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With more than 600 cities and 100 countries under his belt, global traveller Ken Utsumi, who recently blitzed through Bahrain to catch the World Cup qualifier against Japan, has no plans to slow down and is still excited everytime he sees football making the world a smaller place.
The 46-year-old ‘eternal traveller’ may have lost track of the number of countries that he has visited, once he crossed 100, but every exhilarating football match he has witnessed in 23 years of travels lives forever in his memory.
“Football is special to me, because of how passionate its fans can get and it’s such a simple game that every country I have travelled to has a fanbase for it,” the Japanese globetrotter told GulfWeekly on the sidelines of the recent Asian third round qualifying match between his home country and Bahrain.
“Football is a universal language that ignites passion transcending borders!”
Just for his love and undying support of Japan’s football team, as well as his local team Vissel Kobe, Ken has been to more than 30 unique countries in the last 12 years.
This year alone, he has been to seven countries already, and after a week in Bahrain, is currently in Thailand.
Since 2001 and the age of 23, he has been chasing football around the world, starting with a backpacking trip in Europe visiting all the major cities as he tried to catch as many European League soccer games as he could.
The next year, he took a step few can even fathom - he quit his job to chase a life filled with travel, football, music, film, food and all the other passions he was yet to find.
“In 2002, on the opening day of the World Cup, the first-ever hosted in my home country by the Japanese national team, I resigned from my company, picked up my backpack and traversed Japan, visiting friends from elementary, middle, high school, university and from my workplace,” he writes in his memoirs titled Eternal Traveller published last year.
“I travelled by slow trains, night buses and even hitchhiked. Thinking back, the style of travelling while doing a homestay originated around this time.”
Later that year, he moved to Toronto, Canada to study, and in 2003, founded U23, a remote work concept before the idea took hold in the tech valleys of the world. Since then, he has lived in Canada, Brazil and Japan for longer stints, while also having set up base camp in a smorgasbord of countries from Albania to Zimbabwe.
He has met the Prince of Swaziland, lost tickets for a World Cup final only to luck out and buy a sponsored ticket near the gates, visited Burning Man, fallen asleep under the Northern Lights in Whitehorse, watched as the world descended on Qatar in 2022 for the World Cup and even spent seven days on the Trans-Siberian Railway where he was interviewed by reporters as he made his way to Russia for the 2018 World Cup.
In 2012, he began an art project, collecting stories under the title World Odyssey: 23 Laps Round The World.
“The number 23 in 23 laps signifies my lucky number - the 23 of U23, my jersey number 23, and also my birthday which falls on the 23rd,” he explained.
“I believe after 23 laps, I might be able to understand a bit about the real world, despite its inherent biases.
“It’s merely the antithesis to the cookie-cutter, stamp rally-like round-the-world trips that are prevalent everywhere.”
As for what he will always remember from the places he has been to, including Bahrain, his answer is simple: the people.
For more details, follow @u23ken on Instagram.
