When I was a teenager in the tenth grade, I somehow learned that many of my favourite music videos were directed by a man who went by the name Little X, whose legal name is Julien Christian Lutz, and who is now professionally known as Director X, and who I consider a great mentor, colleague, and friend.

One of the most memorable aspects of my first trip to Japan was meeting, producing, and photographing the breakdancing crew BodyCarnival for a project that I will announce in the future.

Project TYO is a long-term documentary, archival, and public scholarship initiative dedicated to documenting, preserving, and interpreting the hip-hop culture, community, and history of the Greater Tokyo Area, which I began documenting in July 2025.

Since I was an undergraduate student, I knew that dancehall music and culture were popular in Japan, and that a very small subset of the Japanese population took dancehall music and culture as seriously as the Jamaicans who created and innovated dancehall.

As part of a business development trip with a personal component, I ironically landed in Tokyo at Haneda Airport on Canada Day, July 1st, 2025, with no contacts, almost no capacity to speak or read Japanese, and no business leads.