Tokyo Survival Channel - My Geisha Experience

Hey everyone!

I have been working on Agitprop for about three years, and in that time my ultimate ambition was to branch into travel and lifestyle. I’ve given a few blogs about this found here but my goal was to create something that was really personal to me and tell stories from some of my travels. I started out in Brighton in the UK, south of London by about an hour and it’s quite an eclectic mix of subcultures. Many of my friends were goth, or punk and one of the heavy influences came from Harajuku. I was absolutely in love with the images of the Fruits books and the stories of all the bands in Japan and it became something that I was always fascinated and inspired by.

During 2006, I was contacted about working as a model for one of the first times and it led me down a path of playing with many different looks and images. I got the opportunity to book a lot of underground and editorial fashion work which was an escape from the boredom of my home town. In 2008 I was contacted on myspace by a photographer from Japan and it became clear that there was a pathway to finally get to Tokyo, and I took the opportunity. I arrived in Narita in the winter of that year and booked into a Ryokan, a rice paper hotel in Takadanobaba. It was an amazingly different experience to anything I’d been through and I was thankfully relieved that many of the stores and cafes could speak a little English so I didn’t have to embarrass myself too heavily with my terrible language skills. I remember falling in love with the busy street and the amazing shift between day and night in the city. There is a painting that I’ve always been majorly in love with because it just sums up all the energy I felt about my stay.

There are so many stories and places that I am excited to revisit and when we travel I’ll be launching the first travel video for the Youtube so I’m very excited about it all! I wasn’t technically allowed to drink when I was last there as I was so young so we shall see this time hahahaa!!

I got back home during the summer of 2009 and it was far too much of an adventure to fit into one blog, but I definitely left my heart in Tokyo and longed to revisit. So through the last decade of my career, I could never have believed all the twists and turns but Agitprop was a thought in my mind all the way back. It was something that I always wanted to do and explore more of Japan. So when I was putting together the ideas for the launch, I waited a little while to get the site live because of the discovery of a wonderful company called Tokyo Challenge. So Tokyo Challenge is an incredible resource for any travellers out there who want to find out some completely unusual and new types of information about Japan, so it immediately piqued my interest. I reached out and offered to collaborate and explained my work moving into travel, my experience being in Tokyo all that time ago as a kid model and how I was building my own hub of innovative information for travel and lifestyle, so it was a great match.

Tokyo Challenge + I discussed a number of different options to review, including bars and restaurants, different hotels and I’ve got a lot of that coming for my adventures to come. But some of the opportunities really blew my mind because I was introduced to a brand called Fude Beauty which offers phenomenal brushes and products. My idea was to create a few different looks, including a Pikachu transformation that can be found on their site already, and we created a range of all different types of makeup transformations. But I also wanted to create a totally new Halloween series inspired by Geishas that I could link in with my Halloween series with their products. That can be found below. I have used Koyudo products in my tutorials since the start because when I created the prototypes for my own range I worked with the same company haha! Check the video out here.