00:00:09 John Daub: I'm in Saitama—no, Hachijōjima—and I thought I would do a really fast drone cast. You can see me down here, and it's 4:40 in the morning. We've got a nice sunrise coming up over the Pacific Ocean. I thought I'd take you for a little spin. Wow, look at that beautiful pink sky. There's purple clouds in the distance. I'm still half asleep, but it's worth it to get up to see this.

00:01:16 John Daub: There's a fishing boat on the left of the horizon. This is Hachijōjima, the biggest of Tokyo's islands out in the Pacific. It's about a 75-minute flight from Haneda Airport, and I came here yesterday. There's the port—I'm off in the distance here in a safe zone. Down there right in the middle is the beach. I was there yesterday swimming; it was pretty nice. That's the ferry pier that takes you from Hachijōjima to Tokyo. And you can see down there is the camp spot—there's one tent, a blue one. Oh, the white one is ours; that's where we are, right in the middle of the screen.

00:02:26 John Daub: Sorry about the signal—I'm on an island after all. It's amazing, though, because we have 4G LTE here on Hachijōjima, which is pretty incredible. That's one of the two peaks—Hachijōjima has two peaks on the island. One of them is this one on this side; this looks more like Mount Fuji. And if you look on the other side, that's the second one. In the middle is a lowland where most of the population is located in the center between the two peaks. This makes it a very beautiful island.

00:03:48 John Daub: What was really interesting to me is how established this island is. There's an airport with five flights from Tokyo coming here, and then it's a jumping off point. After you arrive at Hachijōjima, you can take a helicopter or another ferry to the other islands. This is the base, the biggest of Tokyo's islands—maybe Oshima is the biggest. This is also the base for a lot of the other islands in this group too. The next island, I think it's Omurojima or something like that, has an airport but it's much smaller—usually it's helicopters. And then from there you can go to Iōjima, which is deeper into the Pacific.

00:04:43 John Daub: Wow, look how beautiful that is. Let's take her up a little bit higher. Whoa—and all the way that way is California. Now, I don't know if that's true, but that'd be cool if it were. So just getting ready for another full day on Hachijōjima. And then I'm going off to Aogashima tomorrow morning to stay there for a while. Oh, look at the sun—look at the beams of light streaking over those clouds. That's where the sun's going to be coming up very soon. You get to see some of the boats. I'm going to take her up just a little bit higher. Wow, so beautiful—and you can see some of the boats still out there. I guess they're fishing or going back to another island.

00:05:54 John Daub: It's amazing that I do have 4G signal here on the island. I was surprised to see that—a full five bars on the Docomo signal to my iPhone 7 Plus. And this is being streamed on the DJI Mavic Pro. Beautiful sunrise here. At this time of the morning, there's no air traffic, and the airport is well far off from here.

00:06:46 John Daub: Beautiful island—lots of farms. They grow lots of produce down here, mushrooms. Had some yesterday at the restaurant. I think it's a hotel down there, but it looks like the presidential palace or something like that. And that's the other volcano. Beautiful, isn't it?

00:07:58 John Daub: So I'm going to pan one more time over to the sunrise. Once again, this is Hachijōjima in Tokyo. Believe it or not, this is Tokyo. Tokyo has a whole chain of islands that jut out from the city into the center of the Pacific, and they go all the way out to Iwo Jima, which is famous from World War II, the battle that was fought there. That's under the jurisdiction of the city of Tokyo. So the mayor is essentially the governor and has the power over all these islands as well, which makes these islands very beautiful and very well set up. They have all of the proper funding—at least Hachijōjima does.

00:08:51 John Daub: Yesterday I was surprised I saw a lot of elementary school kids coming out of school, and some high school kids. So I know that there's a pretty good school system here. Usually in Japan, in the countryside away from the city, the populations are decreasing very fast—it's usually really old people—but here the population looks pretty mixed. There's people of all ages, and I thought that was pretty cool. The restaurant I went to last night was a family restaurant—almost all, there's no chain restaurants here. Everything is pretty much locally owned: a family with the daughter and the wife and the husband cooking. Little pricey too, but good food.

00:09:52 John Daub: You can see the sun just starting to peek up. The sun should be making its way just over the clouds in a minute.

00:10:19 John Daub: Beautiful. I'm gonna bring the drone back down and leave you with this image of the sea and the sunrise in Hachijōjima, Tokyo, Japan.

00:11:09 John Daub: There I am. Haha. Thanks for watching everybody.