I arrived in Japan in 2008 with no particular plan, just a work contract and a vague sense that the Asian adventure I had started in China two years earlier was not finished. Eighteen years later I am still here, and this site is probably the most continuous thing I have ever done.
Before Japan, There Was China
I grew up in a village south of Bordeaux, near the bay of Arcachon. Engineering school in Paris, then a gap year at a Chinese university to learn the language and find out whether Asia spoke to me. It did, loudly. I had started keeping a blog around then, for no real reason, just to write down what I was seeing and send news home to my family in France. That habit carried straight over when I landed in Japan. Only the scenery changed.
Tokyo, Photography, and an Accident
The first years in Tokyo were work on weekdays and exploring at weekends. Neighbourhoods I did not know, train lines it had never occurred to me to take, mountains and islands that Japanese people themselves do not think to mention. To hold on to all of it, I took up photography. Properly. I bought a real camera, read the manuals, and taught myself in the field.
Then one day, half by accident, I found myself in the rain inside an abandoned site while looking for something else. A haikyo, as it is called here: a ruined place, forgotten, where nature has taken over. I came home with photographs, posted them on the blog, and the response was out of all proportion to anything else I had published.
I never particularly decided to become a haikyo blogger. It happened the other way round: readers decided for me by coming for those articles, and I followed. For several years the site was mostly known for that. Gunkanjima, Nara Dreamland, the Hachijo Royal Hotel and dozens of other explorations ended up tracing a parallel geography of Japan, the one made of places nobody shows any more.
From Haikyo to Offbeat
Over time I realised that Japan is full of gems nobody talks about, and that they are not all ruins. A fishing village on the Sea of Japan. A shrine at the end of an unnamed path. A country road that stops at a crater. A small museum kept by a man who spent his life collecting things nobody cares about. Those places deserve as much attention as the haikyo, maybe more, because you can visit them without worrying anyone and you come away happy rather than melancholy.
So the site widened without disowning what it had been. I still explore abandoned places, I cannot help it, but also islands, traditional villages, forgotten roads, quiet temples, oddities, corners of Japan the guidebooks ignore. That is what offbeat means: beside the beaten track, and sometimes on a completely different one.
The Site Is Also My Workshop
I am a developer. Most of the code on this site, and most of the plugins that keep it running, are mine. Meow Apps is the label I have published my WordPress plugins under for more than ten years. AI Engine, my main plugin, powers the small chatbot you have probably noticed in the bottom right corner: it knows everything on the site and can help you find articles, suggest routes, or answer questions about Japan. This site is its shop window too.
That double role explains why the site still moves so much after all these years. When I have an idea for an improvement, I can write it in the evening and deploy it the next morning. Few site owners get to do that, and it is probably why Offbeat Japan is still standing.
Written by Two
For the past few years I have not been alone. Eventhia writes the stories you read here with me: I come back from the field with the photographs and the notebooks, she turns them into writing. She is the one who checks the local legends, tracks down the name of a founding monk or the exact date a place closed, and who gives the articles a precision I would not have the patience to reach on my own. We also worked together on Japon Secret, the book published by Lonely Planet, after Les Villages du Japon which I did on my own. Both are in French.
The Method, in Three Rules
Every photograph on this site is mine, taken on location. Every place described has genuinely been visited, often more than once, and when a piece of information comes from somewhere other than my own eyes, it is checked and sourced. And the site is independent: no sponsors, no paid articles, no press trips. When I recommend a place, it means I would go back.
What Is Left to Tell
I have terabytes of unpublished photographs. Places I visited and had forgotten about until their images turned up while I was looking for something else in my library. Articles three quarters written, waiting for me to decide where they belong. Corners of Japan I have not seen yet but that have been on my list for ten years. This site is nowhere near finished.
If you find an article here that makes you want to go and see a place with your own eyes, or simply to understand Japan a little better than the postcards do, then it worked. That is exactly why I keep going.
For more about me outside Japan, my full biography is on jordymeow.com. You can also find me at Meow Apps on the code side, or at Ikuzo, the trip-planning app I built because I needed it myself.