But the couple never set out to become internet famous. When they started their channel in 2012, they were in a long-distance relationship (Jun is Japanese and Rachel is American) and used the platform to share videos.

It didn’t take long for others to get interested. They only had a dozen or so subscribers when they made “What NOT to do in Japan” early in 2012, which quickly racked up hundreds of thousands of views.

But the road to vlogging success is not an easy one.

“There was a period of maybe two or three years where we had no days off – it was seven days a week. Every waking hour was devoted to video-making, editing videos, thinking of ideas, filming, social media, going to meet-ups. We ended up so sick,” Rachel says. “I was getting sick every couple of weeks and pulling all-nighters several times a week to make my arbitrary deadlines that I set for myself.”

Burnout among YouTubers is not uncommon. But the thing that kept Rachel and Jun going was making videos they genuinely cared about – and the Japan-hungry internet responded.

“All of us [J-vloggers] get comments from our audience that they went to Japan because of us, or they started studying Japanese because of our videos, or they visited this city because we made a video about it,” Rachel says.

Does that make them grassroots cultural ambassadors? “I personally don’t consider myself an ambassador,” Jun says, and Rachel agrees. “We started YouTube just because we wanted to.”