00:00:01 John Daub: Good morning. It's 7:30 in the morning. I didn't get a ride yesterday. I camped at the Fukuoka Interchange. That's what's up. I found a really good spot to camp right there. You can see my tent. I had a pretty good dinner at a restaurant called Joyful. Good morning, everybody. It's April 2nd, 2017, and I'm still where I was last night. And that's not a good sign for a hitchhiker.

00:00:43 John Daub: There's the tent. I camped in this park about 500 meters from the interchange over there. And you know what? That's a good thing because I don't have to go that far to get picked up. I just have to wait. I wake my sleepy head up and pack. Nobody likes packing. I do not own a car. That's why I'm hitchhiking. Well, that's not why I'm hitchhiking.

00:01:14 John Daub: There's a restroom over there with a sink. Hey, welcome back, way down there. And this soccer field I camped in is now a puddle. Luckily, I picked a spot that was only one centimeter above that area. It's just dry enough that I didn't get soaked. But my cardboard is underneath there. Oh, the rain cover did not last. The wind knocked it down. There's my tripod. I did a morning shoot. So that's the area I camped in. I can hear the highway behind me. So I know it's not that far. I walked over here last night. This place is filled with trucks. So I'm hoping to get a ride with a truck this morning.

00:02:21 John Daub: So I thought I'd take some questions very quickly. There's some questions coming in, comments about the trip. I like that, being able to answer that before I left yesterday and my utter failure of getting a ride. So let me have them. I'll read the questions out loud so this video can be useful. Facebook live stream does not save your chats. That's the problem. It is morning. It's 7:30 in the morning. What keeps me going is the challenge right now. That's what's going through my mind. I just woke up. The challenge of trying to get a ride and moving on and that feeling when you arrive at your destination is a good feeling. It's such an addictive feeling that makes you get back up in the morning and go out again.

00:03:09 John Daub: If you ask the question, I will answer it. It's 1:32 a.m. Thank you. I do hope I get a ride soon. I'm at Fukuoka Interchange and I might cycle, but hitchhiking is the main thing. Yeah, the journey will end. I'm planning on Hakodate. It will semi-end in Hirosaki and Aomori and then I'm going to go to Aomori City and take the ferry. If I can find a car to go under the tunnel, I'll have a car take me to Hakodate. But if not, I'll take the ferry. I don't mind. The ferry ride is beautiful. And then at Hakodate, I'll spend a couple of days and then go back to Tokyo.

00:03:52 John Daub: The cherry blossoms don't bloom in Hokkaido in the north until June. And it's just starting in April. So I don't know if it's worth going all the way up there to look for cherry blossoms. I'm keeping a journal up here. Yeah, no, I'm filming everything. I probably should keep a journal. I'm keeping track of everybody's name. I'm going to be posting a lot of things and I'm writing emails and I'm going to be adding messages to the Patreon page, which will be sort of a blog, I guess, sort of a written account. I want everything to be digital because I could lose it if it's a pad or pen and paper or even if it's digital on a website, I think it could crash. But the best place to store everything is here and here video-wise. So just this Only in Japan Go entry is almost like a backup.

00:04:54 John Daub: Do you miss home? Yes, I do miss my pillow and comfortable bed. It's not always comfortable to sleep in a makeshift tent. Sort of. I say makeshift because I put that up real fast. Patreon is patreon.com/onlyinjapantv. If you search Patreon Only in Japan, it'll come up. Does Japan have Uber? That's a good question. Japan does have Uber. I found this out because I have friends who make a YouTube channel called What's Inside? Dan and Lincoln. And after we filmed the Got Your Point episode for their channel, they took an Uber back to Narita. And guess what? The Uber cost $20 more than a regular taxi. So I don't know if Uber is the best thing to call. Uber is more expensive than a taxi. The weather right now is sunny, but it rained all night.

00:06:01 John Daub: I might try to live stream hitchhiking for this channel. Actually, I haven't played pachinko. But you know what? Yesterday, not two days ago when I was eating ramen in Fukuoka, I was talking to some dudes in line. You know, my wife and I were talking, my age, 40-something. And one of them was a president of a pachinko company. And I told him, for the longest time, I've been trying to make a pachinko episode, but no one's giving me access. So he said he could help me with that. I sent him an email yesterday. And very, very nice guy. He actually treated me to the ramen, too. So hopefully pachinko is like a Japanese pinball.

00:06:53 John Daub: Gosh, waffles or pancakes. Breakfast in Japan is hard. I just had a piece of bread and a banana in my tent that I bought yesterday at the convenience store. I'm absolutely thinking of getting some coffee. In fact, I'm thinking of doing that right now before I start hitchhiking. I might have to get a new piece of cardboard. Actually, let's look under the tent and see if the cardboard is still there.

00:07:20 John Daub: Okay, I'm just going to take off the rain cover. I don't think it's gonna rain anymore. Boy, this DJI Osmo Mobile does a great job of stabilizing the video. For you watching this, it would be like torture if I was hand-holding it, even though the iPhone 7 has really good stabilization. So this is how the Montbell tent connects. Montbell was really nice to me. I asked them for sponsorship for this trip and they said no, but they gave me 30% off this tent and that's a cool thing to do. They didn't have to do that, but they did. So Montbell, and my vest is Montbell. I have a Montbell vest that I like. I like vests because it adds more pockets for batteries and stuff. All right, I'm gonna take this rain cover off and put it... I'm not sure where. Gosh, what a mess. And now ground dust, it feels wet.

00:09:06 John Daub: Oh my god, I don't want to see what the cardboard looks like underneath there. Oh my god, it is... it's not gonna be good. Oh no, it's like through. No, I knew it. So I gotta go back to that convenience store. It's a 10-minute walk and I'm thinking I'm just gonna leave my stuff here and then come back. It'll take me 20 minutes round trip. That means I'm not gonna leave here until about eight o'clock. All right, gotta get moving. Any other last questions that are positive in nature? Yeah, it didn't survive. The cardboard did not survive. Thanks for asking about that. Do I like the DJI Osmo Mobile? I like the DJI Osmo Mobile. The battery life's been pretty impressive. But the phone, you have to have this stupid handle. You need it because you need to be further away from the camera. So either you need a wide lens or you need distance or else you don't see enough of the background. You just see my face and that's not a pretty thing.

00:10:56 John Daub: Coffee, milk and sugar? I'm just gonna go black today. Black coffee. Yeah, so sun's out. I got a long way to go. I'm leaving this beautiful park behind and hitching a ride to see the deer of Miyajima. Thanks everybody if you funded the Kickstarter project. It's 85% funded in one day, which is so cool. It's at four thousand one hundred dollars now and the goal is at five thousand dollars. I probably should have made the goal higher because Kickstarter takes about ten percent of that and then Uncle Sam might take more. So I'll end up... that stinks after taxes and stuff. I probably won't make that much and then I gotta send off the DVDs.

00:11:46 John Daub: April Fool's video? No, but did you see the one from What's Inside? Dan cut open Lincoln. I don't know if you guys watched What's Inside. It's a channel where this father and son cut stuff open. He cut open a rattlesnake last year, that one had like 50 million views. He cut open his son for April Fool's Day. Oh my god, it was pretty funny. I was watching that in my tent last night, cracking up. Yeah, probably I asked for too little because Kickstarter won't pay you unless you reach your goal and I figured five thousand dollars would be enough to cover enough of the costs that wouldn't hurt. Ten thousand would cover everything and I wouldn't make a profit. So yeah, with the camera equipment, I had to get a laptop to edit the video, the tent, the new camera, the hotel stays which I didn't want to do but I need to to edit the videos. Was something I didn't realize. I thought I could do it all in the tent. That wasn't smart.

00:13:13 John Daub: No worries, raining is part of the experience. If everything went perfectly, I don't think it would be a very good trip. It's the moments where things go wrong, those are the moments that you remember the most. I remember the stuff that goes wrong more than the stuff that goes right. If you have a sense of humor about the stuff that goes wrong, you're probably gonna have a very memorable happy life because stuff goes wrong. You need to have a sense of humor about it. Yeah, so there you go. I'm gonna pack. I have a backpack. I put one backpack over there which got wet but it's better than you see there's like a covering. It's wet but not as wet.

00:14:11 John Daub: Someone might do that. I'd feel guilty about that if someone were to fund that much. On Patreon, I had these $100 Patreon donations and I think three people paid it and it made me so happy but I didn't expect that. I kind of just had that out there just in case. Yeah, all right. Someone just asked about my love life and I'm gonna say right now, you tell me, man. My love life is me in a tent with a pad. That pad's big enough for one and I want the pad. Yeah, don't ask me about my love life when I'm on the road. That's cruel. My love life was me in a tent with a laptop computer and no Internet. So it's pretty sad.

00:15:21 John Daub: So, as you saw, the cardboard is a disaster. I'm going to move this backpack over. Oh geez, that's heavy. I'm going to move this backpack over to a dry platform. Well, it's not muddy anyways. God, this thing weighs a ton. I'm an idiot for bringing all this stuff. You know, you don't bring a lot of stuff when you hitchhike, but I sort of did. I kind of brought way too much. No, I did bring way too much. But there's not much I could do about it. It's literally stuff I need. It's batteries, wires, cables, cameras, this pad which is quite comfortable. Yeah, I do like this pad. And this size is enough. I thought I would need a bigger one, but this size is enough. The sleeping bag is pretty good that I got. I've been quite happy with the sleeping bag.

00:16:42 John Daub: You can hear the water underneath my feet. It's awful. Okay, everything is out of the tent. And then once everything's out of the tent, I can put it away and move on. I just know that the cardboard is totally gone. What the heck is that? Wow, the whole area is blasting. That's not normal for 8 a.m., is it? Usually they have an announcement. I don't think it's a tornado. Gosh, it gives me chills because I was here for 3.11, the great Tohoku earthquake. What's up with this alarm? It's not just this one. They're all over the entire area. Is it because it's a sunny day? I'll keep live streaming a little bit longer. Okay, there. It ended. If there's no announcement, then could be just a warning. But that's pretty cruel. It's Sunday at 8 a.m. and they play the alarm. Talk about people working hard and sleeping in. Not gonna happen on a Sunday in this neighborhood.

00:19:08 John Daub: All the bags are now out of the tent. All right, folks. I'm gonna put this tent away and get out. It was just a drill, I think. April Fool's. It's not April Fool's Day in Japan. April Fool's Day has been over for 8 hours. Oh look, the sun's out. That's wonderful. Everything was wet. It could have dried my stuff in like 10 minutes. But no. It'll dry this field real fast. Look at that sun. You can see my shadow. It rained all night. As soon as I get my tent up, the clouds came and it rained. As soon as I put the tent away, the sun comes out. And look at the sky. It just means I'm gonna have a good day, right? That's a good omen, I think. We have alarm bells at 8 a.m. but I was already awake. That's a good sign. The sun is out. My cardboard's ruined, but that could happen to anybody.

00:20:26 John Daub: Can I even pick it up? Oh my gosh, it's totally... I lost it. It's gone. There's nothing I can do for her. No amount of help could make a difference. She's gonna have to go to the rubbish bin. Sorry, Calbee potato chips. Oh, this is the Kyushu Shoyu. Kyushu soy sauce potato chips. I guess that's a good brand. It held up pretty good until it didn't. I'm gonna put that there for now and throw you away later. Sorry. I do need a marker for my sign.

00:21:23 John Daub: Alright, folks. I can't do this and put the tent away. So I'm gonna have to call it a wrap. I'm gonna go to the convenience store, get a piece of cardboard after I put this tent away, get packed up, get out there on the road. 30 minutes. That's my goal. Gotta do this in 30 minutes. So maybe see you again out there on the road. If you're following me on Instagram, go to Instagram because I log into that with videos more often because they don't save. I like that. I can just focus on answering questions. Live streaming from Fukuoka Interchange. I'm a hitchhiker. Random hitchhiker. See you on the road, folks.