The Scholarship Behind the Journey
Blaisian Journeys is built on a specific intellectual tradition — and on people who have spent decades inside it.
David Wright
Founder · Scholar-Host · Cultural Connections Asia LLC
Blaisian Journeys begins with a question that W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey were already asking a century ago: what does Asia mean to Black people, and what do Black people mean to Asia? I founded this brand because that question has never been more answerable — and because I happen to have spent the last thirty years building the access to answer it.
My entry into Asia came through the Yale–China Association, which sent me to Hong Kong as a scholar more than three decades ago. What was meant to be two years became a lifelong immersion. I hold an M.A. from Yale and pursued doctoral training in history at UC Berkeley. I have been based in Tokyo for over twenty years. I speak Japanese fluently. I have been traveling to Bangkok since 1995.
Cultural Connections Asia LLC, the Wisconsin-registered company behind Blaisian Journeys, began as a platform for scholar-led luxury travel for Japanese guests. Blaisian is its second brand — built specifically around the African American relationship to Asia, and around the Black intellectual tradition that has always understood that relationship to be significant.
I do not offer tours. I design immersions. Each Blaisian journey is built around a specific historical and cultural argument — that the Black American encounter with Asia is not incidental but foundational, and that traveling here as a Black American, with the right knowledge and the right access, is a different experience from any other. My role is to make that difference legible, and to make the access real.
I am on every journey. I am not a coordinator or a vendor. I am your Scholar-Host — the person who has read the history, knows the people, and can tell you what you are actually looking at.
Mirei Sato
In-Country Scholar · UC Berkeley · Asahi Shimbun
The Blaisian research foundation runs through Mirei. A lifelong resident of Japan and a UC Berkeley academic, Mirei's scholarly focus is Black American history — which means she brings to our Japan-based work precisely the intellectual grounding that Blaisian is built on.
Her role is not logistical. She contributes the research, the nuance, and the cultural depth that make the historical connections we trace on these journeys accurate and substantive. When we examine the relationship between Black American intellectual tradition and Japan — Du Bois's 1936 visit, the Russo-Japanese War as read by the Black press, the resonances that Garvey found in Japanese sovereignty — Mirei is the scholar who has done the reading.
She also serves as a professional translator for the Asahi Shimbun, Japan's newspaper of record, bringing precision and command of both languages to the cultural connections she helps us create.
For guests who come to Blaisian Journeys because they take the intellectual dimension seriously — this is the team behind that dimension.
Why Blaisian Exists
Du Bois saw Japan's 1905 victory over Russia as proof that white supremacy was not natural law but accumulated power. Garvey read Japanese sovereignty as a model for what Black self-determination could look like. The Black press tracked this part of the world with a strategic attention that had no equivalent in mainstream American journalism.
That tradition of Black intellectual engagement with Asia is real, serious, and largely unknown to the travelers who could most benefit from it. Blaisian Journeys exists to close that gap — not through lecture, but through immersion. The history becomes visible when you are standing in the right place, with the right guide, asking the right questions.
This is what we offer: scholar-led travel for Black American travelers who bring intellectual curiosity and want an experience that meets it.
Ready to travel with us? The Blaisian Thailand NYE Journey runs December 26, 2026 – January 4, 2027. Grand Hyatt Erawan Bangkok, with an optional Andaz Pattaya extension. From $2,900 per person.
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