About Barefoot Surfer

At 11pm with thirty tabs open, the hardest part of planning a trip to Japan isn’t finding advice. It’s working out who actually went, and who’s just spinning a list to sell you something.

Half of where I’m from

My mother is Japanese. My father is American. I was born in Destin, Florida, on a stretch of the Gulf coast the locals half-jokingly call the Redneck Riviera, and I grew up a US and Japanese dual citizen with a foot on each side of the Pacific.

I first set foot in Japan as a small kid, too young to keep more than a few flashes of it. Then my family hit a long stretch of money trouble, and that was that. More than ten years went by before I made it back. So for most of my childhood, Japan was my mother’s country, my grandparents’ voices on the phone, and a passport I held but hadn’t earned. My grandparents live deep in the Kansai countryside, close to Osaka and Kyoto on a map but a world away in pace. My father spent ten years of his life in Toyama, his mid-twenties to mid-thirties, long before I was born. The half of me that’s Japanese was always real. I just hadn’t lived in it yet.

The trip that started all of this

When I was sixteen turning seventeen, I was lost. I’d started going to a charter school for dual-enrollment college prep at fifteen, taking university classes next to kids who already knew they were going to be surgeons and rocket scientists, and I had no clue what I was doing with my life. That fog hits a lot of us at that age. Mine was thick.

My parents made one suggestion that changed everything: go to Japan for a month with my friend Liam. Not a family trip. Just the two of us. Liam was the only other half-Japanese kid I knew growing up in our corner of Florida, a year older, from the next town over. Our moms had been friends for years. I saved for it working beach service and wedding setups through the summer, and both our mothers got on the phone with everyone they knew back home to build us a route.

That route is the reason this whole site exists. We spent a few days homestaying near Tokyo with Liam’s grandparents, then a few days in Toyama, then cut down through the mountains of Shirakawa-go, Takayama, and Gifu, passed through Nagoya, and came out in Kyoto and Osaka, where Liam’s cousin took us around the city. We spent time at my grandparents’ place out in the countryside, then looped back up to Tokyo, making some more stops on the way. The triangle. Down one side, through the real Japan in the middle, the famous cities on the way back.

That loop is what I walk you through across this entire site. Most people do Tokyo, then Kyoto, then Osaka, maybe tack on Hiroshima, and call it Japan. You’ll get those highlights here, every Instagram shot included. But we’re also going through the middle, out to the mountains, the half of the country I actually fell in love with. You don’t have to hike or ski to go there, though if you’re into the outdoors it’s some of the best you’ll find. And if you travel for food, the Hokuriku coast around Toyama pulls some of the best seafood in Japan, going toe to toe with Hokkaido, with almost none of the crowds. My job is to tell you what’s worth your days out there and what to skip.

How a lost high schooler ended up living there

That first trip pulled me out of the fog and handed me a question I’ve been chasing since: how do you build a living without signing away your freedom? I didn’t want the ninety-hour a week grind, even the impressive version of it. I have real respect for the people building rockets and curing diseases. It just wasn’t the life I wanted. I wanted to own where I was and how I spent my hours.

That’s how I landed on marketing. I liked psychology and philosophy, and marketing is really persuasion at scale, helping people name a problem and see how something solves it. I studied it at the University of West Florida, with that goal in mind. Senior year, I worked the job-fair and interview circuit like everyone else, and somewhere in there I stopped and asked what I was doing. I’d spent a lot of late nights with my gym partner Gavin, driving around after workouts, talking through the safe plan: house-hack a duplex, 3.5% down, build the boring money machine. The money could wait. I couldn’t always be this young, this free, and this willing to sleep in a two-dollar-a-night hostel where you flush the toilet with a bucket. So I went.

In February 2023 I left with a 45-liter carry-on, 12kg, no checked bag, on a budget of about five grand. I’d planned three months in Southeast Asia, then realized that flying from Florida into Europe first and onward to Asia cost the same as flying straight across, so I bolted Europe onto the front: Amsterdam, Italy, Istanbul. Then Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Singapore, and Taiwan, where I bought my first tent and hitchhiked the island solo with almost no Mandarin.

Somewhere in month two, with no return ticket booked, I trimmed my spending to about $500 a month and just kept going. Eight months. Thirty thousand steps a day, walking eight to ten hours with nowhere I had to be. I’d figured out my travel style years before on that trip with Liam, and it’s the opposite of the hour-by-hour itinerary with three backups for every backup. It’s closer to how Anthony Bourdain moved: show up, drop the bag, walk the local streets, find the market first, watch what people actually eat. I’m not there for the resort. I’d rather fumble through a conversation in broken Japanese and leave both of us smiling.

Then I used the half of me that’s Japanese

When the trip wound down, I wasn’t ready to go home, and I had something most backpackers don’t: a Japanese passport. So I crossed into Japan and worked my way north, hitchhiking through Kyushu, then Shikoku, all the way to Osaka from Fukuoka. My Japanese was good enough to hold a real conversation in a stranger’s car, as long as we stayed on familiar ground. The running joke was baseball. Every driver who heard I’d lived in America assumed I’d have opinions on Shohei Ohtani, and every time I had nothing, the look on their face was worth the ride.

I ended up back in Toyama, the city my father once called home, staying with Mamoru, his old friend, an artist who showed me more of the country than any guidebook could. Mamoru knew the owner of a traditional Japanese restaurant and got me in the door. I had the job, but the interview humbled me fast. I’d only ever learned casual Japanese, so I walked in talking to the boss like an old buddy. Picture someone interviewing in English by talking like they just rolled off a street corner. They sat me down and taught me to speak properly. That kitchen was brutal, and once the new-guy grace period wore off, the boss and I argued nearly every day, which almost nobody there had the nerve to do. I worked there for about a year until I had enough of a network to pick up other jobs like English teaching and bartending. I stayed almost three years. I learned the language on that floor, not from an app, taught English on the side, held a doorframe through the 2024 New Year’s earthquake while the fridge emptied onto the floor, and cried in the rain saying goodbye to a coworker the day he retired.

That’s the difference. I know the Hokuriku region the way you know a place you’ve lived, not the way you know a place you read about the night before you booked it.

Why I built Barefoot Surfer

Most Japan content online now is the same recycled list, written by people who flew in for a week or generated by AI that has never been anywhere. You can feel it. It’s vague where it should be specific and confident where it should be honest.

I built this site to be the opposite. First-hand or it doesn’t go in. If I haven’t been somewhere, I tell you, and I tell you what I do and don’t actually know about it. If a famous spot is overrated, I say that too. Kenrokuen at midday is mediocre, go at the free dawn window or skip it. Kanazawa’s seafood reputation is overstated, the better bay is Toyama. I’d rather lose your click than waste one of your days.

That honesty is the entire point. It’s also the one thing a content farm can’t copy.

Who I write for

You’re taking the big trip. Maybe it’s one you’ve been putting off for years. You’re careful with money, but you won’t cheap out on the once-in-a-lifetime parts. You’ve got the tabs open and you genuinely can’t tell the real advice from the filler, and the part that stings isn’t overpaying, it’s the thought of burning one irreplaceable day on something hollow.

That’s who I write for. I’m the friend who actually lived there, telling you straight what’s worth your days and what isn’t, so you can stop auditing the decision and make it.

Where I am now

I’m in Da Nang, Vietnam, as of May 2026. Still surfing, still riding, still writing this site every morning. Japan is the deep well I draw from. Vietnam is the chapter I’m living now, which means the Da Nang advice here is as current and first-hand as the Hokuriku advice.

Quick answers

Who is behind Barefoot Surfer?

Barefoot Surfer is written by William Kazuma Branham, a half-Japanese, half-American dual citizen who lived in Toyama, Japan for almost three years and now bases in Da Nang, Vietnam. Every article is first-hand.

Does William actually speak Japanese?

Yes. I speak conversational Japanese, learned by living and working in a traditional Japanese restaurant in Toyama, not from a phone app. It’s why I can tell you what the local who served you actually said, and what the sign you can’t read actually means.

Has he been to the places he writes about?

If I write about a place in the first person, I’ve been there. When I haven’t, I say so plainly and tell you what I do and don’t actually know about it. That line is the whole reason this site exists.

Start here

Before you plan another day of your trip, grab my free trip-planning checklist. It’s the exact framework I’d use myself, built from three years of living it, made to stop the 11pm tab-spiral and get you to a decision.

→ Get the free trip-planning checklist

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