About What's On Japan

My name is Adrian Cox. I have lived in Japan for eight years, having first visited as a high school exchange student long before I ever imagined I would one day call it home. My wife is Japanese, my son was born here, and Japan has been woven into my life for as long as I can remember.

Despite all of that, I still regularly had no idea what was going on around me.

Not because nothing was happening — quite the opposite. Japan is one of the most event-rich countries on earth. Festivals, art shows, food events, live music, cultural ceremonies, underground happenings — something is always going on, in every city, at every level. The problem is that almost all of it exists entirely in Japanese. On Japanese websites, Japanese social media, Japanese flyers on Japanese noticeboards. If you cannot read it, it is effectively invisible.

I would walk into a park and discover a festival already in full swing, with no idea how everyone else knew about it. I would hear about an art show through word of mouth and think — if nobody had told me, I would have missed it entirely. That feeling, repeated enough times, eventually becomes the seed of an idea.

My ongoing photography project, Mystics of Japan, has taken me inside traditions most outsiders never encounter — the yamabushi of Shugendo, fire-walking ceremonies, mountain pilgrimages, secretive rituals conducted far from any tourist trail. That work has given me an unusual perspective on this country: that its most interesting, most moving, and most human moments are almost always the ones that never get translated. What's On Japan exists to change that.

We scan Japanese-language sources across the country every day — venue websites, ticketing platforms, local event pages, city announcements — translate them into English, and put them in one place. The events here are ones that most English-speaking visitors and residents would never find on their own, not because they are hidden, but because they were simply never intended to reach a non-Japanese audience.

Japan rewards the people who look beneath the surface. This site is an attempt to make that easier for everyone.