00:00:00 John Daub: I'm in the Onsen Ski area in Nagano Prefecture. I can't believe there's 4G signal here, but I came here to take a break from my life out there in Tokyo. Down here, down here. It's pretty nice out here. Completely different scenery from what I'm used to in Tokyo, the urban jungle.

00:25:00 John Daub: I am what you would call an ultra beginner. There's beginner, baby beginner, and if you go this way down to the bottom, it's like ultra beginner. That's where I am. I'm that guy who's always getting in the way, that topples over the beginners. There's always gotta be one person on the ski slope. I'm stuck here at the bottom. I haven't actually made it to the ski lift, although I have a ski lift ticket. This is my ski ticket for today. So yeah, today is the 21st of January 2018, adult. That's what the kanji up on the top is. And this is a pretty nice ski area. I'm just staying here all night and then I'm going back to Tokyo. But you can see it is a very nice day. I'm gonna show you, here's the ski slope up here. Boom, look at that. So there's people skiing. That's what you do here.

01:32:00 John Daub: Now, Nagano is a location where the 1998 Olympics took place. And there's a sort of a tradition for winter sports here. A very good tradition. But the tradition is not limited to just Nagano. Niigata, Yamanashi, there are places all around the Japanese Alps, Toyama for example, that have a tradition of awesome skiing. And it's very close to Tokyo. In fact, I came here by Shinkansen and then a local train ride for 30 minutes and I was here, not very far from Tokyo.

02:04:00 John Daub: You know what? I want to snowboard, but the last time I did it was for NHK and I would go this way and then I couldn't turn because then I was going backwards and I absolutely could not control it. I'm like a fish out of water. You know, I just flop around. I am on skis right now. Hold on. This is very, very bad. Okay, here we go. So basically, I'm going to try to ski for you and you guys can tell me how my skills are. I've improved a little bit. Basically, I can do this without hurting myself or the people around me. That's a big, big, big bonus because I don't have any insurance or anything for skiing. I guess the health insurance would cover it, but hey, that was actually a big step forward what I just did.

03:33:00 John Daub: Oh, thank you, Adni. I'm close enough to see the screen. Yeah. Thank you very much for this super chat. Alright, let's do some skiing, okay? I'm going to be back in a second. I'm not going that far because it's for public safety that I stay within the camera. I'm going to go past you and then I'm going to ski around you, okay? Don't go anywhere because I'm not. I'm probably going to nail this camera. Oh my, this is not good. Alright, here I come. I'm free. Oh my, I'm free. Just that, I feel like I burned off this udon that I just ate for lunch. I put a picture of that on Instagram if you want to check it out. It was really good. It's like a naganomiso udon.

05:20:00 John Daub: Yeah, and this is the ski area for those of you who are joining in now. You can see I'm going to pan up a little bit. That's, you know, if one day I get good, I hope to be able to ski like these people. I always wanted to learn the skills that James Bond had and it's very, very difficult. Oh, thank you, Wes. It's very, very difficult for me because, oh, that guy's like sledding. No way. Now, I love to see him. He like sledded down. Did he mean to do that? Oh, yeah, I could do that. If it's just like ski, look, look. I could totally do that. Why don't they have toboggans?

06:10:00 John Daub: It is really cold, but it's not that cold. Actually, today was a pretty reasonable day weather-wise. I think it's above freezing, believe it or not. I could just snow angel for Stan. Oh, man, people are flying down this mountain. This is where the Olympians train, maybe. I don't know. I'm just saying. But it's a lot of fun to do winter sports in Japan. I haven't done any resort episodes, basically because I can't ski. But I'd like to. My teacher is down there in the yellow with some other beginners.

06:55:00 John Daub: All right, I'm going to try to do snow angel for Stan. You know, you don't have to ski to be cool at a ski resort. You can be cool in other different ways. The cool people aren't the ones that are just skiing. They're the ones that hang out looking for a ski. All right. I can look cool. Totally. I can totally do it. Why do they give you poles? The good thing about snowboarding is there's no poles, you know? I'm going to take you to the sign so you can get a quick look at what the ski slope area looks like. The good thing about Japan is nobody really steals stuff. You could leave things out and it'll still be there.

08:00:00 John Daub: People looking at me funny. That's a warning that don't leave it there. Or maybe they're looking at me because I'm live streaming. Look what I did. I did that. Look, there's my poles. Oh, it just collapsed. There it is. That's my gear. These are really cool. They're rentals. And the skis are 30 centimeters too short. I'm going to show you the sign. Check this out. Miyako Akakura snow area. You see that? Grande Gaido. Very nice. They have a lot of slopes here. Where's the one for like ultra beginners? I guess I'm already there. We're here.

09:37:00 John Daub: There's a lot of slopes. You could literally just go up here and ski the whole mountain maybe. But once again, if anyone who's asking me for advice on skiing, don't, or just do the opposite. What I tell the bunny slopes, that's what it's called. Yeah. There's the lounge, which is cool. You can drink, I guess you could drink coffee up there. There's a restaurant, people lounging. And this is the queue for the ski lift. Welcome. Very cute. And you can see the people going up to the top there. Those people know how to ski. Yours truly is not quite there yet.

10:33:00 John Daub: So basically I just wanted to show you a ski slope here. Cause that's all I'm good at. Oh, the snow angel for my friends. And then that's it. Wow. It's a beautiful view. Check it out. It's pretty nice, huh? This is live. You know, this is pretty good. So that little one right there, that's Megumi. She's a teacher. She's really good. And those people are ultra beginners too. They're dangerous to be around. So yeah, fake cast. This is a neat experience.

11:26:00 John Daub: I'm going to go here and do something that only I can do. It's not going to be yellow snow. Um, you immature people out there. I'm learning that. The internet. You know, there's a lot of immaturity going on. That's okay because sometimes I am too. This is like virgin snow. Check it out. You see that? All right. I'm going to try the snow angel here. Um, Nosh don't censor the yellow snow comment. Nosh is one of the administrators of the moderators. Thanks. All right, let's try this. Boom. Snow angel for Stan. Man, I'm sweating. I didn't even do anything and I'm sweating. I think I got in my jacket.

12:49:00 John Daub: All right, Stan, you know what you guys can see in the chat, but rank it one out of 10. 10 being good. And one being, you know, do I have to say it? You see it? Boom. Check it out. You could just see the snow angel. Look at that. There's where the head is and the wings. I don't see where the feet are. It's more of a mermaid. I could make a snowman in the middle of the night. And then when the skiers wake up in the morning, they got to slalom around all the snowmen that I make. There are kids they're like three years old and they are skiing like they're James Bond. You know? Like I'm talking Roger Moore, James Bond, where he's in For Your Eyes Only. And like half the movie is skiing. Totally good.

14:00:00 John Daub: There is the other beginners. So I'm getting a hundred for the snow angel. What have you been drinking? That was not a hundred. I give myself like a six out of 10. It's mostly the snow's fault. All right. I just wanted to give you a little insight on the snow situation here. It's good. There's lots of it. And people seem to be really enjoying it.

14:33:00 John Daub: You know, this ski town, a couple of things to leave you with at the station. When I came in I'd say it's about 65% non-Japanese international. And I mean like Australians, a lot of people from Australia and maybe New Zealand. I haven't talked to anybody yet, but a lot of people from abroad here. All the taxi drivers speak really good broken English. So you can get around pretty good. All the hotels speak English. They seem to be making their living off of a lot of tourism here, which is very good. I also heard from the hotel owner that the nightlife here is pretty raunchy sometimes because of the Australian crowd people here. And maybe I'll investigate that tonight. I'm not sure.

15:42:00 John Daub: All right, I can't believe this 4G signal in the mountain. It's weird. Only in Japan. Alright, everybody, I'm going to leave you with some skiing from better people who are much, much better than me. Oh, look at that one guy at the top. He's coming down fast. Well, then there's a real skier. You see him right in the center of the screen. Oh, how does he do it? He's probably got massive concentration. Look, he's not even a skier. He's not even going left and right. He's just coming straight down. Amazing skill. Honestly, how anyone right to the ski lift that dude, he really loves the ski. He skied right to the ski lift. He got on. There's like no line now. This is better than Disneyland Tokyo, because the lines are so long here. You just ski and you get right to the ski lift and he's going back up again.

16:54:00 John Daub: I have a lift ticket here. It's in English on the back too. See, it says here, please present the ticket to the staff when you're on the lift. Do not replace or reissue lost lift tickets. Don't lose your ticket today only. Yeah, basically, you know that. Yeah, come on out to Akakura. It's cool. Thanks everybody for watching this live stream and definitely check out some of the other live streams I'm going to be doing in the next couple of days. We're doing a lot. I'm going to try to talk to some more people and walk around this town. It's a nice little town around here. They have I saw a place that's cooking up some time ago. There is an onsen here, so I'm going to try to soak in the bath before I get out of here tomorrow. I'm going back to Tokyo tomorrow evening, so it's a very short trip, but it's nice. You know, it's like a getaway change of scenery refresh, then go back to Tokyo because I got a lot of work to do more videos to edit.

18:01:00 John Daub: I hope you enjoyed the last couple of videos that I uploaded to the Only in Japan main channel. One of them was the sento experience and I kind of want probably most of you already seen it because if you watch the series and you probably got it in your notifications. I deleted the first upload and re-uploaded again. It's one of my favorite videos already because of the deeper meaning behind it. Because Tokyo sento is failing. It went from 2000 to 600 because the population is declining and because people aren't going. And I don't want to talk about the Japanese people because they have bathtubs in their houses since the 1970s and they're losing money. The result is that they might go extinct and I wanted to make the video to help get people to go and save them. So for me, this is a big deal to make that video and it's not doing very well on YouTube and like that's sort of hard to see as a creator and as somebody who likes the sento to save it, so I'm always going to try to promote that video until it gets to wherever it's going.

19:03:00 John Daub: Alright, so I'm going to leave you the last 20 seconds. I appreciate you just joining me for this. I'm going to leave you the last 20 seconds looking at something more beautiful than my mug. Can you do an episode on bonsai? Yeah. There's a bonsai master who lives near me. He's one of the most famous ones in Japan and he lives two kilometers from my house. So I might ask him if I can film there. It's a good suggestion. That guy's pretty good. This guy's pretty good too. So just move side to side. Side. That's all you got to do? I can do that. Bye-bye everybody.