A Life of Detours 

Tsuyoshi Tagawa, known as Yoshi  is one of the people behind the journeys of Japan Sideways. He helps decide not only where we go, but how we travel — often choosing to step beyond the famous places and look for a different side of Japan.

That way of traveling has a lot to do with the way Yoshi himself has lived.

Born and raised in Osaka, he was a city kid who dreamed about life in the countryside. He entered university, but soon began questioning the conventional path in Japan: graduate, find a company job, and follow a route that seemed already laid out.
So he decided to leave Japan.

His first destination was Canada. 

He was young and curious, and wanted to see how far he could go. From Canada, that curiosity eventually took him to New York, where he tried to make a life as a musician.

Those years did not give him a simple answer about what he should become. But by pushing himself into unfamiliar places, he began to understand what he could do, what he could not yet do, and what mattered to him.

For that moment in his life, he had gone as far as he could. So he returned to Japan and began again.

Back home, he worked for an advertising and design company, but started wondering whether he wanted to spend his life so far removed from the things people actually need. Agriculture attracted him, and he moved to Nagano, where he spent six months living and working on a farm.

It was not quite the farming life he had imagined. The farm was a large commercial operation, focused on producing and selling more. Yoshi had pictured something closer to nature.

Still, the experience stayed with him. He learned what farming really involved, and came away feeling that growing enough food for his own life was something he could one day do.

The dream was put aside for the time being.

This is a pattern in Yoshi's life: he tries things. Sometimes they become detours. But almost nothing is wasted.

After returning to Osaka and moving through several jobs, Yoshi became a cabin attendant in 1996 and

moved to Hong Kong.

For more than twenty years, his work took him around the world — London, Amsterdam, Rome, Milan, New York, Los Angeles, Paro, and many other cities, often again and again.

And something changed when he began returning to the same places.
On a first visit, you see the famous sights. After a few visits, you start looking farther out. You take another train, walk another neighborhood, and see what is beyond the center.
Yoshi began to feel that major cities around the world were becoming increasingly similar. The character of a country often became clearer when he left the biggest cities behind.

Eventually he realized that Japan was no different.
Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya — each has its own character. But in many parts of these large cities, the same modern buildings, shopping complexes and chain stores can make one place begin to look much like another.
Even in a historic city like Kyoto, there are areas where, at a glance, you could just as easily be in another Japanese city.

Travel farther into smaller towns and rural communities, though, and the differences become harder to miss. That is often where Yoshi feels the character of a place comes through most clearly

Yoshi never intended to spend his entire life in the air.

In 2019, he left the airline and returned to Japan with his wife, Mie.
It was finally time to return to a dream he had carried since childhood: living in the countryside, closer to nature, and growing some of his own food.
After more than twenty years abroad, even returning to Japan was a new beginning.

Yoshi and Mie traveled through rural areas in Okayama, Shiga, Nara, Yoshino and elsewhere, looking for a place that felt right.

Tambasasayama was not somewhere Yoshi had family or old friends. He knew almost no one there.
What changed things were the people.
Local residents helped them search for a home, introduced them to others and took their plans seriously.
Eventually, they found an old farmhouse surrounded by fields and settled there.

After decades of flying across the world and visiting countless places, this was where Yoshi finally stopped.

The wanderer had found his home.

Finding a home in Tambasasayama did not mean that Yoshi's traveling life came to an end. In many ways, it gave him a place from which he could keep traveling.

His home is a working farmhouse, but it is also a farm stay where guests from around the world come to experience rural life in Japan.

Yoshi also became a National Government Licensed Guide Interpreter, and still heads out from Tambasasayama to guide travelers in different parts of the country. Today, he is a core member of Japan Sideways.

What makes that possible is having a place he can truly return to.
His journeys are shaped by everything that came before: growing up in a city while longing for the countryside, stepping away from the expected path, testing himself abroad, working on a farm, living overseas, and finally choosing to build a life in rural Japan.

For Yoshi, travel is rarely about collecting famous places.
It is about going a little farther.

Meeting the person behind a workshop. Driving into a village you might otherwise pass by. Seeing how people live, work and make things.

His own life has rarely followed the straightest route.
Perhaps that is why he knows the value of taking the side road.

Tambasasayama is now Yoshi's home — a place he knows from everyday life rather than from a guidebook.

Throughout the year, Japan Sideways welcomes private tours with Yoshi through Tambasasayama. Meet local makers, explore the countryside, and discover the people and places that made a man who spent decades traveling the world finally decide to stay.