00:00:01 John Daub: Good morning from beautiful Tokyo Station. I'm on the Marunouchi line going from this station to the JR station. It's really crowded. This is the Only in Japan Go channel. Everything is broadcast live on 4G signal. I don't know how crowded it's going to be or how the signal is going to look because there's a lot of people here at Tokyo Station, but I'm making my way. This morning I have an IC card. I just left the gate here at Marunouchi. There's a lot of students as well. People take the train from the public subway to get to school. This is the corridor between Marunouchi and the JR train station. And I only have 15 minutes to get to the Shinkansen to catch my train to Kyoto. I want to get an ekiben (station bento). So I'm going to get this lunch to eat on the train.

00:01:11 John Daub: Here's the ticket gates at JR. Right there you can buy the tickets. Alright, let's do this. Credit card only. I have cash. So here we go. That's a non-reservation ticket. The Tokaido Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto. I'm leaving today, one person. Norikaze [?], Otsu. Alright, so this is the ticket. This looks good. Confirm. That's my total. Wow, that's like $120. That's some cash. I also need an official receipt for this. Hurry up! Thank you very much. I love when machines talk to me.

00:04:03 John Daub: Alright, first things first, I have to make sure my money gets put in my pocket. I'm gonna need that money to get my bento. I got tickets. I'm now going from Tokyo to Kyoto. Now this always gets confusing to me. You have to put two tickets in here, I don't know why. Now we're in Tokyo Station JR. I have my tickets. Now I have to go and enter the Shinkansen platform. It's right now about 6:45 in the morning. It's a race against time. So thank you for the super chat, Nosh abroad. And I saw another one coming in here. I'll try to answer it from the train, but I really am in a hurry. It's still too early for the morning rush hour here at Tokyo Station. Here's a look at the walkway going towards the Shinkansen inside the station. There's also a place for me to get an ekiben.

00:06:01 John Daub: Ah, there's the Keihin Tohoku Line. Oh it's closed. What happened? It's over there. I don't got time to mess around. People, I gotta move. So this store inside the station has some of the best ekiben. You can see all of the variety of bentos here. So I gotta pick one real quick. I don't have time to mess around. Alright, it's so crowded in here. To be honest with you, it's not that bad. It usually gets worse. Do I want a tea or coffee? I'll get a coffee on board. I just need to get something. Oh look, there's an old lady on it. Whenever you see old ladies, you know it's gonna be good. Boom. Look there's an umeboshi in it. Oh look, everyone's lining up. There's a proper line. I'm behind this guy. Alright here we go. I gotta buy this thing. 1900 yen. 5000 yen. It's not crowded here. Not yet. Thank you.

00:08:26 John Daub: Alright, sorry about that folks. Had to buy the bento. And now you can see the arrows pointing towards the Shinkansen. It's saying that the Tokaido Shinkansen is this way. There's no time to mess around. I do have my bento, my ekiben which is really awesome. Okay here we go. Shinkansen, yes. This is a good day. And it's not too crowded, I'm liking this. Alright I put my tickets in my pocket. When you do the Shinkansen you enter, you have to put in two tickets: one for the Shinkansen express ticket and one for the regular price ticket. You have to put both of them in here. Oh no I messed up. I keep messing up. It keeps telling me no. All of them? Alright I have another ticket. Eh? Why? Alright let's go get some help. This doesn't make any sense.

00:10:32 John Daub: Excuse me. I put in two but I couldn't get it. Blue one. Oh I got it. Blue one. That was the Tohoku Shinkansen. Oh my gosh. Okay. The Tohoku Shinkansen is the green one. That's the one I've been taking recently. The blue one that you just saw is the Tokaido Shinkansen. And the Tokaido Shinkansen is the one that goes towards Kyoto. Run run. Run followers run. Alright both these tickets should work. Boom. Bingo. Kyoto 7 o'clock, number 19. Okay so 16, 17, 18, 19. Oh look at this little escalator. I gotta ride the little escalator. Walk on the right side. Oh there it is, number 19. Vending machine. There you go walk the steps.

00:12:00 John Daub: Now I am a non-reserve ticket. Non-reserve ticket means that I have to fight my way to get a seat. Usually non-reserve tickets are train cars 1, 2 and 3. I'm at car number 3 right now. But I like to go to the front. If you're going to be number 1 you gotta be in the front. I'm out of breath. This is cool. So this is the Shinkansen platform. I'm going to try to snag a seat. Oh it's not that crowded. Alright seat number 1. Let me grab a seat. Number 10 looks good. Tickets. Oh that was fun.

00:13:36 John Daub: So I made it. I'm at Tokyo station inside of the Shinkansen. I got my seat. It's not that hard. 13 minutes and 45 seconds, that's a new record. This is fun. Behind me you're going to see the Shinkansen. Boom. I'll be riding that for about 2 hours to get to Kyoto. It's not that far. Well if you were to drive to Kyoto it would take about 7 hours maybe on the highway if you didn't have any traffic. But by Shinkansen you can get there in 2 hours. And that's really cool because I have an appointment in Otsu city to meet with the city officials because I have an episode I want to film there. So I'm scouting that this morning. But I'm also going to Kyoto for more live streaming. So definitely stay tuned. In a couple of hours I'll be in a different area of Japan. It's going to be really awesome. So you're going to see a new place: Kyoto and Otsu and maybe some other places that I can take you to today. I'm totally live streaming this whole thing. So definitely subscribe to the Only in Japan Go channel. Make sure your notifications on because you're going to be getting a lot of news and a lot of content today.

00:14:49 John Daub: This is Tokyo station, end of the line. There's the Marunouchi side. Sorry. Sorry I lost the feed a little bit. Look at how beautiful the Shinkansen is. Gosh, it really is a work of art what they've done with the Shinkansen. There you go everybody. It really is Tokyo I wasn't joking about that. This train over here is going to Okayama. That means it goes past Kyoto and Osaka and it terminates in Okayama. This one is going and terminating at Shin-Osaka. So it's important to know the kanji. This one says Nozomi. Nozomi is the fastest train on the Tokaido Shinkansen. And you don't have to know the characters for this, but Shin meaning new Osaka station, Shin-Osaka. And it tells you the destinations where everything goes. But everything is in English so you don't have to worry about that really.

00:16:10 John Daub: So I'm going to go to the train now. Boom! Wait hold on hold on. And usually there's some time to get something from the vending machine before the Shinkansen takes off. It'll go blub blub blub blub like this and then you know you better run because the doors are closing. Shinkansen series N700A. That means something to some people. So here's the men's restroom. It's pretty clean. You can go to a restroom anywhere else in the world, this one is usable. The others are not. I mean it just depends how bad you have to go. Alright. There's a little sink in there. It's pretty clean for a train. Alright this is car number two but we're in number one. Alright we have three minutes. I got a good seat.

00:17:46 John Daub: You know on this train line you can usually see Mount Fuji if you sit on this side, on the right side of the train. You're gonna be able to see it because it's raining today, the weather's not very good. Haha. I'm not even subscribed to my own channel. I'm trying to show you the live stream. Live it's not working. Woah Shinkansen's passing. It's pretty cool. Kids love the Shinkansen too. It's so easy. It's hard not to be a train geek. Oh you know what I want a drink. I don't think I have time. Oh crap alright. In these situations you use your IC card. Come on come on come on. Nevermind I hope it doesn't come out right now. Man I tried for that last second. See I'm glad I didn't do it. If I stuck around for another 30 seconds I'd be over there and not over here. And my bags are already inside the Shinkansen. Oh well that guy got his drink. That's not fair.

00:20:08 John Daub: So this is a live stream, the Only in Japan Go channel. So subscribe but I'm just going to do a little bit of talking here. One more time I was showing everybody from Marunouchi the Tokyo subway how to get a ticket really fast, enter into the JR station, get an ekiben which is what I got. We picked one out remember. And then get on to the Shinkansen in time. I think I had about 16 minutes to do it and we did it in 13 minutes. And we had enough time to not get a vending machine drink which is really close. Oh Shinkansen passing. I don't know how many times I've ridden the Shinkansen. I'm just amazed at its speed. Woah did you see that guy.

00:21:06 John Daub: So that's what I'm doing today. And I have some scouting to do in Otsu City which is on the bottom of Biwako. After I do the scouting there I'm going back to Kyoto to the old area and I'll be live streaming from there. But I can't tell you exactly the purpose of it but it has something to do with the next video which is coming out. I think if I can get it done tonight or tomorrow sometime. Probably tomorrow. I don't want to rush it because if I make a mistake these videos you put online live forever. If you make a mistake you can't technically really erase it. It's there. So when you're on the Shinkansen you pass by a lot of the stations. That's Shimbashi. You can see Tokyo going by. Bye bye Tokyo. We're going to another place. I can't really talk loud. Thanks Firecracker.

00:26:40 John Daub: I'm okay with it. I like the presentation. I've never gotten an ekiben that sucked. It always looks really good. And a big... oh wait that's not a bean. It's sweet potato. Sweet that's a chestnut.

00:27:20 John Daub: I'm in Kyoto. We're gonna do some more live streaming.