Skip to main content
Last October, Portland received a visit from the Japanese travel show Somewhere Street. The title of the ensuing hourlong episode roughly translates to “Portland: A Verdant City of Weirdos.” The only problem is, it’s almost impossible to find online.
The 14-season show is produced by NHK, Japan’s equivalent of PBS. Sadly, this gives rise to foreign viewer barriers on the network’s website. Thankfully, for those dying to see how our city is portrayed, Chinese video platform Bilibili has your back (yes, it is legal in the U.S.). Just type “世界ふれあい街歩き 自然豊かな変わり者の街 ポートランド〜アメリカ〜” and “Bilibili” into your search bar and it should be the first link to pop up. Bilibili does not have subtitles, but the footage is familiar enough for Portlanders who don’t speak Japanese to get the gist.
Each episode of Somewhere Street follows a nameless, faceless narrator through a first-person POV as they wander through cities around the globe. In Portland, they wind their way through downtown and the eastside before ending their day back along the waterfront.
As a Japanese speaker, I noticed the episode’s odd fascination with certain aspects of Portland. Food cart pods are obsessively featured, and one sighting of a Portland Streetcar gets the city enthusiastically dubbed a rare haven of public transit in America’s car-centric society. There is even a brief interlude featuring Mr. Dude, Portland’s bright-blue abominable mascot to Japanese tourists.
However, it is Somewhere Street’s depiction of everyday Portlanders that makes the episode shine. From senior dragon boaters to Arnold, the Powell’s Books paper magician, the show enthusiastically captures the “変わり者,” or oddballs, that make up our city.
The Unipiper, Brian Kidd, points the production crew toward Old Town’s “Keep Portland Weird” mural. The motto helps the narrator reach their final diagnosis of the Rose City: what I translated to be, “a place where you can be yourself without worrying what other people think.”
See the rest of Willamette Week’s Best of Portland 2026 here!
