Happy New Year! 2023 is here!!

Happy New Year everyone! John here - we’ve put 2022 behind us, good riddance. A lot of nice things happened but it seems like 2023 has the potential to be a big year! WE CAN TAKE THIS MONSTER PIRATE SLIDE 🛝🏴‍☠️ !! NO CHALLENGE is too big. I’m finishing up the next video and documentary with Peter, first narration today. The big goal, 1M subscribers on the main channel! To do that, I need way more main channel content. I’ll keep up the highly edited content as usual but add in some simpler topics, which probably aren’t that simple 😂 If you have ideas on a OIJ mini-series within the series, I’m always happy to take ideas because 2 brains are better than one - I’ve been taking notes on all the ideas from viewers for a few years now.

In January, I will still be doing GO live streaming but it will slow down at the end of the month in frequency as I work hard on the edited content schedule and build the team. 15 streams a month is my goal. I’ll have an assistant with me on location shoots over 2023. I wish it could be Emi who’s helped me get access to so many places from her home base in Shizuoka, but she’s a mom and has to work remotely. She is so smart too - and we never give up. When a place says no, we just ask again a few weeks, months later 😂 once I’m on the trail of a story, I don’t give up easy.

My friend Joe Hattab is coming next week. I’ll help him a bit with his channel. He has 11M subscribers and was inspired by this channel back in 2014-2015. He contacted me when he had about 15,000-30,000 subscribers. Now he’s the biggest YouTuber in his area of the world and part of our family.

I expect to get to the islands this year for more stories. That takes time and if I can take Kanae and Leo too, I will. Kanae is quite busy with her dance school and student development but to share the travel is always good.

Meetups! I will try to do one a month. It’ll be hard to meet individually. I’ll try my best, but to get to 1M this year, I’ll have to be very scheduled and regimented. I do intend to do a boat trip on the river this spring and maybe another Kickstarter IF we have help to edit the video and send the packages. Peter and I are doing it ourselves and it’s hard, not impossible. It just takes more time to do it right. In the end, the work is timeless.

All this is thanks to our community here, and I’ll give it my best effort to get back to the top. After seeing a video (speed wrapping) go from 0 to 2M views in 8 days, 12 hours (now at 1,996,000 views) I think anything is possible. We can all see it! It’s so exciting!

DREAM BIG!! Don’t let anything stop you from getting there. No matter what you’re doing in your life now, it’s good to have a goal and always improve a little every day, week. It’s amazing how we take steps forward towards something and see over time how far we’ve come! It just takes a few steps to start in the right direction and a drive to say “I’m going to get there!” Get ready for an amazing adventure - 2023!

Much love from us in Tokyo,

John, Leo, Kanae

PATREON update tonight at 11:30pm JST.

▶️ https://youtu.be/PZg-Np91lT8