🇯🇵 Hayato will introduce Japan for FROGI

Japan often begins for travellers with a very familiar set of images: Tokyo, Kyoto, cherry blossoms, Shinkansen trains, anime, temples and rules of behaviour that can make you afraid of accidentally doing something wrong.

We wanted to start a little differently and give the floor to someone for whom Japan is not a holiday destination, but the place where he grew up and still lives.

That is why Japan on FROGI will be introduced by Hayato, a new author for our media. He is 18, was born in 📍 Ena in Gifu Prefecture and agreed to share his own view of the country, its culture and travel.

👋 Meet Hayato

Hayato has already travelled around quite a lot of Japan. He has been to Hokkaido, Tokyo, Nagano, Hyogo, Kyoto, Nara, Shiga, Okayama, Fukuoka and Okinawa.

Outside Japan, he has visited Uzbekistan and Thailand, and in the future he especially wants to see Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union.

He prefers mountains to the sea and says that on future trips around Japan, mountain regions would be the first places he would want to explore.

But what interests us even more than the number of places he has already visited is something else.

Hayato sees travel as an experience that gradually expands his own world. His stories include his first independent train journey, a motorcycle trip from Gifu to Fukuoka, conversations with people in ryokans and his first experience using transport independently abroad.

That is exactly why we want his articles to preserve not only information about Japan, but also his own way of seeing it.

🗾 Not another guide to the “right way to do Japan”

We do not want to turn Hayato into someone whose role is to explain to foreigners how they are supposed to behave in his country.

We are much more interested in something else.

What does a young Japanese person himself think about tourists? Which places does he consider important? Why does he not think people should judge old Japan only through Kyoto? And why, in his opinion, should modern Japan be looked for not only in Tokyo, but also in the Japanese countryside?

Sometimes his view will match the familiar image of Japan.

Sometimes it will not.

That is exactly the point.

✍️ What his first articles will be about

In his first articles, Hayato will talk about how travel changed his own life and why, after his first independent train journey, he felt that his world had become bigger.

We will also talk separately about tourists in Japan and local rules of behaviour.

Hayato believes it is useful for foreigners to learn at least a little about the country before arriving. But at the same time, he does not support situations where someone accidentally breaks a rule they did not know about, the incident spreads across the internet and becomes a reason for public criticism.

Another article will be about old and modern Japan.

For discovering the country’s historical side, he talks not only about Kyoto, but also about Kurashiki and Shirakawa-go.

For modern Japan, he suggests Harajuku and Akihabara — and then unexpectedly sends the reader away from the megacity altogether, because for him the contrast between modern urban life and the countryside is also part of Japan today.

Later, we want to explore other topics with him that are impossible to understand through tourist instructions alone.

We will pass them on to Hayato, and the most interesting answers may become future FROGI articles.

For us, this is a way to discover Japan not only through routes and practical instructions, but also through someone who grew up inside this culture and is still continuing to discover his own country himself.

So this is where we begin.

Japan on FROGI will be introduced by Hayato. 🇯🇵