“This article is largely written for me as a public manifesto of what I intend to do with my personal brand, A Different Side of Japan, going forward.
However, if you want to learn about my thoughts on travel writing in the age of AI and geopolitical upheaval, it’s sure to be a good, but harrowing read.”
— Donny Kimball
Recently, I just did something that every foreign national living in Japan has to do in some shape or form — renew my damn resident card. While I hope to one day take Japanese citizenship, doing so is a nightmare level of paperwork that I simply don’t have time for. So, just like every other non-Japanese person residing in Japan has to do during some time of the year, I schelped my sorry behind over to Shinagawa to go visit the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau. Since these types of updates are often many years apart, the timeline got me thinking. Will I still even be relevant to Japan when the deadline to do this comes around again?
If AI’s rapid rate of evolution doesn’t fill you with a deep sense of existential dread, you’ve either buried your head so deep in the proverbial sand that you are completely missing what’s going on or you’re too late in your years for it to matter all that much. In either case, I am extremely envious of you. For what it’s worth, I was an extremely early adopter of ChatGPT in 2022 when it came out and have strived to be on the bleeding edge ever since in my work as a fractional CMO and freelance media buyer. Alas, I would be lying to you if I said my chest doesn’t literally seize up and tighten when I think about how aggressively I need to sprint just to stay relevant in this new coming age.
Rather humblingly, I now find myself asking before doing any task if I can prompt my way to the result somehow. In Claude Code, I have painstakingly set up AI operating systems for every part of my life. Each client now gets their own agentic workflow and all I do is prompt my way to results in VS Code (which is my hardware of choice as of this writing). The only thing that I, the bumbling human Donny Kimball, actually do beyond setting all this up is act as an arbiter of direction and taste. The various LLMs are already basically better at everything else and I’d wager anyone who disagrees just isn’t high enough up on the peak of AI potential to really see their full capabilities.
Agentic AI & Blogging about Japan
But what does this have to do with creating travel content about Japan’s hidden gems? Well, everything actually. You see, we are already seeing the degradation of old ways of finding information. Instead of searching for articles like before, users now just turn to the AI overview in Google to find their answers. And, if that doesn’t work, one further tap opens up the Gemini-powered AI Mode where you can prompt the LLM further for more details. Of course, all of this assumes someone even goes to Google in the first place. I mean, why bother doing research yourself when a tool like Grok can scan the internet as well as conversations in real time on 𝕏 to help you find what you’re actually looking for?
Over on social media, things are no better. More and more, what we see on the TikTok FYP or in the Instagram Reels feed is, as the English speaking world has decided to call it, AI slop (though it’s getting scarily better by the day). While I have largely refrained from venturing into this space with my own Japan content, even I have sneakily used AI to animate an old image of somewhere like sections of the Kirishima Mountain Range that are currently off limits due to volcanic activity. Already, AI is able to churn out videos that even the most sceptical audiences would have trouble discerning from real footage and this is the worst the various tools will ever be. In other words, they are only going to get better from here on out.
Watching all of this play out from high up on the peak of AI adoption has been… well, “interesting.” That is undoubtedly the wrong word but the English language doesn’t really have an easy way to convey that feeling when the situation becomes so absurdly unwinnable that you just start laughing, because acknowledging it any other way would be too much. Whether it’s next year or a decade down the road, AI is coming for all of us in some way or form. And, the only way to continue to be relevant is to sprint like you’re running in the Red Queen’s race. Because, and let’s face the facts here, you are — at least until the promised utopia AI will eventually usher in arrives.
But, dear reader, I digress. You’re not here for dread-inducing rants about AI taking all of our jobs. No, you’re here to learn all about Japan’s hidden gems. While I won’t say that this article is going to contain much about where to go in a country now heavily afflicted with overtourism, what I will put to paper is what I intend to do to stay relevant and what that means for all of you. You see, while there will come a day when our AI overlords eventually take this as well, for the time being, human beings are still far better at a few things. Namely, AI cannot yet replicate true taste, community, or the lived experience of having boots on the ground, so to speak. Just as with my agentic workflows, they are now the only things I can offer you.
Why I Quit the OnlyFAMs Game
If you recall, I announced to the world on my 40th birthday that I’d be quitting what I jadedly called the OnlyFAMs game. Basically, as a result of being so burned out from how ineffectively the Japanese government wastes taxpayer money, I decided to just outright decline any inbound partnerships. Participating in this ultimately futile attempt to outsource the problem of regional promotion to content creators like myself was making me increasingly toxic and I knew I needed to get as far away as possible from the incompetence. While I still had a few gigs when I published that bombastic expose on the travel influencer industry, my days of going on government sponsored trips are now behind me.
Since then though, I’ve been thinking. After having renounced FAM trips as a means of monetization, what am I even creating content for anymore? It’s now been a full decade since I published my first piece and, while I love traversing Japan, that alone isn’t a justification for spending all of my time, money, and energy on what would otherwise now largely be a passion project. After all, in the age of AI, everyone out there has a digital concierge at their fingertips that can easily answer all queries like where should I go in Shikoku. My previous role as a trailblazer who goes out into the countryside and packages places in an easy-to-visit manner is no longer needed. If I couldn’t come up with a new reason to keep documenting it, then the honest answer was that it might just be time to call it a good run.
What I can offer, and I don’t see this changing anytime soon, is taste, editorial judgment, and a clear sense of why you should visit one place over another. When you think about it, LLMs are all just basically bodiless brains with unbounded knowledge and no way to interact with the world. While they may always be able to beat me at the what from here on out, the sole thing I now bring to the table is the fact that I have actually been there myself and have lived experience. That, my friends, is something that LLMs will never be able to do and is my real moat as a travel writer, at least until AI gets embodied in robots.
Also, seeing as we are very much running the Red Queen’s race right now, I want to use my personal brand as something of a consequence-free sandbox for implementing AI, or perhaps more accurately, a kind of forge. It’s one thing to talk about these tools and another to actually use them in a way that produces something worth consuming. While I have no intention of building a one-man company worth billions like MEDVi, by tying this to a real output that people can judge, I’m effectively forcing myself to learn how to use AI without defaulting to slop. Without something real on the line, this just becomes theory.
Obviously, I am not looking to go make the next GLP-1 weight-loss company like MEDVi as a solopreneur to produce numbers like that, but what I do need is an environment to aggressively test AI and agentic workflows. And while I am not going to be serving you up unedited AI slop anytime soon here on the blog, you can bet your behind I’ll be using it for coding, research, and much more behind the scenes. At the end of the day, my mission to document Japan for all has always been a way for me to stay constantly in the trenches and ensure that I am never the guy making marketing calls without having true dirt under my fingernails from doing the work myself.
A One-Man Media Company
So, what’s the new objective for A Different Side of Japan then? Put simply, a one-man Condé Nast-like publishing empire that leverages AI to exponentially scale that which should, and indeed must, remain human. With AI basically driving the cost of information to zero, my role becomes not to help you discover somewhere but to instead convince you of why you ought to go in the first place with the kind of storytelling only someone who has actually been there can produce. Amidst an endless sea of AI recommendations and filler content, this is one thing that cannot yet be replaced by LLMs.
Additionally, this is also going to be a play whereby I intimately learn the ins and outs of AEO (Agentic Engine Optimization) to survive the coming storm of LLM disruption. As noted by my number of high-ranking articles in Google, writing for both humans and search engines is my forte but as noted before, fewer and fewer people are actually even browsing the search results, making the potency of SEO largely something of the past. In addition to building a unique editorial brand around a certain kind of style, angling my work to be at the absolute forefront of AEO is also going to be a way in which this body of work about Japan is a test case for how to be trusted by LLMs.
In a lot of ways, this shift is also me finally embracing the path of a publisher instead of masquerading as a creator like I have been. While those two things may seem confusingly similar at first, they are actually fundamentally different in the ways that they operate. A creator is looking to perform for an audience in a way that generates reach organically. They create parasocial bonds with fans and are personality-led. I, on the other hand, have largely always operated as a publisher on the backend despite the entire operation being run in my name. On the surface, this all looks like a creator but the reality is that the brand has always operated as a publishing entity with me as its public face.
For a long time now, I have been straddling the fence between being a full-on publisher and working as a creator for hire. Originally, I was against doing FAM trips altogether but acquiesced during the pandemic when overseas creators couldn’t be flown in. Eventually though, the inexorable incompetence that plagues local government bureaucracy in Japan made me realize that these kinds of partnerships are not conducive to actually bringing people off of the beaten path. At best, they are some vague awareness building effort that is soon forgotten to the endless feed of social media slop, much of it now generated wholly by AI.
What I am really trying to do here is become exceptionally good at the meta skill of using AI to coproduce something that still feels unmistakably human. Not in the sense of churning out more content faster than the next guy, but in leveraging these agentic tools to handle everything mechanical so that what remains is taste, lived experience, and narrative that can’t be replicated. If I can get that right, then this stops being just a Japan travel blog and instead becomes a proving ground for how to actually use AI without losing the very thing that makes any of this worth consuming in the first place. In a world that feels like it’s shifting under our feet in more ways than one, that’s a skill I don’t think I can afford not to develop.
The Path of the Publisher
Nowadays, it’s really hard to ignore the fact that we are entering a new era of history. On a global scale, the hegemonic dominance of the United States that has existed for the past decade is coming to an end, and previous models of how the world worked are starting to fail en masse in ways that feel increasingly hard to ignore. As all of this is happening, we’re also seeing the emergence of the most disruptive technology humans have ever created in AI. At least for the time being though, there will be a subset of people with the means and desire for authentic travel to Japan, and my job as a publisher is to ensure that they have all they need to do just that.
Moving forward, I am going to be looking to leverage AI to scale the living hell out of myself as a human who has actually been there to produce some premium travel products. These will be tailored itineraries and actionable information that makes for bad content but is exactly what someone who wants to visit a locale like the Iya Valley would need. From nitty gritty logistics to where to stay, these guides will cover everything you could ever want to know about the physical mechanics of getting far off the beaten path in Japan. The goal of these curated products is to deliver that which AI cannot through information that only someone who has been there can provide. More than anything though, this gives me something concrete to build against instead of just thinking about how all of this might work.
I’ve long put off creating something like this due to the limits of what a human being can do in a day. As a fractional CMO for a number of Japanese SMEs as well as a one-man publisher, my time is already almost entirely accounted for. And yet, somehow I always felt that the world needed 10x more out of me, despite the fact that I literally do nothing but work these days. This is an opportunity to use the interstice between the looming imperative to master AI’s potential and my personal brand to future-proof myself while also being of service to Japan. More precisely, it’s the chance to fuck around in my own sandbox without the risk of finding out on the client’s dime.
Now, I bet there is someone out there who is rolling their eyes right now, thinking that Donny is about to ship them a whole lot of AI slop, just with a premium price tag attached to it. Honestly, nothing could be further from the truth, and I am about as artisanal as it comes with these sorts of things. The shift I am looking to make here is to use AI to unlock my latent and deeply human potential that’s currently capped by the number of hours there are in a day. Here, I am talking about the literal mechanics of doing something like a guidebook layout that would take hours of my time to do manually in Canva but can be prompted into perfection in mere minutes.
In addition to these premium done-for-you travel itineraries, I think the writing is on the wall when it comes to the need to build a community. In the age of agentic AI, the only thing that scales is, paradoxically, human-to-human connection. While we might get facts and figures from AI, we still crave that personal touch when it comes to recommendations that LLMs can’t recreate. So, as social media feeds continue to devolve entirely into algorithmically recommended crap and long-form writing gets replaced by AI-generated summaries in Google search, my weekly newsletter is really the final bastion I have right now of any sort of community.
Given how much time it would take to actually do it right, I’ve held off on building a proper community on a platform like Skool. However, as I write this, it’s clear as day that I need some sort of place where we can all interact that isn’t governed by AI or algorithms. For some people, they scale their humanity via live performances on YouTube and whatnot, acts that AI can never replace. Since I have no such layer to use as a human moat around myself, the next best thing I can do is directly connect all of you with both me and each other in some form of community that isn’t just the comment section of a post. That way, we can all share our Japan travel experiences with one another.
While this switch towards embracing being a publisher with premium offerings might sound like me trying to monetize the front end of a brand that was always promised to be free, that isn’t actually the case. As I wrote about in that Quitting OnlyFAMs piece back in November, I intend to use any and all proceeds to fund the pro bono consulting that I do for Japanese craftsmen. While AI has greatly enhanced my ability to help these kind but often stubborn souls start the journey of digital transformation, getting a foot in the door often involves a fair bit of face time in the countryside. So, to scale those efforts, I plan to reinvest whatever these new efforts bring in back into keeping as many of the crafts from dying as I can.
Essentially, this is also me replacing the old model. For years, I effectively used FAM trips as a way to subsidize the volunteer consulting I was doing. With that now off the table, I need a different system. So instead of relying on gigs, the idea is to turn this into something more like a game: use AI to scale what only I can produce, have the output generate real economic value, and use that to put some skin in the game. While I don’t need any of the revenue, it’s proof that the model works, and more importantly, it gives me a real feedback loop to measure against. And if it does, then whatever comes out of it can be funneled back into supporting the very craftsmen and traditions that are most at risk of ending up like the dodo.
The End of Everything or a New Dawn
If any of you are still with me after spilling so much ink on what is coming with AI, know that writing this has been very therapeutic. We are living through one of the most tumultuous times since World War II, and that’s not a comparison I make lightly. At the same time as we’ve let the genie out of the bottle on the most disruptive technology to date, the geopolitical game board is being reshaped right in front of our faces. Right now, the United States and China are caught in Thucydides’ Trap, and historically only a select few superpowers have ever avoided a kinetic war when put in similar predicaments.
As if this weren’t enough, the United States’ fiscal irresponsibility (let alone its diplomacy) threatens to tear to shreds the fabric of the global economy due to the collective reliance on the dollar. We are all in for the ride of our lives in the next few years, and my recent trip to the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau in Shinagawa really put the timeline of what’s to come into perspective for me. Perhaps more accurately, it scared the living shit out of me to know that by the time I need to go back there again, the world will not look anything like it did even just a year ago. As they say, the times they are a-changin’.
Like that misattributed ancient Chinese curse says, we are definitely afflicted with living in interesting times right now. At the end of the day, I am but one mere Japan travel writer and expat living in a country that is increasingly feeling fatigued with foreigners. For a while, I actually considered throwing in the towel, as after all, I am simultaneously both crusading against overtourism while hypocritically promoting the country to the world. Following my exit from the influencer candidate pool, I struggled for a while with why I was even continuing to do this beyond some vague sense of duty to showcase Japan’s lesser-known sides.
With the literal need to sprint as hard as I possibly can just to keep up with the AI arms race though, I feel like I am actually in the perfect place to leverage what I do as a publisher to constantly learn how to stay human when co-producing with LLMs. I’ve never wanted to turn A Different Side of Japan into my main gig. However, seeing as I stand at a unique nexus of disparate and largely unconnected areas like digital marketing, Japan content creation, and online commerce, I feel like I need to see how far I can go, all the while donating any yen I make back into keeping Japan’s traditional arts afloat just a little longer.
I am just one guy living his best life in Japan and have no control over the future or what that means for our world, especially as things seem to be trending in a direction that feels increasingly uncertain by the day. For all I know, the convenient interconnectedness of the last century will soon start to crumble as international lines are redrawn and free travel becomes naught but a distant memory. In the meantime though, I’m going to do all I can to connect the right people who want to visit Japan’s countryside with the information they need to do so for as long as I can. At least for the immediate future, there are plenty of people out there who are clamoring for an overtourism-free experience of Japan.
In closing, this decision to go in a new direction has all been the result of about six months of soul searching and feeling completely lost. For a while there, I genuinely didn’t know what this was supposed to be anymore or if it even made sense to continue at all. Stripping away the old incentives and watching AI evolve so quickly forced me to confront the uncomfortable reality that what had worked for years was no longer enough to justify keeping the lights on. Sitting with that during late-night walks, and without immediately jumping to a new answer, was honestly one of the harder parts of this whole process.
Ultimately, I’ll likely fall on my face and fail miserably when it comes to implementing the things I’ve outlined here, but it’s also the only rational path for me as a publisher. The Red Queen’s race is very real, and if I want to still be useful to Japan by the time I next need to go to that godforsaken place in Shinagawa to renew my residence card, I’ve got to give the next few years my all. Thankfully, due to the decade that I’ve been running A Different Side of Japan, I am in the perfect place to experiment as a solo publisher. When the AI agents finally do come for us all, I’ll likely be one of the last few men standing with something to actually still contribute.
Put another way, what I am really aiming to do is see if I can use AI to scale something that is still “me” and fundamentally human, generate real economic value from it, and use that as a kind of scoreboard. Not for the sake of making money in and of itself (I have an entirely different career track for that), but as proof that this model actually works and can be exported to client projects. If it doesn’t work, so be it, but if it does, then I can take whatever that system produces and funnel it back into supporting the very craftsmen and traditions that are most at risk of being swept away by the same agentic forces I’m trying to learn to harness.
Until next time travelers…
