00:00:02 John Daub: The view of a very typical Japanese Tokyo neighborhood. High-rise buildings all around. You can even see the highway in the distance. Hey everybody. So, I am in my final day here in this apartment. I've been living in a place called Shinozaki for the last 13 years. And I wanted to share with you my experience, or I guess I can put it better, my apartment. Now, they say home is where the heart is. Home is home sweet home.

00:00:45 John Daub: But I got to tell you something. Home is also where all your stuff is and it ain't in here anymore. But I wanted to, before I leave, just give you a tour. Because I've always promised people who are watching this series for a long time. Everyone's been asking me to do a house tour. So, I said, well, you know what? I will do a house tour on the last day that I live here. And this is the last day.

00:01:12 John Daub: So, this is where I've been living for 13 years. And I've hated these bars for 13 years. And I'm actually very happy to be leaving this behind. I actually asked the landlord if I could remove these and they said no because all the other apartment buildings have, all the other windows have them as well. Just part of the design. But that was one point I didn't like. There is some ventilation. You can see it on the outside. Some of the things I want to show you before I go inside.

00:01:45 John Daub: This is some ventilation where I can control the opening and closing of this vent inside. This is the door. And we had older doors but these new doors came in. The landlord put these in about three years, two years ago. And it was really good. The caulking has now hardened. I remember when they first put it in. And they also put this panel in as well. And this here is a camera that will let me know who's at the front door so I can either open it or not open it.

00:02:12 John Daub: Yeah. Maybe the bars are there to keep the thieves away. But I gotta be honest with you. There aren't that many thieves because if you look down here, that there is the police station. So I can't imagine there's gonna be a lot of thieves breaking into houses where the police station is just like a hundred meters away. I could just walk outside my front door and scream and the police will come immediately. One of the advantages to living right by the station.

00:02:39 John Daub: Alright. This is the gas unit. Let me show you here before I go inside. This is the gas unit. Now in Japan, gas... They come with gas bottles. And the gas man will renew the bottles every now and then. One of the things that they teach you is that when there's an earthquake, here's the valve. And when there's an earthquake, this button will pop out. And when this button pops out because of the earthquake, usually very strong ones, it stops the gas. And if I push the button after, it restarts the gas.

00:03:19 John Daub: So there's a lot of safety measures to make sure that when there's a massive earthquake, the gas does not explode. You know what I'm talking about? Why did I just laugh right there? Because that was a serious, serious thing. Alright, so I'll be sad. This is the last time I'll see this gas unit. Rinnai. It's the thing. Alright, let's go inside.

00:03:46 John Daub: Welcome to my humble apartment, which is now empty. Like good Japanese families or people who live in houses, this is called the genkan (entrance). And you can see there's a step here. And usually when you enter, you'll take your shoes off here. And it's nice to turn it around. So for easy access. I shall do that right now. Actually, I sort of did that wrong because you should take off your shoes and not step in the mess. But it's the last day. Give me a break.

00:04:26 John Daub: Alright, here we are. You can hear the echo of the apartment. This is where I've been living for 13 years. And I can't. Oh, I got to take this off, too. This is a light. I got this at Nitori about 13 years ago. When I first moved in. Japanese apartments also have smoke detectors. This was standard in the apartment when I moved in.

00:04:53 John Daub: Here's the kitchen unit. And this is actually quite a large room. This is quite a large room for a Japanese house. I'm at the end of the bathroom now. So you get a good scope of it. This is a 2LDK apartment. Means it's LDK is living, dining, kitchen. And two is two rooms, one here and one here. I'm going to show you that in a second. But this is the living, dining, kitchen room.

00:05:17 John Daub: And when I first came in here 13 years ago, it was just I couldn't believe the amount of space because I'd been living in an apartment in central Tokyo in a place called Futako-Tamagawa. When I saw this, this was double the size of the apartment that I was living in. And I just absolutely fell in love with this right away. Let's take a look at the kitchen here.

00:05:42 John Daub: Now, this unit has a lamp. And vents here. This turns it all off. This is the light. This is the fan and the lamp. And this cuts it. So it has a weak and a strong fan in here. And it takes all the smoke and the steam out from the three gas burners, which I really loved. Down here is a rack where you could cook fish. I've never actually cooked anything in there. So I don't know why this is actually dirty. I never used this. Ever. So it looks a little bit old, but I just don't grill fish in my house because it makes it stink.

00:06:24 John Daub: Underneath here, there is some nice space. It's kind of nasty. But there is another place to cut the gas. You can see here in Japanese houses. I leave the instruction manual for the next person. But there's a place where you can cut the gas as well inside of the house. A little place for wine, maybe. And some more storage space. This is a nice check for me. Also, that's where I had Mr. Bean was hanging there. If you ever saw some of the cooking shows that I did. The one with Jennifer and with cheese. You know, just stuff to put there. Here's the sink. Now, it's just a sink. I don't think there's anything special. Hot, cold.

00:07:15 John Daub: This is where the refrigerator was. You can see the shadow of where the refrigerator was for 13 years. Plugged in here. This on the wall. This here is the gas unit. And Rinnai makes the one in my new apartment is the same. Rinnai makes it. This is nuruku (warm) and this is atsui (hot). So you can control the temperature. It's now set at 44 degrees Celsius. And you can hear that? The voice is coming from the bathroom. And from that panel, I can control. This is the shower and the bathroom.

00:08:01 John Daub: One thing I have to point out. And probably other people have explained this about Tokyo apartments is the bathrooms are usually all plastic. The entire room is just plastic. And you see every single corner, every single section of it is plastic. Here you see. And the reason why is this is the shower area. Typically in Japan, you will shower before you get into the bathtub.

00:08:26 John Daub: Here's where you can put the shower up or down depending on your size. And if you're sitting, because in Japan people will sit to take a shower too. You can do that by putting the shower at this length. It is dirty because I've been moving out. Typically you do a quick cleaning but you don't have to do it because you're probably going to have to pay for it. So this is the panel in here too. So I can turn on and off the gas panel right here as well.

00:08:55 John Daub: If I push this button, this red button automatically fills the bathtub. Check it out. And now the bathtub is going to automatically fill. But I don't want to do that so I'm going to turn it off. So I turn it off using the control panel here. Now, in Japanese baths, after it's been filled, you want to make it warm again. You can put this on. This is the uidaki (reheat) button. If you push this, it will heat the water. So you always have a circulated warm water in a Japanese bath. It's very convenient. I like this bathtub a lot. Spent some time in it but my new apartment bathtub is bigger so I have to say thank you for 13 years of nice baths.

00:09:55 John Daub: This is where the washing machine was. And the washing machine I had for 13 years as well. It was a Korean company so I got it really cheap. They weren't very popular here in Japan. The bathtub fits the washing machine fits in this little tub area just in case water spills. It will collect the water which is great. When the water would spin, the spin cycle would go. It would empty into this pipe here. It's kind of self-explanatory. And you can turn the water on and off.

00:10:36 John Daub: The apartment has two rooms. I'm going to show you the next one. Just quickly, the last thing I want to show you is this. This unit came in during the 2011 earthquake. The big one in March 2011. My sink had a crack in it. And the crack started getting bigger. And the landlord put in this new unit. However, they never really completed doing it. And this was like seven years ago. I've been living with this ripped wall. And it's incomplete. You can see they didn't do a very good job with it up there as well.

00:11:14 John Daub: So I was in this apartment during the 2011 earthquake. And this unit is new. It's nice. But didn't make me happy. But the landlord did replace it. Not at my cost. They paid for it. If you remember outside, this is the little monitor so I can see the people outside. And I can call, hey! How you doing? Nobody's out there to listen to me. But this is something that was really convenient. And I like.

00:11:47 John Daub: Now. This is so cool. Apartment tour. So let me put this down for a second. So now I'm going to take you into the tatami room. This tatami room has always been very important to me. Why? I've always thought that when you live in Japan, you really need to have a tatami room (straw mat room). Because it makes you feel like you're in Japan. I mean, you just don't have two tatami rooms in other countries. I've never seen one in the United States where apartment came standard with a tatami room that you yourself didn't have to put in there. This apartment did come with the tatami room. And right now I'm showing it to you.

00:12:31 John Daub: These doors slide like this. And you can also take the doors off. And when you take the doors off the hinges, you can put them against the wall on the inside. And what it does is it makes a massive room. So you have this room. And then you have this room. And it's just all opened. And I used to do that when I had parties. If I had 30 or 40 people over. And I did fit 34 people in here. I would open the doors like this.

00:13:08 John Daub: So this is the tatami room. There's a little panel here. I would sleep in this room. And the echo is gone. I would sleep in this room typically. I had a futon (traditional mattress). And a futon is just like a mattress. It looks like a dog pad if you're unfamiliar with the futon. There's no frame with futons in Japan. It's just basically a mattress and a comforter. And that's how people sleep in Japan. And that's how I've slept for 18 years. And I wouldn't want it any other way.

00:13:47 John Daub: I think when you're in a tatami room, you want to sleep on a futon. And I would put the futon this way. And sleep at night. It's very comfortable. Here's the closet. Tons of closet space. Very deep. You can put the futon away underneath here. I had little racks in here. But you can put the futon away underneath here. And then you would have this room completely open. Which I really liked about futons. If I had a bed, you can't put that away. But the futon, you can put it away. You fold it and put it away. And that was really nice.

00:14:19 John Daub: I love the closet space. I put my dresser in here. I would put shoes. And if people came in suddenly to visit me, I would throw all the clothes into the closet and close it so nobody could see anything. So that's sort of a secret between us. So this is what the closet looks like. There is, interestingly enough, a detector inside the closet. And I didn't know for the longest time what this was. It is a smoke detector in case there's a fire, I guess. Or if the heat level changes. And once a year, the landlord would check this out to make sure it was functioning. And that made me feel good when he came in and checked. Although I had to clean the closet because I didn't want to see my landlord to see the mess that was in here.

00:15:39 John Daub: This is the balcony. It's sort of a mess now because, as you can see, they're doing construction. And one of the reasons why I'm so happy to be moving is that this building has been having drills and hammers and just so much noise because it's undergoing renovations on the outside. So I'm very happy to be leaving at this particular time. But the apartment is going to be so much more beautiful after they finish the renovations. There's not a lot of space here. I'll be honest with you. I had a table that I bought from IKEA. And I tried to make a little cafe and eat outside, but it just was never really enough space in this balcony.

00:16:20 John Daub: It's sort of a mess because I had a carpet. You can see this is where the carpet was. I had a carpet lined up here in a pad so I could walk outside. And that window leads to the other room. And again, another air vent, so there could be air circulating inside of the apartment. Right down there is the air conditioning. And I have to tell you something. This is the only room with an air conditioning right here. And Japanese summers are so hot, it's just not enough. You would just be hot in the summer and cold in the winter. And that's just sort of the way things are here in Japan.

00:17:03 John Daub: So I'm going to really miss this tatami room. I'm really going to miss it because it feels so good when you just lay in the tatami. And this room would be completely empty, typically. I didn't have a lot of stuff in here. There was a chair, but I got rid of it. I always like to have this room empty. I have a kotatsu (heated table) that I would use, but it's just so, so comfortable. And in the summer, the smell of the tatami is really, really nice. And there's no way for me to sort of share that smell with you through video, but I can tell you it smells like a really clean farm. And there's this really nice, pleasant, relaxing smell. It's like the farm without the poo, of course. It's just like a really fresh smell. Like straw, grass. It's a little bit different. It's hard to explain, but what I can tell you is when, in the summer, when the sun heats it up, and if I close the door for a little bit, and I opened it five minutes later, you can start to smell that tatami smell. And it's so good.

00:18:43 John Daub: So, let me see if there's any questions here. A small housewarming gift for the new place. Sabathius, thank you very much. And Mike Mike, Marv C., I appreciate that. And M. Mar, M. Moore John. Do those mats get replaced? This is an awesome question. Let me put you down here for a second while I answer this. Do those mats get replaced, the tatami mats? Also, good call on the Costco pizza. Yes, I love Costco pizza. And Dark Zaku, how do you feel about leaving somewhere that you lived for so long? Two amazing questions.

00:19:19 John Daub: First, these mats get replaced typically every seven to ten years. Seven years, I moved here in 2005, and I got these mats replaced in 2011 after the earthquake. And they are ready to be replaced again, I think. It's been seven years. So, you know, you don't have to replace tatami. They have a pretty good life, but I think you start to lose some of that tatami smell as the seasons go by. And after about two years, the tatami smell is much more subdued. Fresh tatami, it's like, it's hard to explain, but when I have this tatami room, I believe in my soul that this room is alive. This is like a living room. Not a living room like where you watch on your sofa Netflix and YouTube, but like this room is alive.

00:20:24 John Daub: And that's why I really want this tatami in my apartment, but my new apartment does not have it, and most apartments in central Tokyo do not have tatami. It's just a fact. I went to many, many apartments. It's all gone because tatami is also quite hard to take care of. They get these things called dani (mites) sometimes, these little bugs that go into the tatami, and they're very hard to get out of. You have to put like some kind of spray that fumigates and kills all the things in here. One thing that I can show you is these things do come up. This one is a one-sided tatami mat, and typically, well, sometimes there'll be two sides. This one's just on one side, and when they take it out, they throw the whole thing out. It's pretty thick. It fits in perfectly. And that's what a tatami room is like.

00:21:35 John Daub: As I said, for me, I don't think I would think I was living in Japan without a tatami room, but I've been here so long that I know I'm in Japan. But when I first moved here 13 years ago, this was just a huge selling point. But it's awesome. Tatami room. Yes. And I will miss it a lot. It feels very strange to be leaving here because, like, whenever I finished work, whenever I did an NHK shoot or I was out filming a location in Hokkaido or Kagoshima or Aogashima or one of the faraway places, I would come back here.

00:22:24 John Daub: Hold on a second. It's much cooler. I keep the futon down because my hair is a disaster if I don't wear a hat. Before I take you into the next room, this is the breaker. And there's only been four or five times where I used too much power or an earthquake or something would break the light. And usually the breaker is above somewhere, either in a cabinet. Or near the bathroom. These will control different areas of it. And it will just the breaker will go off sometimes. When you go into a new apartment, you want to turn that on or else the power will be off.

00:23:06 John Daub: This room is my office. This is where I did so many Only in Japan episodes in this room. I was an editing master in this room. I would work all night. Into the morning. And I'm going to show you the view from the window. This is a room. I was glad to have this. I could close the door. If I want privacy, but I always lived alone. Now I'm married. And it was nice. I had a blue carpet in here. It was always a disaster and very messy. Because I was always away. I come home. I come from location shoots. So tired. I would the first thing I do when I come home is start shooting. I would start recharging the batteries of all my cameras and taking the SD cards and backing them up onto three or four terabyte hard drives.

00:24:07 John Daub: And once I backed up everything and I'd started recharging all my batteries, then I would go to sleep. I made this as a ritual because if you do things without taking those steps before you go to sleep and relax, it's harder to get them done later on. And let me just take you in here. I wasn't crazy about the pattern. Of this. But it is what it is.

00:24:25 John Daub: Thank you, Deborah. For reading my mind. Next week, we're going to get my wife on to the show and you guys can ask her questions. I don't want to introduce her until she's comfortable. First of all, and when she feels comfortable, I want her to answer your questions herself because I don't want to talk for her. She's my wife. So I think she can do that for herself. And if she struggles with English, she can do that for herself. I'm going to help her. But I do appreciate that. Varun, John, you are one of the most humble vloggers I've known. Varun, I'm just me, man. I don't know if I'm that humble. But I really think that people who talk so highly of themselves, it's a turn off. So I think if I do good work, I don't have to talk about it.

00:25:28 John Daub: Jim, awesome videos, watching videos, making me want to live in Japan. And you might be in an apartment like this. And Chris Martin, how hard would it be for a not Japanese person speaking to rent an apartment? And what's the biggest problems you've had in your apartment? This is a really good question. Let me introduce this room and I'm going to get to that. That's a great question, Chris. Again, we're live right now and in my apartment for the last time. This is the view that I've had for a long time.

00:26:00 John Daub: Now it's obstructed by the place where construction workers are going to be working on it. But I could see I kid you not on a clear day I could see Mount Fuji right there. Mount Fuji was right there. And Tokyo Tower, the top of Tokyo Tower was right there. And before they built this apartment building, it was an amazing view. And for the price that I paid the rent. What I want to address Chris's question was just absolutely. I mean, it was a steal.

00:26:34 John Daub: Here's where it was. If you remember from the balcony, here's the vent that you can open to let some of the humidity out because Japanese apartments often have not enough light. And if there's not enough light, then you can get fungus between these two buildings. See right between these two buildings. That is where I would see Tokyo Disneyland's fireworks. Every like I think it was 8 p.m. Or 8:30 p.m. Depending on the season. And it was pretty cool because I'd hear in the distance. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I remember the third day I moved in here. I said, what is that booming? I looked out the window. I couldn't see anything. Then I saw between the building. I said, what? No way. So between these buildings, I could see Tokyo Disneyland's fireworks every night was really cool. And that got old after about a month or two. But it was still kind of cool.

00:27:34 John Daub: I live on the edge of Tokyo because the next place over is Chiba. So this is still Tokyo. But the end of Tokyo. Very cool. This is the room. You could see where I had the blue carpet. It's sort of left a shadow there. I had my desk here when I've been doing the live streams on Patreon for the last year. For the Patreon supporters, I would do Q&A here. This view was always kind of nice. And I would sometimes open the window, take a break and pop my head out. And I could see the station 30 seconds away because one of the biggest selling points of this was not just the tatami room, but the fact that the station was 30 seconds away. It's huge.

00:28:25 John Daub: This is a good important story. So it's this actually isn't very clean, but we don't wear shoes in the house. So it's not too bad. March 11th, 2011. I was in this room when the earthquake happened. The earthquake was massive. The entire building was swaying like I was on a boat. It was the scariest moment for me in my life. While I sat here, I was frozen like a deer in headlights. And I did not know what to do. I never, ever felt in 20 years of living here that same sensation ever again.

00:29:07 John Daub: Just it was first of all, before the earthquake hit, it's like you could hear the rumble. You could feel it building up like boiling water, like before the bubbles start to boil and burst up. You could sort of feel underneath the ground the shaking. And all of a sudden, like it was a big one. I'm like. Oh, there's an earthquake coming. But I had no idea how big it was going to be. Nobody did. And I was sitting right here at a desk right here. And the first thing I did, I had a hamster. The hamster was sitting right here and there was a little cage here. Hamster also had a summer house inside of the closet. Used to take the stuffing out of my pillow. And it made a second house in the corner. And it took me three days to figure out why my pillow. There was a hole in the pillow and the stuffing was coming out.

00:30:13 John Daub: But my first reaction was to grab my hamster and we ran outside. And when I was standing up outside on the street and it was like it felt like I was on a boat. The street. The ground felt like I was riding a bus. And it was really, really the scariest moment. And I was right here. And I'm always going to remember that because I just told you on this live stream and live stream is history forever. My hamster's name was Kiki and I missed Kiki very much. Kiki was alive for a good three years, which is very long time. And I do miss Kiki. And I probably will get another hamster sometime in the future.

00:31:18 John Daub: But I buried when Kiki died. I buried Kiki underneath the cherry blossom tree in a park nearby. And I'm going to share the story with you. So I buried Kiki. I don't know if I should tell this story for sanitation reasons. But I buried my hamster underneath the cherry tree in the park. And I always felt that every season and every spring when the cherry blossoms bloomed, I would see the hamster. I would see Kiki again and the blossoms. And that's another thing I'm going to miss about this place. Every spring would go and sit underneath that cherry tree. I'm getting a little sad by thinking about this story. But I would sit underneath that cherry tree just for a couple of minutes. Or if I ran through that park, I would yell Kiki's name. And I always thought maybe his little ghost would come running after me or something. It's pretty cheesy to mention this, but this is sort of the way my mind thinks. And I will definitely be coming back. Every now and then just to say hi to Kiki and to the old apartment.

00:32:36 John Daub: This is where I edited all of the videos that you watched. And now I get to edit into a new place. You know, I got to edit everything in a new house. And that's kind of something really new. I mean, will I be able to do it? Chris, to get back to Chris's question. It's getting easier and easier to rent an apartment. If you Google search it, I made a show for NHK's Tokyo Eye program two years ago. I think it was about renting apartments. And it's getting easier and easier to do that. If you have the visa and you have the proper documentation, you can rent an apartment in Tokyo.

00:33:18 John Daub: Now, a lot of the you might want to live in a really expensive high rise apartment or something, but they do background checks on you. And if your salary is not you have to be the rent has to be about 30 percent of your income or less. Meaning if you can't live in a three thousand dollar apartment, even if you have the money up front, unless like your salary and your income is if that rent is 30 percent of your income. So I think you have to make like ten thousand dollars a month in order to live in a three thousand five hundred dollar apartment, which would be crazy. That's kind of expensive.

00:33:59 John Daub: So this apartment that I'm living in, Chris, and everybody's interested was one thousand dollars a month. All right. You see now both of the rooms one thousand dollars a month or one hundred and eight thousand yen. One hundred and eight thousand yen or one thousand dollars a month. And that's pretty good for Tokyo. I'm talking 30 seconds from the station and two rooms, two rooms and one big room. And then I'm talking about the big dining kitchen area. This one here. So that is actually I thought it was a steal. For one thousand dollars. Except there are a couple of things I didn't like, which is these bars. I didn't like these.

00:34:48 John Daub: Oh, and you see the crack between the buildings here. Just I got to tell you the story. Do you see that right there? I remember one day I was coming back home and I walked past that crack and I looked to the right and I walked past. I stopped. I went backwards. I looked again. I said, they just opened up a Mister Donut. And I could tell just by the logo, just a little bit of crack. And I ran downstairs to the Mister Donut and got in the line because the whole neighborhood wanted to come and try the food. I think I was the first Mister Donut in Shinozaki and I'm still here after Mister Donuts in Shinozaki. Mister Donuts went out of business five years ago. Thus that little window. So kind of a kind of sad experience.

00:35:49 John Daub: But I want to tell you one of the biggest problems that I have with Japanese apartments is daylight. This room is dark okay this room is dark and it also does not get a lot of ventilation. The vent was broken in the shower room for two years and something was moving but the vent wasn't sucking the air out and I told the landlord this they came in but they could never there was always like a fungus problem and you can see discoloration on the walls and I had the landlord come in many many times this really bugged me up here I could never this isn't one of the reasons why I'm moving out because I don't know what I'm breathing in but I definitely let the landlord knew that there was like a fungus problem on this wall you know on this side of the apartment I don't think it gets enough daylight one reason is because of these bars and the other reason the window is too small all the sunlight comes from this side so when you get a Japanese apartment people actually yeah it's not good mold is something that you have to definitely check out you should look underneath all the cracks to make sure your apartment doesn't have any mold it didn't when i moved in because they cleaned it and now after a year this apartment was not i was always fighting the mold.

00:37:28 John Daub: But one of the other places you can check for the mold is underneath here this is the bathtub and you can take this panel out and you can see there if there's there's a lot of mold underneath here so make sure you check and this is the drain and make sure you can open it up and check and see if that they've cleaned that all out sometimes they leave the gunk in there which isn't good there's the bathroom and the shower room.

00:38:15 John Daub: And this is the toilet now i'm always going to end with the toilet because it's clean i cleaned it but this toilet is old and when i moved in i was really disappointed because it didn't have i'm not going to give you a close-up for people asking it did not have the washlet that you like where it would spray and keep you clean that was a huge disappointment to me and i'm moving so i don't have to be disappointed anymore my new apartment has it but you can see it has a sink in there so when you flush it i used to have stones in here so that's why it's dirty when you flush it you can your hands on the top here and almost all the Japanese toilets I'd say 95% of them have this option which is really cool there's usually a towel here we could dry your hands so people are asking me well they used to say oh that's the same water that the toilet is how could you wash your hands and toilet water the water hasn't gone into the toilet yet it's the same water that comes from the sink so there's no difference between the water coming from a spigot here as one in there it's just for washing your hands and after you wash your hands there you can wash it and I would wash with soap in the other room which is where the bathroom is I never really like that funky door though that funky door was kind of a little bit too much for me but and here's the vent it was open and still we had the fungus look at that on the wall I told the landlord about it so you can pull it out I pushed it in but you can pull it out and that lets out the humidity but in the summer Japanese summer is so humid you will get like fungus if you don't get the humidity out or you're not using air-conditioning this is absolutely awful and I was fighting to get things replaced but the landlord was pretty good just it wasn't the perfect situation for me.

00:40:30 John Daub: There you have it if you have any questions, let me know right now I will answer them for the next couple of minutes while I reminisce of the times I spent in this tatami room man, it is kind of sad to go. Here's the remote control for the air conditioner. The company is called Beaver and never heard of them before. Yeah, you push it and it would turn on and it would oscillate. It was a nice air conditioner. The controls are all in Japanese as you can see this is temperature and you can go hot or cold. This is dry and this one here. I believe would control the fan strength and this one would control you can see here automatic cold hot dry and fan. So those are the options that you have and it's good to learn kanji because you'll have remote controls like this. That it comes in useful. This is neru (sleep mode). This is just when if you want to turn it off the timer. Yeah, it's pretty basic. It's a Beaver. Very nice.

00:41:49 John Daub: Do you feel nostalgic leaving your apartment Oscar rights? I do I really do. Put this down here for a second. I really do feel. This is nice. If you guys are in Shinozaki, I would invite you over for the last hurrah. I do feel very nostalgic to leave this apartment. It's just because I spent my entire 30s here. All right, I moved here in 2005. I was 31 and I'm leaving here at age 44. So it's 13 years. I've been here for like the prime. No, I wouldn't I think I'm reaching my prime. But my 30s were spent here and my 30s were incredible I had so much fun and making the show and when I started the Only in Japan series in 2013. This is where the ideas came. I was thinking of this in 2011 after that earthquake.

00:43:01 John Daub: Well, I just to put a ribbon on this just to tie up that story and after the earthquake happened a lot of foreigners were leaving and I'm talking about Westerners mostly Westerners left because of fears of radiation and we just didn't have any facts. The one thing that I knew for sure was that I was not leaving if people in Japan are gonna suffer with the radiation you know, then what the heck am I gonna do because this is my home my parents we really didn't know what was going on either and I didn't think that it was that bad because everything was seemed to be contained in that one area up in Fukushima. No, we're talking like eight seven years ago now. But I didn't leave there were times where I was worried I did look at flights but I never left and my friends I had a lot of friends almost all my friends left almost all my friends left for a period. I went down to Osaka for four days because there was so much shaking in Tokyo that I was getting seasick because of the aftershocks so I went to Osaka for four days to kind of reset and get some food because there was a supply chain problem and we didn't get a lot of food at the supermarket the aisles were bare because the supply chain was messed up after the earthquake so I actually went grocery shopping in Osaka and brought stuff back to Tokyo and the foreigners who left we called them flyjin (fly gaijin) you know like gaijin flyjin and they flew away and they didn't stick it out and those people yeah they had the reasons but I stuck in there because this is my home and I would not leave and the flyjin left and some of them never came back.

00:45:02 John Daub: Sometimes it's just the way it is here but it's like I don't have to work for it. To me, Japan is my home. I love it here. I will do everything I can to support it, except for joining the army, because that would, as an American citizen, you can't do that. All right, electrical sockets, you'll notice, they don't have the middle one, like in the United States, there's like a ground. There's just two. And if you cut that third little prong on the US ones, they'll fit just fine. This is a cable, all the rooms have a cable for, to set up a TV, and all the rooms in this house will come with a little bit of mold, so.

00:45:52 John Daub: As you're looking at it there. The voltage is 100, and the US is 110. The electrical appliance that you have in the United States will work here, all right, and vice versa. If you buy something in Japan, you don't need a converter to make it work in the United States. I love that. So hair dryers, vacuum cleaners, stuff that I would get as presents from my parents, I could actually plug it in here and use it just fine. The difference between Europe and the United States, we don't have to deal with all these different prongs.

00:46:19 John Daub: Yeah, so there you have it. That's my apartment. I'm very, very sad to be leaving. I do feel extremely nostalgic. Excellent questions you guys had on this, and I'm gonna have to say goodbye, because the guy is coming to take my key. He's gonna be here any moment now, and that's it. This is the last time we can stay together in this apartment, and I'm all the way at the end of the corner, and I've really loved the time here. I love the memories of the people that came to visit me, and the parties that I had here sometimes, and the nice views, and the quietness of this neighborhood. Going on midnight snack runs here. I would bring the snacks back, and eat them here, whatever I didn't finish. It was just such a nice place to live, and I will very, very, very much miss it.

00:47:19 John Daub: Just one last walk through. I really will miss it a lot. Don't forget the light, picture. Okay, yeah, I'm gonna take that down. I'm leaving this one up here, because it should have one light. I'm taking, you know what, I'm gonna take that down right now. I don't know how I'm gonna do it. It's like way up there. How do I get that down? I used to have a stool. I'm gonna have to jump and get it down, okay. Any tall 210 centimeter basketball players, six foot five inch basketball players in the neighborhood, like right now, I can use your help.

00:49:02 John Daub: Thanks again, everybody, for watching this live stream and sharing this apartment with me one last time. It means a lot to be able to do this with you. I know over the years, the channel has grown, and a lot of my growth as a person has happened right here in this apartment while I was living here at this address, and it is sad to go, but new opportunities, life changes, new things come a-callin', like marriage, and I will be back live streaming again soon. So take care, everybody, wherever you are in the world. I really appreciate it, the support, the love, and this apartment, which we can now all share together, because you've been in my apartment now. This is it. We have shared this moment, this experience together. So thank you.

00:50:04 John Daub: The rest of this time is going to be spent by myself as I get ready for the end. Thank you. I'm gonna end with the last view of Tokyo. This is my house, and if you look between those buildings, that's Chiba over there. Chiba Prefecture, and this is Tokyo, and I always really loved this neighborhood. So thank you, Shinozaki. It's been awesome. Love you. Bye, everyone.