worldwide.”

In the 2022 WWDJAPAN interview, the theme he named was “clothes have no gender.” His first collection was made up entirely of crop tops, and his online store had no “menswear” or “womenswear” categories, he said.

Crop tops mean a lot to him. It all began when a university friend gave him a yellow one, and he says he wore it every day for a week.

He loved it so much that he bought a sewing machine on the secondhand marketplace app Mercari and turned every T-shirt he owned into a crop top. Part of the appeal, he said, was that crop tops have never been seen as something men wear.

Making clothes had been his dream since childhood; in high school he even ran a brand called UNISX, built on a print-on-demand service.

When launching byXTRA, he says, he arranged not only the designs but also the factories and the shipping center himself.

Yet in the description of a December 2025 video, he writes, “I also launched my brand, byXTRA.” The description adds that it sold out in 17 minutes, before the official launch.

Back in an October 2021 description he had already written “my first clothing line launch,” and a link to the brand appeared in his descriptions in 2024 as well. “Launch” is a word that has come up with each release since. What the December 2025 “launched” refers to, we could not confirm.

The clearest explanation of the name is his own, from 2022. He said that he could now wear the clothes he wanted without doing drag, and that he owed that to XTRA too: “I couldn't have created it if it weren't for her” (translated).

A name born as an excuse to wear women's clothes became the name of clothes without gender. Perhaps that's why the name has lived on even away from the stage.

The “Full-Time Job” Is the Brand: What His 2026 Descriptions Say

From here on, we turn to his 2026 video descriptions. In the March video “Starting a Business in Tokyo ISN'T WHAT YOU THINK,” he calls himself a “young CEO.”

Alongside filming and planning marketing, the description lists paying business taxes. His goal, it says, is to “build something big enough to retire my mom early.”

Then comes a surprise: a video titled “i think i'll quit,” posted August 1, 2026 (Japan time). It looks like he's walking away from the channel, but read the description and it was the brand he nearly quit.

It describes the stretch before a launch, when manufacturing delays and production problems piled up. He also visited a warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, for the first time.

“At one point, I genuinely started wondering whether I should quit because it's all voluntary stress,” the description says. By the end, it adds, “I finally figured out how to move forward.”

“what my full-time job in japan is actually like...” from September 2026 is the video we mentioned at the start.

According to its description, it was a week of work toward the brand's biggest launch yet: designing, preparing production, and a first professional photo shoot with a photographer he hired. On top of all that came the hunt for an office, the brand's first ever space of its own.

He did it all, the description says, “on 4 hours of sleep,” which gives a sense of how hectic things were. In the description of an October video, he goes to see the new office.

That said, we could not confirm the company's sales or size. “CEO” is his own word from the description; we did not go as far as checking any company registration.

How Did the Channel Grow? His Most-Watched Videos

Line the numbers up by date, and the growth comes into view.

Metropolis put the channel at about 360,000 subscribers in October 2021; WWDJAPAN, at more than 500,000 in June 2022; and Metropolis again, just short of 1 million in December 2024. He wrote in a December 2025 video description that he had reached 1 million, and as of October 31, 2026, the channel had 1.08 million.

As of the same day, the channel had 564 public videos, about 193.38 million total views, and 317 videos longer than three minutes.

The channel itself was opened on October 10, 2015. But as of October 31, 2026, the oldest video still public is a Japan travel video posted in January 2017, and after that there is a gap until June 2020.

Metropolis writes that he “began consistently uploading” in April 2020. It seems fair to treat that as the real start.

In the 2024 interview, he named short-form content as one of the main reasons for his growth. His upload count rose, too, from 99 videos in 2024 to 153 in 2025. Both figures include Shorts.

As of October 31, 2026, his most-viewed video is a Short: “JAPAN USES FAKE EGGS!!!” from October 2025, at about 6.31 million views. Next, as of the same day, comes “Coming out to our mom,” a 19-second video from May 2024, at about 5.9 million.

As of the same day, his most-viewed long-form video is “coming out to my homophobic dad,” at about 3.37 million views, followed by “We stayed at the FREAKIEST Love Hotel in Japan,” at about 3.3 million.

As of the same day, five of his top eight long-form videos have “love hotel” in the title. Of those, two read, from the title and description, as if he actually stayed at one. The everyday life he says he wants to show includes episodes like these, it seems.

How Does Family Fit Into the Channel? His Mother and Father

As the top long-form video suggests, family is a key part of this channel.

In the 2024 interview he described his mother as “a very supportive mom who's also a YouTuber.”

He also said, “we are precisely the way we are off camera as we are on camera.” What they do argue about is whose channel gets to post something they filmed, and “it usually ends up being me because I’m the most stubborn one (laughs).”

His father is not a creator, so we will keep this short. A December 2022 video is the one in which he came out to his father as gay. The description says, “He didn't have the best reaction in the past about the lgbtq+ community.”

The words in the title are his own. We have not checked the video itself, so we cannot say how his father reacted.

In the 2024 interview, he said overseas fans have come up to him in tears, telling him he had “changed their lives.” He also said he doesn't realize what impact he can have on viewers “living with family members who don’t fully accept them.”

Is Life in Tokyo Safe? Two Sides of His Story

His own account doesn't lean one way or the other.

He told WWDJAPAN that once, when he rode a train wearing a crop top, an older man pulled at his piercing and scratched his face. He was shouted at with a slur as well, and he said he cried for the first time in a long while.

Even so, he went on, he came to realize that simply being himself is a kind of protest.

In the 2024 interview he said of Japan, “I feel very safe here.” Living with his boyfriend, he feels “very privileged to hold his hand in public without worrying about anyone attacking us.”

At the same time, he said that “Japan still lacks a lot of the laws that allow LGBTQ+ people to live just like heterosexual people,” adding, “I hope they legalize same-sex marriage soon.” Both, it seems, are true to his experience.

In the same 2024 interview, he named what he wants to do next: modeling, acting, and reality TV. Among his idols is Lady Gaga.

His own brand does not come up anywhere in the text of that interview. A link to it was already in his descriptions by then, but we do not know why it went unmentioned. About a year after the interview, he wrote “launched my brand,” and less than two years after it, the “full-time job” in his descriptions had become the clothing business.

As a child, Stan reportedly danced to “Bad Romance” in dresses made from bed sheets. Someone who played with clothes now runs a clothing business, and somehow that makes perfect sense.