00:00:00 John Daub: Good evening everybody. Welcome to Chūō-ku. This is the central ward, the center of the city of Tokyo. This is one of the 23 wards in Tokyo that I now live in. And I'm in front of a statue here. I guess it's called the messenger statue. And it's situated on this bridge that connects the island of Tsukishima with another island called Shinkawa. And this road here that you see leads all the way to Tokyo Station, which is pretty cool. And of course, the river that you see right here is the Sumida River. And in the distance, you can see the Shinkawa River. And in the distance beyond that is the Eitaibashi. Eitaibashi is a bridge that I featured in Only in Japan Go about three weeks ago or so. And in the distance beyond that is the Tokyo Skytree live. It's kind of grainy because it's nighttime here and I'm just working with an iPhone 7.

00:01:09 John Daub: But it's been a few days and I thought I would take some time up here. Take some time and just talk with you a little bit about the stuff that's been happening in my life. Life is moving at warp speed for me. I thought I would just spend some time here on the river because a river is a place where you can think about things. You kind of let the mind flow with the water and things come to you. But for me, I'm sort of at an intersection in my life. And this is a bridge of life. So I thought it was symbolic. As many of you know, I've gotten married. I moved to a new apartment. I have had so many things happen in such a short period of time in my life.

00:02:22 John Daub: So I want to talk about those changes and what you will see on the Only in Japan channel in the next three to six months, as well as talk about this wonderful area that I'm living in now. Before I was living in Edogawa ward. Edogawa is one of the 23 wards of Tokyo. Edogawa is near Chiba. And I moved here to Chūō-ku because it's central and it's a place that I've always wanted to live. It has a lot of history. Chūō-ku also includes Nihonbashi. Nihonbashi (Japan's bridge) is Japan's bridge and has a very long, rich history. And now I feel like I'm living in the center of all of this history. It's really cool. I think that's going to enhance Only in Japan and Only in Japan Go in the months to come. Because when you're here, a lot more opportunities come to you.

00:03:18 John Daub: The apartment that I live in is not any bigger, believe it or not. It's sort of a parallel move. But it's a very nice place. And now that there's two of us living in one apartment, it's tighter. But it's kind of neat. I think married life, and I'm saying this only after one week, okay? But it's been pretty good. My friend Tom was here. He came for the wedding from London. He's one of my best friends from when I was a child. And now he lives in London. We both grew up in the United States. And he just flew back. And I was really happy to see him for almost two weeks here to show him a little bit about Japan. Yesterday we ate, the last meal was sushi at Tsukiji.

00:04:12 John Daub: I want to tell you if you do come to Tsukiji, do not eat, well you can if you want, but I don't recommend eating in the inner market. It's so crowded. You can wait two hours. But you can just take a step out. You can go to Sushi Zanmai, which is one of my favorite sushi chains, and get really good sushi for a pretty reasonable price. All the fish comes from the same place. So I don't see why you would pay a ridiculous amount of money for sushi at Tsukiji. For those of you who catch me live streaming, I'm always trying to live stream at different times too. This is a long time since I've streamed at about 8:30, 9pm here in Tokyo. As you can tell, Chūō-ku is very, very quiet right now. One reason is because this is Golden Week in Tokyo, between April 29th and about May 5th. Golden Week really quiets the city down. A lot of people are on the go traveling to visit family or they're in their car going to the countryside, out to the mountains to see the flowers. Tokyo empties out, which is pretty cool. When you stick around the city, it feels like you have the whole place to yourself.

00:05:50 John Daub: We've established that I'm married. We've established that I've moved. Now the question is, how does this affect the Only in Japan channel and the Only in Japan Go channel? I have to admit for the last two months, I have not been posting a lot of content on the Only in Japan main channel. The reason why is just because there's so many things going on in my life coming at me at warp speed, including other opportunities that I've been shying away from actually. Because there's a couple of things that I still have on my plate that I have to finish, including a DVD project that's been running for about a year. Today, I spent the entire day throwing away large trash from my last apartment back in Shinozaki in Edogawa Ward.

00:07:11 John Daub: About two years ago, I was rushing to get to Narita Airport and I had to finish a video for Only in Japan and upload it before I went. I only had about an hour and forty minutes to get to Narita, so I ran to the taxi stand. The guy had been watching me walk by the taxi stand for years and I'd never really taken a taxi, so he said he'll take me to Narita and I jumped in. The whole way there we were just talking about all these things about Edogawa, about the neighborhood, about his family and my family and we kind of made friends. I got to Narita just in time. And today I went to get a taxi to help me move the large trash, the large objects that I want to recycle to the sodaigomi (large trash collection), and the guy at the taxi stand was like, hey, you know what? He's the same guy that took me to the airport two years ago. He remembered me and helped me. We put as much stuff as we could into the trunk of his taxi and into the back seat. I covered it up with a tarp so it wouldn't get dirty and we drove to the sodaigomi place and he helped me move it. All these connections that you make when you're living in Japan, where you stop and talk with your neighbors and have these interactions, those relationships matter.

00:09:17 John Daub: Relationships matter when you live in Japan, especially in Tokyo. Your neighbors are not very talkative or social, but if you make an effort, it starts with you. If you make an effort and you seem to care about it, people will make connections with you. You'll be able to talk with your neighbors. You'll be able to make friends more easily. It starts with you. Here in Chūō-ku, as I start my life here at my new apartment, I'm going to use that same kind of thinking to connect with my neighbors. I've already started to do that. I've bumped into more of my foreign friends down here too. A lot of them tell me they've been discriminated against or it's tough to make friends in this neighborhood. I think it has to do with the fact that maybe they're waiting for people to talk to them. The way I do that is I just smile at everybody. If you see kids in strollers, I like to say hello and look at the kid and ask, what's his name? How old is he? Nice to meet you. Tell them that I moved in and that I'm really happy to be in the neighborhood. I express this to my neighbors and say hi and I hope to bump into you again. Being proactive in your neighborhood when you first move here, even if you can't speak the language, learning a little bit of Japanese and putting in effort, just making an effort and smiling and making the other people around you feel more comfortable pays huge later on in your relationships.

00:12:28 John Daub: I've only been in this neighborhood for about a week and already I'm getting a really good sense of the people here and I really like it. This is really an unexpected live stream. I didn't plan to come out today and stream with you guys. I'm on a bridge here looking at this Tokyo Skytree and in the distance you can see Eitaibashi. I'd like to come back here with Peter von Gomm one of these days because he also has a hankering for good craft beer. So does my friend Andrew who was at the wedding. After I'd recycled all the trash from my last apartment, that's my responsibility, I can't just leave it there outside of my apartment building. The other thing I had to do today was to change my address. This is not as easy as you think it would be. It almost reminds me of the way Japan was 200 years ago during the Edo period where there was a gatekeeper and you had to enter through this gate in order to be allowed access into the town.

00:14:20 John Daub: Before I could move into Chūō Ward, I had to leave Edogawa Ward. So I had to go back to my ward office, my city hall in Edogawa and get a certificate saying that I'd left and I was moving here. After I'd gotten that certificate, I came to the city hall in Chūō-ku today. And I filled out the paperwork addressed to the mayor of Chūō-ku, telling him where I was moving from and where I'm moving to. And after that they made adjustments to my residence card. It just took all day to do it. The whole time I was talking to my neighbors left and right. In Japan it's not normal to talk to people in line, but I have a habit of just talking with everybody. It's kind of an American thing maybe where you just make friends. I still got a lot of little things that I have to do to adjust like change my bank address, change the address on a lot of stuff including my business. I own a small business here in Japan and I have to change all of that documentation. The tax season just ended so while I was preparing to get married and moving I was also doing my company taxes. I do that still myself and it's really painfully hard but it's a good experience to learn how to do this type of stuff and you learn a lot of Japanese by doing that too.

00:16:46 John Daub: That's what's been keeping me off the Only in Japan main channel from producing more content for the last couple of months but now that it's done I'm super excited. I can now focus back on creating content for you guys and that means I'm gonna be going on the road soon. The first trip is going to be going back down to Osaka to meet my friend Kevin Reilly. He's got this wicked beard and this kind of look to him that's like yeah whatever. He's always worn shorts even in the middle of winter, could be because he's from Canada. I want to go down and see him and maybe do a couple of episodes with Kevin because it's been a long time. I have four episodes I'm going to be shooting in four days when I go down to Osaka and Kevin is going to help me out with that. I'm kind of excited about this because the weather has been awesome and the weather in May is simply the best in Japan. Forget cherry blossom season for a second. Weather in May is the time when you want to be in Japan because it's warm but without the humidity of summer. You can wear a light jacket and still have shorts on and you feel really comfortable and there are flowers out but it's just not the cherry blossoms. All the tourists and all of the crowds go away and you can really enjoy yourself a little bit more in May.

00:19:38 John Daub: So that's where I'll be next week and I might do a meetup in Kansai as well and there's a couple of other jobs brewing in other prefectures around Japan that I've been researching. Thanks to the help of viewers like you guys who are giving me suggestions all the time. This makes the series more interesting. If you want to leave in the comments below some of your ideas that you might be interested in for not just live streams on the Only in Japan Go channel but for the main channel, I'm always going after different types of themes that have a good story behind it. I'm not going to go to the Pokemon store for example. I want to do more content that's got a good story behind it like the square watermelon story or the white strawberry story, stories on fruits like the 106-year-old woman, the story on how people live a long time. I like stories and I think you do too and when you hear a good story, it makes you lean forward and really watch that content and learn something from it. So if you've got some ideas, leave them down below. If I get ideas from you guys who are also interested in Japan that keeps this show relevant to you.

00:21:12 John Daub: In my fifth or sixth year of doing YouTube to keep it relevant and fresh for you because the show is for you. A creator never creates for themselves. If nobody watches your content, then why do you make the content? The content has to be very relevant to what the viewers want to watch. I'm not really a vlogger. I like to tell stories in a program kind of mode. If the stories are relevant to your interests in Japan and that's why I'm doing this show and I'm not just doing manga or anime because if you're interested in manga and anime you have to know a little bit of the history to make the manga and anime relevant because there's a lot of cultural references that you'll miss unless you know the history, unless you know the food, unless you know the way the lifestyle is. Even if you're a quote-unquote otaku, you should know about the history and the culture and that's what I like to cover with this channel. Actually my wife is at home cooking. This sounds so weird to say the word my wife. I guess it takes a while to get used to that. It's kind of cool too. You know like I feel like an adult now. 44-year-old man, but not used to saying wife.

00:23:28 John Daub: Things are still pretty new to me, which makes it fun and we'll see how it goes over time. You think you're gonna see how it goes over time. This might be a relevant part of the Only in Japan Go series. There's more I can talk about like there's a lot of history in Chūō-ku and also there's Kōtō-ku and Minato-ku and I'm a lot closer to these places. So I'm gonna be able to highlight more of the center of Tokyo than I did before. Some people are saying he's getting married so he's not gonna be able to do midnight snack runs. My wife knows what I do for a living. She knows I need my midnight snack runs. Why? Because I cannot change my editing style. That means I edit until like 3 a.m. Usually maybe I'm gonna edit to 2:30 as a compromise. But if I edit to 2:30, I'm gonna get hungry and I'm gonna have to make a snack run. I'm gonna be going to places like down this street for example. Stay tuned for more snack runs just not right now because it's not midnight. But I will be doing more snack runs in the future and it's gonna be cooler because now I'm in center Tokyo.

00:25:52 John Daub: One of the reasons why I wanted to move downtown was because I can bring you more stories and it's easier for me to get on the shinkansen and it's easier for me to get from place to place in a faster time than it did from where I was living. Despite the fact that I loved living out there because it was important for me as a runner. I loved running out there. There's no traffic lights for like a hundred kilometers. It's just the best place to run and Tom is also a marathon runner. My friend Tom has a 2:45 marathon time. The guy's a stud when it comes to running. Here it's a different kind of run. You can run along here all the way to the end of Tokyo. You can run to the Skytree just about. So it's a good run in the center of the city as well as the Imperial Palace run. Those midnight runs are going to continue. So shh, your wife's not watching, okay? I would bring back a snack for my wife, but she'll have to see it in the morning. What I'm going to do is get that snack and I'm going to write a note and then tape it on it because she gets up at 7. Our patterns are different. She gets up early, and if she sees the note, maybe she's going to appreciate it more. See? I take your suggestions.

00:28:47 John Daub: I told her that there was a, after I showed my ring, all of you guys out there gave super chats. And I said, listen, you have to let me do these live streams. It's because the people love this too, and I like this too. And you know what I'm going to do with the super chats? This is your honeymoon, darling. She started thinking, and now I think she's more in tune with letting me do this stuff. I don't know. She knows that I'm not Japanese. Sometimes you can use the escape clause that you're not Japanese. Your value to Japan is not to be Japanese. It's to understand Japanese and culturally try to blend in, but your value is always going to be because you're not Japanese. Because you can connect and be a bridge to other cultures because you have another culture inside of you and that is important for you to maintain. I'll always be American. I'm not giving up my American passport. That's important for me to hold on to. That's a part of who I am.

00:31:34 John Daub: That's why this word weeb, I didn't really understand until I started this channel and people calling me this. I'm not here because I'm in love with the Japanese subculture. I'm here for the everyday life and I try to blend in because this is what makes Japan work. A weeb is like something that trolls use in a derogatory way to call people who are freakishly in love with Japan but they're outsiders. I'm not an outsider. I live here for half my life. You have to try to blend in because that is your value to Japan. Your value is that you can blend in and be a part of this culture and that's what makes this place safe, what makes this place clean. Everyone is working in harmony. We all understand the way the system works and that's why you play by the system. You respect your neighbors, you recycle. When the train stops at a station you're crowded, you get off the train and then you get back on. You get off to let the other people out. It just works like harmony if you know how the system works. If you can't adapt then you destroy the harmony that is Japan. Knowing how to adapt is important but at the same time you also have to keep who you are because that's your true value to Japan. It takes years of living here before you start to realize how to do it.

00:34:02 John Daub: Newbies off the boat complain because it's not like at home and they say, why do Japanese do it this way? Japanese do it this way because they've always done it that way. It's up to you to learn how to navigate the system. You have to learn how to navigate the system if you want to be a resident here because that is how we keep the harmony in Japan. That's how Japan stays safe. That's how in the middle of the night I can walk down the street and not have to worry about anybody attacking me or being violent or there's no litter on the streets. Everything is clean because everybody knows, like an unwritten rule, that all the trash that you have, you carry it with you home. That's where the trash cans are, in your pocket, in your house, or inside the convenience stores. But that's what keeps this country so clean and so beautiful. This talk kind of goes into the title of this episode, When Life Changes in Japan. You kind of have to learn how the Japanese system works and accept it. And yet, stay who you are. And this can either mess up your mind, totally make you crazy, or this enlightens you and you start using the left and the right side of your brain. Some people go crazy from it and some people become completely enlightened and get like superpowers or something. That harmony is what makes Japan hum. Our value as non-Japanese is not to be Japanese and yet still keep the harmony.

00:36:43 John Daub: When I first came to Japan in 1998, I was an English teacher for children. I taught children from zero all the way up to high school, but mostly kids five to seven. Every year between 1998 and 2002, I would leave my job, take the contract bonus for completing it, and I'd saved up as much money as I could. And I would travel around the world with that money. I'd blow it. I had no savings for those four years because I would backpack for six months and blow all my savings and then come back to Japan and do another year teaching and save up that money again. It was the most enlightening thing I could have done because I got to see the world while I was young. The reason I came back to Japan was because I fell in love backpacking. In that year or two years that I was living in Japan, I picked up some stuff about how the Japanese language and the culture is. Sometimes there would be a girl who was traveling alone. She didn't speak English very well. So I would speak a little bit of Japanese and show her where the youth hostel was. And this is the story of one girl in 2001 or 2002. She was lost and couldn't find the youth hostel. I spoke in Japanese to her. Then we had this conversation and then I took her to the youth hostel and then we were both there and there was nobody in the youth hostel. So we went out to dinner and one thing led to another. And yeah, things happened. And I ended up moving back to Japan because I wanted to spend time together. That didn't work out. But it was love that brought me back to Japan. And it was because I took that step.

00:40:07 John Daub: I'm going to do a live stream tomorrow with Peter von Gomm, the man, the voice, the mystery. We're going to be doing a live stream tomorrow. He was the emcee of the wedding. Thank you very much, Peter. That was really awesome. I'm kind of excited to catch up with him before I go to Osaka. Also, I will be going to Osaka later on. And I do have another episode for the main channel that I want to release this weekend. Now that I'm free, I'm going to put my head down and finish up this DVD project. So I got to make a thousand DVDs, apparently. And that means that I'm going to have a lot of spare ones to sell. If anybody wants to buy a DVD, stay tuned because I'm going to be pitching. I want to thank everybody who supported me in the Kickstarter and was super patient. I heard you guys. So I'm back on it now. You're going to see me live streaming it. Like, look at this mountain of DVDs. How do you get rid of them?

00:43:47 John Daub: I'm going to walk this way towards Tsukuda and I'm going to end this live stream because I'm getting hungry. If you keep walking straight, this takes you to Toyosu. And Toyosu has a short road. And there's a shopping mall there called LaLaport which also has Kidzania which is pretty cool if you have kids. Because the kids pretend like they're in a job and learn responsibility at this place called Kidzania. My friends What's Inside, Lincoln and Dan, came to Japan for the second time with his family. I was really happy to meet them. One of the things that they wanted to do in Japan was go to Kidzania. And the pictures, I think they made a video on it on their What's Inside? family channel. Where the kids got to take jobs. You can see Tokyo Skytree right there. And then if you look over there, over yonder, that's Tokyo Tower. The red tower there. And yeah, the Rainbow Bridge is that way.

00:46:48 John Daub: I haven't been able to find a bakery in this area. There's supermarkets across the bridge. And there's that beer pub that I showed you. Yesterday, me and my friend Tom went out to that Eitaibashi brew pub, which is just over there. I made a live stream on this a few weeks ago. And we were sitting there and a guy, I think he was from the United States, walked by and he goes, John? He was there because he had seen that live stream. And that was just so cool. Just the other day in Tsukishima, I did a live stream on the melon pan (melon bread). A really famous shop. And the melon pan shop lady said, you're the YouTuber? And she said, yeah, your viewers have been coming to buy melon pan at our shop. And I just wanted to say thank you. The result was that people came. So if I ask you to live stream your restaurant, please say yes so I can do it. Because people will go. This is an island here in Chūō-ku. And you can walk around the entire island. You can walk down here all the way to Tsukiji, the fish market. Over here, that's Nihonbashi. And you can see Tokyo Station up there. I really like Chūō-ku. It's kind of really connected well. It's got bridges and islands and stations and neat restaurants.

00:49:36 John Daub: We're going to have an exciting couple of years, I think. The move was for you. Introducing a new area of Tokyo. Because I'm going to be living in the thick of it. And it's going to be pretty exciting. I'm really stoked. Peter von Gomm and I were going to do a live stream today. But it was raining. At least he said it was raining. And he put a little boohoo face. Didn't want to come out in the rain and stream with me today. But we're going to do it tomorrow. See you guys tomorrow. Thank you for just hanging out with me for 50 minutes. And sort of thinking about how life changes when you're in Japan. And my life has changed dramatically. And it's for the better. I'm really stoked about this. These live streams are a chance for me to take a break. But I want to introduce you to some new places that are sort of secretive and that you don't know about that you might want to visit if you came to Tokyo. Because a lot of people say, I want to see what the locals see. And I want to get off of the beaten track. So hey, I'm a local. I'm going to take you there. See you, everybody. Thank you very much for the support. And I'm going to go eat some dinner.