How far can you go without a map and smartphone in Japan? US gamer Ludwig Ahgren tries to find out
These are the rules American game streamer Ludwig Ahgren and his YouTuber buddy Michael Reeves have imposed on themselves as they embark on a journey to traverse Japan on motorbikes.
The friends ditched the smartphones that are a staple of their generation and set off without so much as a guidebook.
That left them no option but to mingle with locals to get directions, sparking encounters that have unlocked a full display of friendliness from Japanese people.
The journey from Cape Sata at the southern tip of Kyushu to Cape Soya, the northernmost point of Hokkaido, is about 2,000 miles – or it would be, if they hadn't gotten lost already.
It took them two weeks to complete the trip, according to a finale video posted Saturday on Ahgren's YouTube channel. A team had been responsible for tracking the pair and uploading videos of the journey since they hit the road two weeks ago, enjoying some of Japan's most unique scenery, culture and cuisine along the way.
It was no easy quest, acknowledged Ahgren, one of the world's most successful game streamers with 6.7 million subscribers on YouTube. 'We are doing this the hard way,' he quipped in a video before hopping on his motorbike.
'I've realized I have become addicted to this thing,' he said in the video, referring to his smartphone. 'But now, I can't use it to go on Yelp to find the best place to eat, Google Maps to figure out how to get there, Google Translate to figure out what to order when I get there.'
CNN reached out to the pair during their trip but did not hear back – probably a sign they didn't have their smartphone on.
They cruised through the bustling capital Tokyo, the tree-blanketed countryside of Miyazaki, fed crackers to deer in Nara, and caught a glimpse of cherry blossoms in Shizuoka – where they also ate a picnic against the backdrop of Mount Fuji.
Throughout their journey, they sampled an abundance of Japanese food from udon noodles to okonomiyaki, a savory pancake dish from Osaka. When they fell behind schedule, they grabbed quick bites from Japan's ubiquitous convenience stores or cup noodles from vending machines.
But the journey was not without its setbacks.
With no map, they mistook Miyazaki in southeastern Kyushu for Shikoku, Japan's fourth-biggest island, which is linked by bridges to the country's major island. They turned up in the city, only to find they could not be more lost.
The pair also hoped to check out a sumo wrestling match. They decided to park the bikes and travel by public transport but, without a smartphone, it took them three hours to navigate Japan's notoriously headache-triggering train system.
When they eventually arrived at Osaka's Edion Arena, they saw a sign, written in English. 'Tickets sold out,' it said.
Ahgren initially relied on instinct to guess what Japanese people were saying, according to his YouTube videos. Locals went out of their way to help, doing everything they could to overcome the language barrier.
'Ichiban' – meaning 'number one' or 'the best' – became Ahgren's favorite Japanese word when he asked for hotel and restaurant recommendations, and 'nan-jikan' – 'how many hours?' – when he needed information about his journey.
One man bought the pair coffee at a convenience store before giving them directions with his car. And a woman tried to explain to them that the nearest hotel was next to a sports ground by gesturing a baseball swing.
But by day eight, Ahgren was touting how staff at a restaurant complimented him on his language skills with 'nihongo jouzu' – 'good Japanese.'
'They freaking said it,' he said proudly in a video.
Ahgren and Reeves' style of travel strikes a stark contrast to a group of influencers who previously raised eyebrows in the country for their disruptive stunts.
Jeffrey Hall, special lecturer at Kanda University of International Studies in Japan, said there has been rising sentiment in the country against misbehaving tourists – including social media influencers – as the number of visitors hit a record high.
'There is a phenomenon of people who come here to make content that is provocative and annoying to other people around them… That particular type of nuisance YouTuber or nuisance influencer have really damaged the image of foreign influencers in general,' he said.
They included American live-streamer Ramsey Khalid Ismael, better known by his online alias 'Johnny Somali,' who was arrested in late 2023 for breaking into a construction site in Osaka. He also sparked outrage by posting videos of himself taunting commuters about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
That year, a railway company also launched a probe against four popular YouTubers over their stunt to evade fares on public transport, according to local media.
But Ahgren and Reeves' trip had spotlighted parts of Japan less well known by international tourists, and their use of simple Japanese would be appreciated by locals, Hall said.
Ahgren, who often points the camera away when talking to people, is different from the 'nuisance travelers,' as he shows better understanding of social norms, one of which is not to film people without their permission, he added.
'That's something that a lot of American streamers do without even thinking of the consequences, but in Japan people value their privacy very much,' he said.
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Jack Mandala, the CEO of Seamless Air Alliance, a standards organization for in-flight connectivity, told me that air-to-ground works like your cellphone—the bottom of the plane needs a view (metaphorically speaking) of base stations from the air. That's why, for a time, you could use in-flight internet only over 10,000 feet. It's also why the service is unreliable. Just like your cellphone might hit a dead spot, so can your airplane. Air-to-ground bandwidth was limited, meaning that the service would get worse as more people on a plane used it. And finally, air-to-ground service operates extremely slowly when it sends data down to the ground—this is why sending an email attachment or texting an image from a plane can take an eternity, before possibly failing completely. Going up instead of down mostly solved these issues. Around the time of Louis C.K.'s Conan bit, airlines began offering internet service to planes via satellite communication. The improved speed and reliability allowed JetBlue to provide the industry's first free in-flight internet to commercial passengers, in 2013. According to Mandala, satellite services are easier to scale as more planes adopt them and more passengers use them. Satellite also has the benefit of being usable over water, in bad weather, and on the ground. The problem is that having viable technology is different from rolling it out seamlessly everywhere. Doing so requires investing in the equipment and service, and that requires time and money. In 2019, Delta, for instance, made a commitment to roll out free Wi-Fi across its entire fleet. Joseph Eddy, the airline's director of cabin and in-flight entertainment and connectivity, told me that Delta's effort is still ongoing. Unlike hotels or convention centers, Eddy reminded me, aircraft are highly regulated. Each type of aircraft needs to be configured differently, and a big airline such as Delta—or American, which told me it will also soon have 1,500 aircraft of its own with Wi-Fi service—requires some planning. 'We need to make software upgrades. We need to make sure we have all the satellite coverage that we need to ensure that we have enough capacity and the experience is as good as possible,' Heather Garboden, American Airlines' chief customer officer, told me. But, hold up: American is the carrier I fly most these days, and I keep finding myself unable to use the internet. Garboden confirmed that American is still transitioning its regional jets to satellite service—many are still using air-to-ground. And that's exactly the kind of plane I was on from New York. Delta's Eddy told me that its regional jets and some short-haul planes, including the Boeing 717, are also still operating on air-to-ground service. In both cases, the airlines made a deliberate choice to invest first in the routes and planes that carry the most passengers—big, mainline jets. That means that if you're flying on a long flight across or between continents, or on an airline with fewer types of planes, such as JetBlue or Southwest, you might have a better shot at reliable internet. And if you're on a small or regional jet, chances are greater that the Wi-Fi won't work, or won't work well. Eddy told me that Bombardier CRJ regional jets have proved more troubling to certify for the satellite antennas that sit on top of the fuselage, because of the aircraft's rear-mounted engines. 'You can't allow any form of debris to fly off the antenna at all,' he said. If you board a plane and Wi-Fi isn't available on the ground, that's a sign that your aircraft is still using air-to-ground service. Good luck. * * * Beyond the technology itself, the expectation of always being connected is also driving flier perceptions of in-flight internet performance. Fliers are only now starting to take in-flight internet access as a given, rather than viewing it as a surcharged luxury. Eddy thinks the tide started to turn during COVID. Even though people weren't flying as much, everyone became more familiar with digital tools—Zoom, but also Slack, Teams, Google Docs—that might once have been lesser known. When travel resumed, those expectations made in-flight Wi-Fi 'significantly more important,' Eddy said. American Airlines' Garboden added that a younger, always-online generation is buying tickets now—26 percent of the airline's customers are Gen Z and younger, she told me. For both airlines, the evolution of in-flight entertainment has reinforced the need for internet service. American delivers its movies and shows directly to its passengers' devices; once those people are already staring at their phones, habit makes them expect to be able to switch to email or a social-media app. But Delta, which offers seatback screens on most of its planes, believes that having a television in front of you also now implies the need for internet. 'If you look at the younger generations, they're at home watching Netflix and they're playing on their phone. They're doing both almost constantly,' Eddy said, adding that 20 percent of Delta's Wi-Fi customers use more than one device at a time. Competition and passenger expectations may be the key to making in-flight internet work for good. After 9/11, the domestic airline industry devolved into pure carriage, stripping away all comforts in the name of safety—and profit. That appears to be changing. Nomadix, the company that invented the enter-your-name-and-room-number hotel internet service more than 25 years ago, told me that the quality of Wi-Fi is one of the top three factors in customer satisfaction at every hotel property. That's because hotels are in the hospitality business, and catering to customer comfort (not to mention facilitating work for business travelers) is core to their success. Airlines haven't been as concerned with making flyers content in the cabin, but both Delta and American admitted that in-flight internet service is transitioning from an amenity into part of the hard product. 'You would expect that your seat is there, right? Wi-Fi has become that for us,' Eddy said. Almost overnight, he told me, Wi-Fi went from having no impact on people choosing Delta to being 'more important than flight times and airports.' For now, consistency is the missing ingredient. This is what Louis C.K. failed to grasp: The issue has never been the flying public's unwillingness to marvel at the miracles of human invention, but rather, the fact that carriers appear to make promises and then fail to deliver on them. Now that customer expectations, technological feasibility, and airline investments all align, it should just be a matter of time before the air is as well connected as the ground. But how much time? Delta initially promised 'fast, free Wi-Fi' across its global fleet by the end of 2024, but now the airline thinks reaching that milestone will take until the first half of 2026. Garboden said American is on track for early 2026. United also plans to offer free satellite Wi-Fi across its entire fleet, but offered no projected date for full rollout. Like cabin safety or timely arrival, until every passenger on every flight feels confident that the internet will take off along with their bodies and their luggage, the service doesn't really exist, because it can't be relied upon. Internet in the air is both a concrete advancement that's mature and widespread, and a conceptual one frequently deferred into the future. That future may come, and perhaps even soon. Or it might not. Just like the Wi-Fi on your next flight.
