The JunsKitchen YouTube channel features cooking tutorials with a feline twist. (Tanya Sichynsky/The Washington Post)
Let’s pretend I offered you a lot of money to build a popular YouTube channel as quickly as possible. But there’s a caveat: The channel has to combine two seemingly unrelated topics. (Oh, and you can’t just buy a million bot followers.)
You would have a hard time finding a more Internet-friendly combination than aww-inducing animals and mouthwatering food.
To some, that alone explains the success of JunsKitchen, a YouTube channel with 3.4 million subscribers. The videos feature Jun Yoshizuki masterfully preparing gourmet Japanese dishes in front of his mesmerized orange cats.
[Cats and cooking. Here’s a YouTube channel that combines two cornerstones of the site.]
But simply combining cute pets with pleasing dishes isn’t enough to attract a massive audience, something that Brian X. Chen explained in his New York Times essay, “I Tried to Make My Dog an Instagram Celebrity. I Failed.”
“Four months and 70 Instagram posts later, @cookingwithfatmax is far from stardom,” Chen wrote. “Despite how cute Max looked or how plump my steamed pork buns appeared, the account stagnated at roughly 300 followers.”
Granted, Chen’s experience with Instagram is not a perfect cross-platform comparison, but the bigger obstacle applies: It’s a very crowded social media space.
For JunsKitchen, it helps that Japanese culture has captured the global imagination.
American interest in Japanese pop culture is traceable in various media, whether its hip-hop’s fascination with the Japanese animated series Dragon Ball Z, the intersection of American and Japanese fashion, or the decluttering craze Marie Kondo introduced (to the delight of thrift store shoppers everywhere). That interest can also manifest itself in less positive ways when it veers toward cultural appropriation.
This curiosity is not limited to America. According to the country’s transport minister, Japan attracted a record 28.7 million visitors in 2017, the sixth straight year tourism increased.
Many of the videos begin with Jun cycling into town, with his plump cat sitting in the handlebar basket. As he somehow balances the camera and feline, the first minute or so of the video captures the rather mundane day-to-day life in the town, with Jun selecting various ingredients from the grocery store. It’s a part of Japan that doesn’t have the same immediate pop culture relevance to outsiders as some iconic landmarks. Just as Jun values local ingredients for his recipes, his channel serves as a source for daily Japanese life to millions of viewers.
Would the channel have the same reach if it were based in, say, Iowa? By offering a window into daily life in Japan’s Fukuoka prefecture, the videos offer more than a cute cat in a kitchen. In fact, Yoshizuki and his wife, Rachel, initially found a large audience with a different channel that featured significantly fewer felines, and served as more of a traditional vlog, documenting their long-distance relationship. A lot of those videos offered an outsider’s view of Japan, as Rachel adjusted to life in Japan.
Beyond identifying high-interest topics, the videos also have the tranquil, soothing quality of a looping fireplace video. Depending on the accounts you follow, social feeds can quickly turn into constantly refreshing sources of anxiety. Accounts built on relaxing motifs serve an audience in need of a reprieve. It’s lo-fi chillhop music for your eyes. Watching this person use a satisfyingly sharp knife, you can almost feel your heart rate slowing and blood pressure decreasing. Focus on the cutting board long enough, and you almost become a chubby ginger cat yourself, sharing a singular focus for entirely different reasons.
The idea of incorporating personal details into recipes is by no means a new concept. You have probably searched for a simple cocktail recipe only to encounter a blog post with a 400-word introduction about how important the spring season is to the blogger, and how much they value making drinks for friends they haven’t seen in months due to their young son’s activities — as you become increasingly irritated and scroll faster and faster through the page, scanning the text for the first mention of actual ingredients.
If you’re looking for a direct, step-by-step breakdown of a specific recipe, there are a lot of shorter videos that serve that purpose. The appeal of JunsKitchen videos is less about actually following the recipes, and more about watching someone turn a generally stressful task into the most relaxing version of the activity.
Read more:
You Suck At Cooking won’t make you hungry, but it will make you laugh
There’s an art to panning a film. This YouTube channel gets it.
Cats and cooking. Here’s a YouTube channel that combines two cornerstones of the site.
Elle Mills is the celebrity every YouTuber wants to be. But her fame came at a price.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/04/02/cooking-can-be-stressful-this-youtube-channel-turns-it-into-cat-driven-tranquility/
2019-04-02 16:05:27Z
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