About me

Kevin Cooney: New Yorker, Ex-pat Tokyoite, Writer, Comedian, Producer of C02.

If you know me from the Internet, then you most likely know my alter ego: “TokyoCooney.” I say “alter ego” because we are not entirely the same person. My videos focus primarily on Tokyo and my experiences there. If you haven’t seen them, and are interested in Tokyo, I can confidently suggest you view them as I’m told they are helpful/entertaining. I won the YouTube Japan Vlogger of the year award for my efforts, and at last count had over 30,000 subscribers. The last few years, I’ve barely updated it, but I do intend, to get back to video making. In addition I created several segments that were aired on the Travel Channel’s program “What’s Your Trip?” hosted by Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern.

Other places you may find me are as creator and writer of “The Negi” a satirical homage to The Onion that for the past 8 years or so has run in Japanzine and Metropolis Magazine.

There is even more of me to be found on twitter, and now this blog.

I performed Stand-up comedy for about a decade (mainly in English, occasionally in Japanese) with the Tokyo Comedy Store all around Japan and in the US. I ran workshop classes about comedy at Temple University, Japan.

Most of my work however is less publicly known. I was the first foreigner to write a comedy drama to air on Japanese broadcast TV. A short lived show featuring actor Ibu Masato called “Personal Comedy.” In addition to that I developed several other comedy shows that didn’t make it to broadcast, both independently and for NHK’s drama department.

Also for NHK, I wrote the children’s television show “Eigo Rookie: Gabby”. I appeared regularly for about 5 years as a travel host for NHK world’s show “Tokyo Eye” as well as helped create and run a streaming video site with Japan themed content called “Jibtv.com.” I also appeared in about a hundred episodes of an educational progam called “100 Corpus.”

I was story editor/writer for a fantastic cartoon series done by Monolith SKG called “Tokyo Punch,” which did quite well on festival circuits.

I’ve also written for a few other magazines including Japan Inc, Shinbyo, and Wattention.
In addition to all that I’ve also done voice work, theater, video game localization, talent management, modeling and just about anything else you can get legally paid to do.

In my ancient past I played tenor sax in a ska band called “Shortround.” And wrote for several other websites and projects not included here or unrelated to Japan.