About Why Japan?

Why Japan? is the website of WHY JAPAN?, a YouTube series by Sophie. Each episode takes one question visitors ask about Japan and follows the answer back through history — then ends with what it means for you on your trip.

Your guide: Sophie

Sophie is the guide of WHY JAPAN?. She asks the questions a first-time visitor would ask — why the shoes come off, why nobody takes your tip — and follows each one back through history until the strange part makes sense.

How the episodes are made

Every script is checked against sources before recording: government surveys, company histories, newspaper archives and the places themselves. Where the record is unclear, the episode says so. The pictures are illustrations made for the series, not photographs — the samurai looking for a trash can was never really there.

Found a mistake? Tell us in the comments on the episode, and we will fix it.

Affiliate disclosure

Some links on this site go to travel services such as tour, rail pass and hotel booking sites. If you book through one of them, we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. It never changes what an episode says.

Privacy

This site has no accounts and no ads. It is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, and we use Cloudflare Web Analytics to count visits: it does not use cookies or store anything on your device, and it shows us totals such as page views and which site a visit came from, not who you are. A few pages also load things from other services, which can see your IP address and browser details when they do:

• Fonts come from Google Fonts on every page.
• Videos load from YouTube (privacy-enhanced mode, youtube-nocookie.com) only after you press play.
• The map loads its map code from unpkg.com and map tiles from OpenStreetMap.
• Links such as “Google Maps” or “Watch on YouTube” take you to those services only when you tap them.

The Show cards and the tip calculator work entirely in your browser; nothing you type or choose is sent anywhere.