A friendship in Canada became a thesis about Kagawa.
This isn't a company that started with a market study. It started with a volleyball game, a long-running effort to learn a language properly, and a trip taken without a real plan.
Chris Hood, Obika's founder, has always felt a strong pull toward Japanese culture. Near the end of COVID, he met a group of Japanese nationals on working-holiday visas, playing beach volleyball in Canada. The group had been brought together by one person in particular — Takahide Obika, now Obika's on-the-ground manager and board member.
After several months of getting to know the group, Chris made a deliberate decision: he would learn Japanese properly. His reasoning was simple — you don't really learn a culture until you learn the language it's carried in. People show different sides of their personality depending on which language they're speaking; someone genuinely funny in their native tongue can come across flat in their second or third. Learning the language was, to him, the only real way to learn who his friends actually were — and the clearest way to show he respected them.
He kept at it for four years, almost entirely through ordinary conversation — listening, engaging, and slowly absorbing the language directly from his friends rather than from a classroom.
One by one, the friend group moved back to Japan. In 2024, separately, Chris became deeply involved with a large real estate group with significant experience in short-term rentals — learning firsthand how high-performing Airbnb operations are actually run, and the systems built behind them over years of iteration.
When Taka — the last of the group still in Canada — finally returned home, Chris felt compelled to visit everyone in Japan, and spent three months doing exactly that. Part of that trip was a stay in Takamatsu, the city Taka calls home.
Chris hadn't expected much from Takamatsu. He'd assumed it would be a quiet place to visit precisely because it wasn't on the typical tourist radar — he'd barely heard of it before. But at the hostel where he stayed, every other guest was from Europe or North America. That was the first signal something didn't add up. When he asked around, most pointed to the same thing: a major art festival that draws millions of visitors to the region every few years.
By the end of the trip, a pattern was obvious. Demand was high. Property pricing was low. And the actual guest experience, across every place he stayed, was consistently behind North American standards — sub-par cleaning, mediocre guest experience, and systems that felt outdated by comparison. The short-term rental model was clearly emerging in the region, but nobody had properly capitalized on it yet.
The thesis that came out of it
Chris spent the next six months refining the strategy — researching the market and consulting his existing network in the short-term rental space. It came down to one conclusion: Japan is the world's number-one tourist destination today, and the gap is still widening.
Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka are now priced too high to offer real upside. Takamatsu is different — a fast-growing market where the local government and private developers are actively spending tens of millions of dollars to improve the tourist experience. A wave is building in Kagawa Prefecture. Obika is positioned to ride it from the start, not catch up to it later.
