【ニュースde英語】日本人大活躍ニュース：日本を紹介するユーチューバー Rachel and JunがBBCにインタビューされる！｜「burnout」はどんな意味？

Every country in the world merits books and articles devoted to unpacking the nuances and quirks of its culture. But on YouTube, interest in one particular country is pervasive: Japan.

This video of a red-headed woman playing with dozens of squealing foxes in Japan’s “fox village” has more than six million views. The “Idiot’s Guide to Japanese Squat Toilets” has three million, and “Modern Japanese Table Manners” has almost two million views.

They’re all created by Nagoya-based husband-and-wife vlogging duo Rachel and Jun Yoshizuki, who run the YouTube channel Rachel and Jun. Their on-the-ground accounts of daily life in Japan have been viewed more than 200 million times.

They belong to a community of “J-vloggers”: YouTubers who attract millions of views by sharing their insights into Japanese culture. Often (but not always) expats, these users upload anything from a tour of a Japanese high school, to what it’s like to stay in a tiny room in a capsule hotel and what it’s like to be multiracial in Japan.

The rise in J-vlogging is part of a bigger trend: YouTube is more popular in Japan than ever. “The hours of content uploaded from YouTube channels in Japan has more than doubled between 2016 and 2017,” says Marc Lefkowitz, YouTube’s head of creator and artist development for Asia-Pacific.

For Rachel and Jun, making videos about Japan for their 1.8 million subscribers is a way they make a living. They’ve also launched spin-off channels, like the cooking-centred Jun’s Kitchen, which has two million subscribers.

The pair decline to share how much money they earn from YouTube, and say that it varies widely depending on factors like the amount of views and the ad rates in the various countries their viewers reside in, which is the case for many YouTubers.

They say J-vlogging has opened doors to other work: the couple has been offered voice acting roles in video games and Rachel has been approached to do modelling. That, plus sponsorships and donations from viewers on crowdsourcing site Patreon (two staples for many successful YouTubers), all help bring in cash.

（割愛）

But the road to vlogging success is not an easy one.

“There was a period of maybe two or three years where we had no days off – it was seven days a week. Every waking hour was devoted to video-making, editing videos, thinking of ideas, filming, social media, going to meet-ups. We ended up so sick,” Rachel says. （割愛）

Burnout among YouTubers is not uncommon. But the thing that kept Rachel and Jun going was making videos they genuinely cared about – and the Japan-hungry internet responded.

（割愛）