Review of Abroad in Japan by Chris Broad
by Johny McFliggen, PhD Literature & Business, Oxford
Chris Broad’s Abroad in Japan is what happens when an Englishman in his twenties is dropped into the underbelly of rural Japan with no cultural compass, a camcorder, and a mild resentment toward other humans. It’s not a travel book. It’s an accidental anthropological field report delivered by someone who wandered into the experiment by mistake and decided to vlog it.
To call it a memoir would be both accurate and insufficient. Yes, Broad recounts his ten years in Japan—from being a disillusioned JET Programme teacher in the forgotten snowbanks of Yamagata to becoming one of the most recognizable British voices in online travel media—but the throughline isn’t transformation. It’s estrangement. At every turn, Broad maintains a healthy distance from both Japanese and British cultural pretensions. He is the anti-YouTuber: allergic to enthusiasm, suspicious of spectacle, and constantly undermining the very notion of awe. The result is a travel narrative that feels more like a slow, ironic deflation of every naive expectation people bring with them to Japan.
Broad is not interested in teaching you about Japan. He’s interested in showing you what happens when you live there long enough to find the cracks. The absurd bureaucracy. The performance of politeness. The social isolation that hides behind the orderly smiles. It’s not mean-spirited, but it is unvarnished. His greatest gift is in his ability to translate culture shock into comedy without falling into cruelty. He avoids the well-worn tropes of anime obsession or sushi rhapsody and instead fixates on things like overpriced fruit, unbearable summer humidity, and the grim psychological toll of being treated like a guest for ten years straight.
In that sense, Abroad in Japan is more aligned with the work of Karl Pilkington than, say, Pico Iyer. It’s a book that refuses to pretend cultural understanding is easy or desirable. Broad never becomes fully fluent, linguistically or socially, and that stubborn foreignness becomes the point. He turns his outsider status into an aesthetic. Even the most profound moments—a student’s suicide attempt, the Fukushima disaster—are presented with a mix of dry restraint and the implicit discomfort of someone unsure whether they have the right to tell this story at all.
And yet, the book works. It works because Broad is willing to make himself look bad. He is, at times, petty, bitter, judgmental—and refreshingly self-aware. This is not the story of a Westerner who found his place in Japan. It’s the story of someone who never really did and decided that maybe that’s more honest. He peels back the ‘quirky Japan’ veneer and exposes the loneliness beneath. He acknowledges the country’s elegance without pretending it’s utopia. That ambivalence—toward Japan, toward himself, toward the whole idea of having a “journey”—is where the book finds its depth.
The second half of the memoir shifts toward his rise as a content creator, and while the narrative pacing occasionally falters in these sections, it also gives us a glimpse of the strange new media economy that rewards disaffection. Broad didn’t become popular because he loved Japan, but because he refused to romanticize it. His audience trusts him precisely because he doesn’t try to sell them anything, least of all an idealized version of Japan.
Unlike most expat memoirs, which veer toward either reverence or rejection, Abroad in Japan does something far trickier. It hovers in the middle, suspended in ambivalence, animated by deadpan humor and an unwillingness to resolve into either gratitude or regret. It’s not a love letter to Japan. It’s more like a long voicemail from someone who can’t decide if they’re staying or going—but keeps hitting record anyway.
Rating: 8.8/10
The rare travel memoir that trusts its reader enough to be both unimpressed and unafraid of saying so. Wry, weary, and far more insightful than it pretends to be.
