Naomi Watanabe

Naomi Watanabe wants to know how loudly Boulder laughs.

Not exactly because the Colorado city is famous for comedy, but because it sits high in the mountains where the air is thin. It’s the kind of comment that explains Watanabe almost immediately: curious and always looking for the joke hiding inside an ordinary fact.

“I heard there’s less oxygen,” she says. “People living on the top of the mountains must have really strong lungs, so I want to know how loud they can laugh.”

Watanabe’s curiosity now has an international stage. Her first fully English North American tour, FROM TOKYO, will take her through 18 cities across the US and Canada. On paper, it reads as the next step for a global star, but when she discusses her tour, she sounds less like someone arriving to claim a spot in the American comedy market and more like a wide-eyed tourist.

On the heels of selling out Tokyo Dome in February, Watanabe is both a megastar and an observer, famous enough to make more than 40,000 people at Tokyo Dome laugh at once and still curious about what makes a new room respond. But for all her success, her American chapter is not a victory lap as much as a reset from her initial rise to fame impersonating Beyoncé in 2008, earning her the lifelong title “Japanese Beyoncé.”

She wasn't always this sure that this leap would land. After moving to New York City in 2021, Watanabe encountered the metropolis in all its contradictions. “Before I moved, people were telling me New Yorkers are so cold. There is a lot of garbage on the streets. The apartment I was living in was old, so the elevators were slow and stopped sometimes. Water leaked, and sometimes mice said, ‘hi’ to me,” Watanabe says.

But the city surprised her. “Everyone was talking to me,” she recalls. “New York people are small-talk professionals. In Japan, people are quieter and more likely to mind their own business, but in New York, strangers tried to understand me even when I spoke ‘broken English.’”

That contradiction stayed with Watanabe. While she had been told to expect distance, she instead found people who were open and unexpectedly kind, and that everyday kindness became part of the foundation for the platform she would keep building.

Watanabe says one of the things that drives her is “being real, not fake good like some celebrities.” She explains, “Comedy is a part of our lives, and it’s real. There are a lot of people who cannot speak English or are learning English, so, through my comedy, I want to tell the fans and people that the process is important.”

Watanabe’s American career has been built on making that process public. In 2023, she launched Naomi Takes America, a podcast on the idea that her fans could help teach her about American life while she was still learning English. Its own description invites listeners to watch her grow like a Tamagotchi, the famous egg-shaped handheld digital pet.

What could have been treated as a barrier actually became the format itself, and as Watanabe spoke with fans on the internet, asked questions, and made jokes about cultural differences, she eventually took the podcast on a seven-city live tour that blended improv, stand-up, and audience Q&A. In other words, she did not wait to become fluent before trying to be funny in America. “There are people who can speak English in three months, and for some, it takes 10 years,” she says. “What matters is the process.”

Language has shaped Watanabe’s life long before her move to New York. She was raised in Ibaraki, Japan, by her Taiwanese mother, who was also living outside her first language. “My mom definitely had a stressful life because she was living in a foreign country, so my mom is kind of crazy,” she jokes. “As a kid, I always looked around and had antennas to see, ‘Oh my God, my mom is doing something crazy again,’ so I grew up being really sensitive.”

That early sensitivity eventually became part of her comedy. Instead of going to university and getting married as her family had hoped, Watanabe chased her dreams by joining a comedians’ training school at 18. She calls her unconventional path the standard for people in her field: “As a comedian, you have to have something weird and something straight.”

Her clothing line PUNYUS comes from a similar place. Launched in 2014 by Watanabe, PUNYUS loosely translates to "chubby" in English, but for Watanabe, the brand was never just about size. It was about breaking standards and giving people something they could wear right now. “I wanted to provide the clothes that those people can wear for the days before they go on a fully committed diet,” she says.

At the time, many plus-size brands in Japan focused on clothes that covered the body rather than celebrated personal style. That frustrated Watanabe, who loved exploring all styles of clothing. PUNYUS became her answer to that gap, and since then, Watanabe has grown it through global partnerships with big names like Tokyo Disneyland and Sailor Moon. “I wanted to make my brand so people pick these clothes because they like the design, not because they can fit,” she said. Watanabe’s approach with PUNYUS mirrors the logic of her comedy: to reach people where they are, without hesitation or waiting for permission.

That philosophy will likely follow Watanabe well beyond FROM TOKYO. “Since I was young, I loved to challenge everything,” she says. “I used to tell adults to please leave me alone, and that’s how I got here today. I have confidence, and I trust myself.”

Whether or not Boulder laughs as loud as Watanabe had hoped, FROM TOKYO is her way of proving success does not require total certainty. Sometimes, it just requires moving before everything feels fully translated. Watanabe has built a career out of turning uncertainty into connection, often before she has all the words for it. So when she finally listens for Boulder’s laugh, she will also be listening for something larger: the sound of a new audience meeting her halfway.