About Maigo Mika
I make YouTube videos about rural Japan.
The countryside as the main character in my videos. I share its personality through the seasons, food, traditions, and everyday life for my equally curious global audience interested in rural Japan.
There are two sides to my work:
Restoring old akiya houses. Growing food. Cooking with the seasons. Observing how the changing landscape shapes everyday life inside our countryside community.
How I got here
I’m Canadian and have lived in Japan since 2018. Before making my videos, I spent 3.5 years working at a creative marketing agency, producing English-language content, social media posts, for Japanese clientele looking to encourage visits to their regions.
Eventually, I moved into an old house in rural Shikoku.
I started filming our life there as a creative project, combining the copywriting and social media work I’d been doing with my newly discovered love for visual storytelling.
Then, my first YouTube video unexpectedly went viral, reaching more than three million viewers.
That’s when I realized there was an audience for the Japan I had come to know and love; not just the famous destinations or Instagrammable spots, but the quiet countryside, the people who live there, and the small, everyday things that makes this place home for me.
Today, I document my neighborhood and also create dedicated videos to showcase other regions to a curious global audience.
