Web Video / Abroad In Japan

Abroad in Japan is a Youtube channel with a focus on semi-professional travel documentaries hosted by Chris Broad. Originally travelling to Japan after applying to the JET^note Japan Exchange and Teaching program as an English teacher, Chris nowadays focuses on videos documenting his experiences throughout Japan, or giving travel tips to people thinking of visiting Japan, all wrapped up in dry British wit and the wacky antics of his two eccentric Japanese friends, Ryotaro and Natsuki. Aside from those two, he also collaborates with other Youtubers, both Japanese and International, and travels with them to different Japanese tourists spots while setting up challenges sent by his subscribers. Most notable among these would be The Anime Man, who is a recurring guest in several of his "Journey Across Japan" travel vlog series of videos, as well as CDawgVA, who he would frequently collaborate with on his other travel works. These frequent collaborations have landed him the moniker of being the "unofficial fourth man" of Trash Taste, being the current record-holder for most frequent guest. He has since expanded to have his own website complete with soundboards and merchendise and an extra channel here for his shorter videos and live-stream recordings that focus on himself rather than Japan.

Alongside his youtube videos, Chris also co-hosts a similarly-named podcast alongside London radio DJ Pete Donaldson. Thanks in part to his popularity on Chris' videos, Ryotaro has also created his own, dedicated Youtube channel, which Chris himself occasionally recommends to his viewers.

---

Abroad in Japan contains examples of:

• Artifact Title: A few of his videos during and after 2022 have had him travel outside of Japan, such as his home country the United Kingdom and the United States.
• Ascended Meme: Ever since he got the nickname Mr. Affable after being on Trash Taste, Chris has put many references to it in his own videos.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: Chris has an entire video devoted to some of the bizarre translations he's seen while out and about.
  • He also has a video specifically on how Google Translate can end up with these when translating Japanese into English and why, while using some absolutely bizarre restaurant reviews as the examples.
• Cameo Cluster:
  • The video "I RENTED a Japanese Convenience Store for a Day" contains several former collaborators in just the first few seconds — careful watchers will make note of Ellen, his former colleague from university that was a companion during the first Journey Across Japan.
  • The Dr. Jelly videos contain cameos by his crew and behind the scenes collaborators.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Natsuki, to the extent of being the subject of a feature-length Patreon-funded documentary.
  • Mark Kagaya, a massively eccentric bar owner, as documented here.
  • Subverted from Chris' perspective when meeting Hyde, who came off to Chris as rather scary in his music videos, but came across as very down-to-earth upon meeting him in person.
• The Comically Serious: Chris, who always speaks in a serious tone and straight face no matter how ridiculous a situation is.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Parodied with Ryotaro and Natsuki, who have a "sword fight" that basically involves them drunkely lunging at one another, with Ryotaro easily handing Natsuki over.
• Deadpan Snarker: Chris himself, who takes the time to sarcastically praise something (usually any Gratuitous English he finds) in a completely straight face.
• Dying Town: The channel has visited several dead or dying towns in the Japanese countryside, showing the effects the current economical climate in Japan has on small rural towns when its younger generations increasingly move into more urban areas.
• Epunymous Title: Chris Broad is a Broad living abroad in Japan.
• Exact Words: During "Why Himeji is Japan's Greatest Castle" in the first Journey Across Japan, the challange was to be optimistic and positive with no complaining allowed, later in the episode Ryotaro takes him to a sweets shop and expects Chris to pay for all the sweets they've bought, Chris refuzes invoking that there is nothing in the challenge about being generous besides optimistic and positive.
• Foreign Queasine: Happens in both cultural directions when Chris and Ryotaro are challenged by the Kissbee Samurai Girls. Chris brought in black liquorice, Marmite and root beer, while the Samurai Girls brought grasshoppers and natto (fermented soybeans), the latter of which Chris describes as, "the worst food ever made by humans".
  • Ends up being Chris' opinion on the elusive Wasabi KitKats. Particularly when washed down with a bottle of Calpis. He's also said in passing to avoid pickled plum-flavoured onigiri.
• Foreign-Language Tirade: As seen in the video where Chris, Natsuki and Joey go to an abandoned love hotel, whenever Natsuki witnesses something particularly terrifying, he has a tendency to repeat the phrase 'Cho Fuck!' Since Cho is Japanese for 'Super', that's when you know the situation isn't just fucking scary, but super fucking scary!
• Gone Horribly Right: Basically any time he tries to torture a guest with a scary, dangerous, nasty, and/or physical activity; usually Joey, Natsuki, or Connor, it tends to backfire with him becoming the one who suffers the most.
• Gratuitous English: Chris at one point shows off a notebook with a number of motivational phrases on the cover...along with the word "DRIBBLE" plastered right across the top.
• Hero-Worshipper: Chris doesn't actively show it, but when he encounters someone he and Natsuki genuinely look up to, he's positively giddy—as witness his videos interviewing Hyde of L'arc-en-Ciel and Ken Watanabe (which he openly said was a life achievement).
• Intentional Engrish for Funny:
  • Two items on Chris' merch store are based on bizarre phrases that Natsuki has used in an attempt to describe objects in English. In those two cases, he called a microwave oven an "Electric Box", and misheard "Vacuum" as "Fucking", both of which Chris found funny enough to put on some of his merch.
  • He has a series of videos focusing on Japan's tendency to put random English words everywhere, from underwear, strip clubs, and even food as shown when he buys a bagel labeled "Nice stick". He explains that there's a trend within the Japanese market called "Kazari Eigo", meaning "Decoration English". Since Japanese people aren't fluent in English to check the grammar of such uses of English, marketers plaster random English words everywhere as cheap decoration. On the other hand, some examples of Decoration English are structurally and grammatically sound, but happen to be amusingly vague, abundant in Ice-Cream Koan phrases, or hilariously blunt in the way they describe the product they adorn.
• I Take Offense to That Last One: In "I Made the WORST Mistake in Japan", He reads a negative comment with many negative things to say about, notably that he's ”as plain as whitebread”. Chris says that he loves white bread and the commenter is stupid.
• Katanas Are Just Better/Shotguns Are Just Better: In Chris' opinion, to the extent of being a higher priority than bulky Samurai armor (Though not while naked, as Ryotaro presumed).
• Language Barrier:
  • "In I Made the WORST Mistake in Japan", Chris recounts a story from when he was new to Japan. While on a highway to see snow monkeys, Chris went to a card toll booth when he only had cash. This caused the lane to pile up, causing everyone to panic. A man says "genki desu ka?" (Are you okay?), opening the barrier. Chris thanks him and goes through the booth, paying nothing. Chris says he even bragged about the experience to his colleagues. Two months after the toll booth experience, Chris learns that the work for cash is genkin. Thinking back to that day, he realizes the man was actually asking if he was going to pay with cash, but instead he drove away from the toll booth like a dickhead foreigner. This fumble, he states, inspired him to learn Japanese quicker.
  • Chris expresses at some point that no matter how good he became at speaking Japanese he may never be able to surpass a cultural gap that will allow him to express his thoughts or feelings the same way he would in English and is probably one of the reasons why he stopped advancing in his Japanese language knowledge.
  • Japanese viewers are often offended at his British humor and take him too seriously on his words and behavior.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: "Cinnamon water of terror"
• Nothing Is Scarier: The abandoned tunnel that Chris explores with The Anime Man.
• One Chris Limit: Subverted - Chris' cameraman is also called Chris.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: During the first Journey Across Japan, one of the challenges sent in by the viewers was to speak in an American accent, this breaks apart slightly when he is about to be run over by a truck on the road. Pretty soon thereafter he confesses, while still maintaining the accent, that the stress might cause him to have a mental breakdown.
• Playing Up the Stereotype: In "Day In My Life: Living in Tokyo", Chris mentions a Swedish man named Jürgen he keeps running into at Kamakura Beach. Chris explains that he’s helping him learn how to surf, but doesn’t speak English well, and that Chris hasn’t told him that he is a YouTuber. It turns out "Jürgen" is actually PewDiePie, deliberately exaggerating his accent and mentioning stereotypical Swedish things.
  (stereotypical Swedish music plays)
  Chris: Jürgen, how are you?
  "Jürgen": Oh, Jürgen here! Wow! All the waves so big! I feel I could ride them to Valhalla! Very epic! It inspires me to build IKEA furniture, and other Swedish cliches.
  Chris That’s exactly what Swedish people do, isn't it?
• Punny Name:
  • Abroad in Japan, made by Chris Broad.
  • When talking about recipes and/or cooking Chris will refer to the channel as Abroad in a pan.
  • Natsuki is known as MC Rapsuki for his musical persona.
  • Ryotoro got named by a viewer as Rissotoro and Chris has used the nickname several times since.
• Road Trip Episode: The entire "Journey Across Japan" series, where Chris, accompanied on occasion by Natsuki and Ryotaro, and a camera crew bike to different parts of Japan. Along the way, Chris usually accepts random challenges sent to him by subscribers, ranging from mundane (getting a local to speak an English greeting) to ridiculous (Chris speaking with an American accent for a day).
• Running Gag:
  • Playing certain stock sound effects during befuddling or unsettling situations (usually a Scare Chord), or a silly toy trumpet after flat jokes.
  • Chris' go-to method of showing contempt (or punctuating a segment where he's about to show contempt such as "Most Annoying Comment of the Week") is to have a close-up of Natsuki's face appear in a puff of smoke saying, "Go fuck yourself".
  • The name graphics that appear whenever Chris introduces someone in his videos always list the given person's occupation. Naturally, it's never something serious.
  • Describing food with the phrase, "Melt in your mouth", mainly thanks to how often Chris has Wagyu beef. He's tried in vain to encourage people to describe them in other ways.
  • He often does a voice impression, especially when he reads comments — in a deep and over the top way, a sort of upper class British drunkard that is of a somewhat higher moral position and angry about it, it gets interesting when the comment contains misspellings or grammatical errors as well.
  • His most common joke takes the form of: it's X innit?.
  • On the podcast, the sections with listeners writing in is called "From the Fax Machine"^note fax machines still being popular and still in use in Japan, and while Chris has said several times that he does in fact have a fax machine it is mostly for set decoration.
  • Also on the podcast, they have a long standing tradition of listeners writing in calling them something with Added Alliterative Appeal — Prodigious Pete, Courageous Chris.
• Self-Deprecation: He jokes that Japan must know "there's a British weirdo that buys a lot of clothes with English on it" when talking about the Engrish labels plastered on hats.
• Scare Chord: Two types of scare chord regularly appear throughout his videos to punctuate whenever something extremely bizarre or daunting is mentioned.
  Chris: Many foods, the words themselves are 'Gairago' or foreign borrowed words. Take for example beef, chicken, and pork.
  For beef you can say 'bi-fu'
  For pork you can say 'po-ku'
  For chicken you can say 'chikin'
  And for horse you can say 'BASASHI' [in a very low gravelly voice followed by a scare chord and a horse neighing]
  Alright there's a handful of exceptions but you get the general idea.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Ryotaro appears to be this for Natsuki, the trailer for Journey Across Japan: Frozen Frontier beginning with Natsuki attempting to assassinate Ryotaro from a rooftop.
• Spit Take: Happens with Chris' beer after Natsuki tries to introduce Chris to the Wanko Soba challenge (mainly because his way of introducing it came out as, "Let's wank soba")
• Spoof Aesop: At the end of the first story in "I Made the WORST Mistake in Japan", Chris states that the moral is "don't see the snow monkeys", with an image of him with said monkeys saying, "monkeys make you commit crimes".
  • In the third and final story, Chris claims one thing he learned from it is "Don't lie to Ken Watanabe, because he’ll find out some way or another, and then you'll get to see the scary face."
• Take That!:
  • Chris delivers a lengthy one to comparatively cynical travel vlogger Ryan Boundless for his "DreamCrusher" series of videos.
  Chris: I've sat through a few of these DreamCrusher videos and the experience was about as fun as falling down the stairs into a bucket of used syringes. Quite honestly, you could learn more about life in Japan by staring at this photo of a bemused fucking donkey than you will ever learn through watching one of his multimedia tirades. So please, just ignore them. They won't crush your dreams, but they will rob you of your precious time - the same precious time that you'll need to make your dreams become a reality. Oh and, uh, no. We're not friends.
  • Another, leveled at influencers who fly out to North Korea to show off to their followers, all while directly funding a regime that kills and imprisons its own people, and fires ballistic missiles over Japan with reckless abandon in "Being Rudely Awoken by a North Korean Missile":
  Chris: This is what annoys me about all the people who go to North Korea on holiday because it's so different and unique seeing a culture that's so weird and strange like the 1960's, fuck off. Like, every time you go to North Korea you're funding a regime that butchers its own people, that has hundreds of thousands of its own people locked away in concentration camps, and fires just stupidly and randomly at 6 AM in the morning. If you go to North Korea, you're a fucking idiot. Don't go. And now, I'm gonna go to sleep and I'm really angry.
  On-screen text: It was the third missile North Korea has launched over Japan. The last was 2009. North Korea continues to receive income from foreign tourists going on "really awesome" holidays. Tourists spend a week in Pyongyang and seem to think their meticulously choreographed trip somehow represents the country. Just because Pyongyang has a rollercoaster, it doesn't mean North Korea is good.
  • Gives one to the Jurassic Park franchise when giving a review of the dinosaur love hotel in I Stayed in Japan's BIGGEST Hot Spring VS. Abandoned Ghost Town:
  Chris: All the stuff coming in was pretty epic, but the room itself was pretty standard, and a little bit underwhelming, a bit like the newer Jurassic Park movies themselves.
  • In I Made the WORST Mistake in Japan, one of the reasons he doesn't eat at high-end sushi restaurants is because "you have to sell your house to be able to afford it."
    • In the same video, Chris describes both geoduck and akagai as looking like they came from the movie Alien.
    • Chris describes the steps to taste akagai at home as "Cut up a Bridgestone tire, drag it across the beach in the sand".
• Thoroughly Mistaken Identity: He recounts one incident where an American fan somewhat recognized him in a fish market but calls him "Dave from Japan".
  Chris: (in a deadpan voice) Yeah, yeah, that's me, Dave. Dave in Japan dude. I love your videos Dave in Japan. Yeah, Dave in Japan.
• Trademark Favorite Food: His love of fried chicken is sometimes brought up in his videos.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Chris has this energy with some of his friends, but especially with Connor. Almost any time the two are together, they're poking lighthearted fun at each other, and especially in the intros to videos that feature one on the others channel.
• You Are Fat: He has a self-deprecating video about his own weight. It also delves how the Japanese people, in full force to their indirect nature, try to remark about his body weight all the time while trying not to say he is fat.