John Daub

Member since September 19, 2011

https://onlyinjapan.tv/

John Daub is a Japan-based YouTuber and former NHK presenter best known for his long-running series Only in Japan.

Born in 1974, Virginia U.S, to an American father and Indian mother, he grew up in New Jersey before attending Ohio State University, where he earned a degree in Economics and English Literature.

Daub moved to Japan in 1998, knowing zero Japanese, he began his career as an English teacher. Over several years he lived in 16 different cities, helping establish Eikaiwa (English schools) while exploring Japanese life and culture.

In 2003, Daub shot his first videos while hitchhiking the length of Japan, purchasing a professional Sony video camera to film the journey, traveling from Wakkanai in Hokkaido to Kagoshima in Kyushu. He later said these videos were aired on Boston public access TV in 2004.

“This was all before YouTube started.”

Confident from that experience, he launched his own production company and secured a five-year contract producing comedy videos in English for a Japanese company.

This work opened doors in Japanese media, and in 2008 he began working at NHK World, the English-language branch of NHK, as a reporter for Tokyo Eye. Over the years, he produced around 50 reports for the show and also appeared on other NHK programs such as Destination Kansai and Journeys in Japan.

In 2013, Daub launched the original Only in Japan YouTube channel, which grew to over 1.35 million subscribers and became a leading source of content about Japanese culture. The channel was originally owned by WAO Corporation. When Daub left in 2020, he had to walk away from the channel entirely, which WAO later rebranded as WAO RYU! Only in Japan. Daub has described this as a difficult but valuable lesson in ownership and creative control, emphasizing the importance of retaining full rights over one’s own work.

Today, he runs his fully independent channels, ONLY in JAPAN * John Daub and ONLY in JAPAN * GO, where he continues to produce live streams and in-depth videos exploring food, festivals, travel, and everyday life across Japan. With full creative freedom, he remains one of the most trusted English-language voices on Japanese culture.