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. 

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.