Delaina at Shiragane Blue Pond Bie while filming on location for Have Fun in Hokkaido
Hi! I’m Delaina, an American ex-pat and long-term resident of Sapporo, living for more than two decades in Hokkaido, Japan. If you’ve been in the area since then, you may have heard my voice announcing “the next stop is Sapporo station” on JR trains and other sundry places. Back in the spring of 2020, when I first realized how completely the Covid-19 pandemic was going to obliterate my work in travel reporting and live music performance, I started toying around with the idea of starting a podcast.
I posted about it on Facebook asking if it would be a good idea to have a cohost and that’s when my friend Shinya Iles raised his digital hand to join in my project.
Knowing my own “fly by the seat of my pants” character well, it only seemed appropriate to choose a theme that would not only be fun, spontaneous, but also sustainable- hence the “Anything Goes” in the title. “Hokkaido” naturally came in because I’ve lived here longer than anywhere else in the world, and well, it rhymes!
Including video in the podcast seemed a no-brainer to me when it was nearly as easy as turning on a camera to do so. Nearly. Of course editing videos to a high or even moderate quality takes a lot of time and dedication, but I was only aimming for something simple, which is what you get in the first season.
Now, as season two begins, there will be some big and little changes- one of those being that my cohost Shinya has moved so I will be flying this ship solo for the time being. Another big chang is the name. Drumroll, please…welcome to the Anything Goes_Japan! Audio and Video Podcast!!
You see, when the Foreign Corespondents Club Japan asked me to give a presentation on Hokkaido based on the podcast, along with the creator of Fukuoka Now! I suddenly envisioned a myriad of crossover podcasts with titles like “Anything Goes Fukuoka, Japan” and “Anything Goes Osaka, Japan”. The blank in “Anything Goes_Japan” isn’t just an Instagram quirk. It’s an intentional nod towards expanding the podcast to regions beyond Hokkaido, but never fear, it will continue to be Hokkaido heavy with Sapporo as the home base.
*** A little disclaimer here, we (or rather me) at the Anything Goes_Japan Video & Audio Podcast welcome our guests to express their own opinions, but we do not necessarily share or support those opinions. This is a very non-judgy sort of place, so please be respectful and above all kind in your comments and interactions here. More than anything, we hope that the Anything Goes_Japan podcast will be a platform to showcase not only the already well-known food, nature, culture, and beauty of Japan, but also the amazing variety of people who live here and make up our communities.
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