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.

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.

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.