"I've been here for sixteen years. Most of what I can offer, you can't find by searching."
Joshua Lassman-Watts · Japan Fixer & Concierge · Tokyo
I didn't plan to become a Japan fixer. The original plan was finance. Then the pandemic arrived, and in the space of a year I lost three jobs. I found myself in Tokyo with more knowledge of this country than most people accumulate in a lifetime — and no employer. What I did have was a phone full of contacts built over years of living here: chefs, innkeepers, artisans, the people who sit between them.
In four months, with my co-founder Christian Closs, I built Untold Japan from nothing. Week one brought a thousand enquiries. By the end of year one we had twenty-five staff. In 2024, Untold Japan won the Luxury Lifestyle Award for Best Luxury Tour Operator in Tokyo.
The Unbeaten Path is something different — smaller, more personal, managed directly by me. The difference between a fixer and a travel agent is simple: a fixer is on the ground when things change. I am the person you call during the trip, not just before it.
There is an ochaya in Kyoto that has worked exclusively with the same families for three generations. It doesn't advertise. It has never had a website. The first time I was invited as a guest — not as a fixer, not as a client, but as a guest — was in my ninth year in Japan. Three of our Connections members have dined there. Each time, I was asked, not the booking platform.
An hour and a half from Matsumoto, there is a woodworker whose pieces don't exist in any gallery. He doesn't take commissions from people he doesn't know. Several Connections members now own his work. None of them found him — they were introduced.
There is a family in Osaka that has been performing Bunraku for nine generations. The current master agreed to spend a morning with a small group — not as a performance, but as a conversation about craft. This is the kind of access that has nothing to do with budget and everything to do with the relationship that preceded it.
Japan doesn't reward the most prepared traveller. It rewards the most patient one. Sixteen years has taught me how to be patient on someone else's behalf. That's what this is.
— Joshua Lassman-Watts, Tokyo
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