What this is for

We need Reels ideas that actually get watched. Until now we picked topics by taste — someone suggests something, it sounds interesting, we film it, and often nobody watches. A filming day is expensive. An idea is free.

This tool replaces taste with two real signals: something that genuinely confused a real person (that's you), and what people actually type into Google. You do not need to know anything about marketing to use it.

The one rule worth remembering

Who “she” is

A woman aged roughly 30 to 60, in the United States, the United Kingdom or Australia, either planning a trip to Japan or already on one. Roughly your mother's age, and from your country.

This matters because the question is never “do I find this interesting”. It is “would she”. That is why the form asks whether you would send it to your mother — it is a real question with a real answer, not a marketing exercise.

Why you are the right person to find these

You are living in Japan for the first time, and you come from the same country as our viewers. Right now things still confuse you. In a few weeks you will have got used to them and stop noticing. That is exactly what makes this a job only you can do, and only for a short while.

So do not filter. Do not decide whether something is “relevant to travel”. Buying medicine, an ATM that refused your card, the bins, a queue you joined wrongly, a sign you could not read — write it down and let us decide what is useful.

How to use it — four minutes per idea

1. Your name. So we know who found it. If your idea becomes a video you get asked along to the shoot.
2. What did you struggle with? Write what actually happened, to you, in plain sentences. “I got to the shinkansen gate with a big suitcase and was told I needed a luggage reservation.” “Tourists probably find trains confusing.”
3. What did you search when it happened? This is the most important box on the form. Keep it to one or two words. This is the mistake everyone makes. shinkansen · suica · konbini · tax free · pharmacy how do I take a big suitcase on the shinkansen in Japan

   Short words work because the tool looks up what people type after them. Long sentences return nothing.

4. The rest. Where in a trip it happens, what went wrong because you didn't know, what you wish you had known, and whether you'd send it to your mother. Then press Check it.

What comes back

The important part is the list of real Google searches that start with your words. For shinkansen there are over a hundred of them, including:

These are not our guesses. They are what real people typed. The ones about rules, costs, “do I need to…” and “A vs B” are shown in their own group, because those are the ones where not knowing costs her something. Start there.

You will also see numbers: how much people search it, what a channel our size typically gets on that subject, how many videos already exist, and whether we would get buried. Sometimes the numbers are unavailable — YouTube limits us to about a hundred checks a day and they reset at 5pm Japan time. When that happens everything else still works.

Then settle on the words and write the idea

Press Use this on whichever search wording fits best — it re-checks with those words. When you are happy, write one or two sentences on what the video should actually say, and save it.

Every entry is saved, including the ones the tool says no to. Finding out what does not work is part of the job. Koh, Liza and Claire go through the list each week and choose what gets filmed.

Checking it against an official source

The last box asks for the official page you checked — the railway's own site, immigration, the shop. It is optional, but it is worth doing, and here is why.

Rules in Japan change, and a lot of travel content online is quietly out of date. If we can put “checked in July 2026” on a video, we are saying something almost nobody else can say. Being the channel that actually verified is worth more than being the first to post. We date-stamp whatever you paste, so that claim stays honest.

If you cannot find an official page, say so in the idea box. “I could not confirm this” is useful information, not a failure — it usually means the subject is confusing for a reason.

How this makes Reels easier

This is the point of the whole thing. One confirmed search phrase is one Reel. You are not inventing a video from nothing — you are answering a question people are already asking.

Leaving a little unanswered is deliberate. We want her thinking “I want to hear more from these people” — that is what turns a viewer into a follower. A Reel that closes the subject gets watched once and forgotten.

Do this often enough, across enough of the unavoidable parts of a trip, and the channel stops being “some travel videos” and becomes the place you go so nothing goes wrong in Japan. That is what we are building, one entry at a time.

How many, and how often

Around ten a week each. Volume beats polish here — a rough entry that names a real problem is worth more than a beautifully written one about something optional. If something confuses you today, put it in today, while it still confuses you.

If something goes wrong

← Back to finding ideas