Over the course of approximately two months, I spent most of the summer of 2026 in Japan on my second business development trip to the country, which also had a profoundly important personal component; I explored Tokyo, my favourite city in the world, alongside Nagoya, Osaka, and Shizuoka, during what became, by an extraordinary margin, the most prolific, inspiring, fulfilling, enjoyable, and transformative journey of my life and career. I expect to feel about the same way on my upcoming third trip to Japan. 

I think about Japan multiple times per day. I often remind myself that it is a truly rare, remarkable, highly influential, complicated, and inspiring country, and like all countries, it has flaws, tensions, and contradictions of all kinds.

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.