What happens when a TV director stops directing?

For years in television, I’ve constantly thought about how to make images interesting to watch. And yet, I’m now completely hooked on a Japanese YouTube channel with almost no structure, direction, or editing.

The premise is simple. People sit down and tell their life stories, often at great length. Occasionally the guests are famous, but most are ordinary people with a story to tell.

The channel started six years ago. In the beginning, its creator would approach interesting people he spotted on the street. They included homeless people, male nightlife companions, sex workers, former yakuza members, LGBTQ people, people who had walked away from prestigious corporate jobs—the list goes on. I first discovered the channel through an interview with the family of a death-row inmate protesting her innocence.

There are almost no cutaways—just the face of the person talking, sometimes for a very long time. And yet, somehow, it never gets boring. You just keep watching. A new story is uploaded every day.

In the early days, the creator says he might approach fifty people before finding one who would agree to be interviewed. Today, people flood the channel with requests to appear, and it has 1.9 million subscribers. But I don’t think its popularity can be explained by the unusual backgrounds of its guests alone. There is something strangely compelling about it. It’s called “Gairoku Channel — Tell Me About Your Life.”

The man behind the channel is Sanshiro Mitani, a former television director. There is no doubt that the skills and instincts he developed in television are the foundation of what he does. But what fascinates me—and I mean this with no disrespect—is how little of that expertise shows on the surface.

He shoots with a single small camera, which stays on the person he is interviewing, so we only hear Mitani’s voice. When I’ve seen him being interviewed himself, he’ll say things like, “Well… I thought maybe this way would work better, or maybe that would be better, and I just kept going. Before I knew it, this is what it had become,” with a slightly puzzled look on his face. Then, on the other hand, he has the nerve to pick up a guitar, strum away furiously, and play a song he sings himself on the show.

Rather than looking like an ambitious creative type, Mitani comes across as a soft-spoken, unassuming guy who could easily disappear into a crowd. He has talked about being bullied when he was an assistant director. I sometimes wonder whether that gentle, almost defenseless air about him is part of what allows former yakuza members and people who have been deeply hurt to lower their guard and talk to him.

Mitani directed many well-known television shows and developed strong editing skills over the years. And yet, what he eventually arrived at was astonishingly simple. He sits next to a stranger with a small camera and asks them to tell him about their life. That’s all. And once you start watching, it’s hard to stop.

As a producer, I’ve spent years thinking about how to show things. Change the shot. Add a cutaway. Create rhythm through editing. But Mitani left television and has attracted 1.9 million subscribers by doing almost the opposite, by not showing too much.

“Less is more,” as the saying goes. But perhaps it takes quite a lot of “more” before you know how to choose “less.”

We tend to think that getting better at what we do means adding more and more things to what we can do. But perhaps, at some point, it becomes just as much about knowing what you can do and choosing not to do it.