00:00:00 John Daub: Welcome to New York City, the place that's got everything, right? This is Times Square, and in this live stream, we're going to be talking about the differences between Tokyo and New York and what it's like for me to be home. Hey everybody, how you doing? There's Kanae. Yeah, we're back in the United States. It's really nice to be here. This is Times Square. As I was saying, I don't know if you can compare the two. It'd be really hard to do. But first of all, I could say that New York City is special, and it doesn't really represent the United States. However, this place is loud. This place is a lot louder than Tokyo, I think. Maybe it's just because the buildings are taller, and it echoes whenever you hear noises. What do you think, Kanae?

00:00:55 Kanae Daub: Yeah, New York and Tokyo, it's very similar, but different. It's my opinion.

00:01:02 John Daub: Yeah, you can't really compare the two. The other thing that's really been tough for me is tipping, right? If you were to tip in Japan, you're kind of insulting people a little bit because you're tipping them for something that they would do anyways, meaning what is wrong with their service by giving them money. In New York, if you don't tip, people sort of aren't happy about it. Right? Like at the restaurant, do we tip 15%, 20%? When you live in Japan for a long time, like I have, and if you're coming from Japan like she has, it's hard for you to wrap your head around what is the value of service. Because in Japan, the value of service is all baked into the price. In America, it's totally different. It's like the value of service is what you tip.

00:01:55 John Daub: Let's walk around, Kanae. Times Square is not an easy place to walk around holding a selfie camera. So there's that. The tipping is hard.

00:02:07 Kanae Daub: How do I tip? Yeah, I always check on the internet.

00:02:19 John Daub: Yeah, so yeah, you have to go on the internet and check. Because this is the way Japanese think. You have to go on the internet to check and say, at this kind of restaurant, what do you normally tip? And then they'll tip whatever they can find and get that information. So it's hard to know. Like, we get room service in the hotel we're staying in because they have a city tax of $30. And if you don't use your $25 food credit, you lose it. I don't ever order room service. So it was a $22 omelet with taxes that came out to $36, which is beyond the $25 budget. It was ridiculous. And then the guy wanted, and then there's a space for tip. How much do you tip? I don't know. So I gave the guy $2, which is like less than 10%. But then it was like $40 for a $22 omelet on the menu. It's really hard to understand how to tip. So that's the biggest difference.

00:03:13 John Daub: Other differences in the U.S. versus Japan. What do you have to know?

00:03:18 Kanae Daub: U.S. versus Japan. People.

00:03:25 John Daub: Ah, that's true. Because in New York, people from all over the world. So everybody speaks English and other languages.

00:03:35 Kanae Daub: But in Japan, we only speak Japanese.

00:03:40 John Daub: Ah. Tokyo is getting changed now to 2020 Olympics. Maybe more international. Right. Tokyo, people don't speak any English here. Everyone speaks English. That's kind of a big deal. And people speak Spanish here in New York.

00:04:07 Kanae Daub: American people are more friendly. Friendlier. I feel.

00:04:12 John Daub: Yeah. I feel American people are so much friendlier. Warmer. Even when we came in through immigration. And you can see by the way a lot of remnants from the New Year's Eve party. It rained and it was kind of a disaster of a party apparently in New York City. But you can still see some of the remnants. You'd never see this in Tokyo. Tokyo would be so much... like after fireworks, this place, there's no trash anywhere. And here in New York City we have flying debris. It's like that's another culture shock.

00:04:44 John Daub: Let's go through people. Then we're going to go through cleanliness. When we came in through immigration, people were so friendly to Kanae. They were smiling and asking questions. Maybe that's the way to catch you off guard. That's a technique. But people were generally really kind. When you're waiting in line, you could talk to people in the United States and make friends pretty easily. You can't do that in Japan.

00:05:07 Kanae Daub: People in my opinion. So Japanese are friendly. But we need to take a time a little bit to be friendship. To get to know you.

00:05:19 John Daub: It took time for me to get to know her. I'll tell you that right now. We took a lot of time. But people are just different with their personalities. Americans are more open and friendly. And Japanese are more reserved. And it takes a long time to make friends with people, like to really get to know them. Japanese will be friendly at first. But they'll be only friendly on the surface. They won't tell you anything private about themselves. In the US, people tell you about their private lives, their politics, their religion in like the first 10 sentences. It's crazy. Just different cultures like this. For me, that's what I miss. One of the things that I miss living in Japan is that it takes so much longer to get to know people. And in the United States, it's so much easier to make friends. At least that's my opinion of it. I love seeing people smile. You don't see a lot of smiles in Japan from people, especially on the train in the morning. Well who smiles like this? But just people are more open to going like this. That's just my take on it. And that sort of changes the way my day goes sometimes. If you see somebody smiling, that's a big difference between the cultures.

00:06:32 John Daub: Cleanliness is a big big difference. These are the streets of New York. And as you can tell, it smells like humanity. I don't know any other way to say this. It smells unique in the city.

00:06:49 Kanae Daub: Yeah.

00:06:50 John Daub: American cities are not as clean as Japanese cities. Not even close. And the fact that Japan doesn't have any trash cans in the cities outside publicly, and New York does, says a lot about the culture. People will just spit, litter, they throw stuff on the streets. That's New York. Right. There's some, I guess there's somebody there to clean up for us. Whereas Japan has this kind of personal responsibility where it's their job to clean up what's around them. So even if there's a mess and you didn't do it, a lot of people will clean up the mess for them and just try to keep their home clean. Because that's what you would do. Right. So that's pretty unique. I think that's just a very Japanese thing. One of the things that I miss about Japan is that it's clean.

00:07:44 John Daub: And it's non confrontational. If we go back to people, one of the things that I like and I don't like about Japan is that people keep mind their own business too. They won't grab you. And we've been walking around Times Square and we've been grabbed a couple of times by people. I mean Roppongi is a special area. But in general, people are non confrontational in Japan. That's a Japanese personality. You don't want to get involved in a confrontation. In America, you're more ambitious. Especially in a place like Times Square. Right. Behind us you also see people that are homeless. We have homeless in Japan as well.

00:08:32 Kanae Daub: Yeah.

00:08:33 John Daub: But it's a different kind, I think. There's a lot more people with cups asking for money. I don't think panhandling is legal in Japan. But I don't even know if it's legal here. But we've had a lot of people asking us for money. Hey Tasty Chronicles. Happy New Year John. And can I grab some coffee and pastries. Yes. We will be doing that.

00:08:55 John Daub: Price is another thing. If we compare Tokyo and New York, on the surface prices in New York might seem comparable. But when you add in tip and service charges and all these hidden fees, I've never seen a city with more hidden fees than New York. It ends up being like three times more than Tokyo in many respects. There's just no way around it. Especially in this area where we are. You just get fleeced. They just totally find ways to extract cash from you one way or another. I guess it's different outside in residential areas. And it's probably the same a little bit in Tokyo. But there's no tipping in Japan. So prices are generally cheaper in Tokyo. Which might blow some people away. And I'm talking about in the cities. Now out in the countryside away from Tokyo, like we were up in Vermont, the prices are a lot more reasonable, I think. We got breakfast at a famous waffle and pancake house. And it was about half the price of what we would pay inside Tokyo. But the tip adds 20% to that. So it's just harder to compare the prices. For goods, for services, the US seems more expensive because of the tipping. But for goods, America is so much cheaper. If we buy a Blu-ray player here, it's about half the price in the US. If I buy an SD card here, it is. I never buy SD cards in Japan by the way. It's just really expensive. A 128 gigabyte SD card with a 95 megabyte per second read speed is $40, $45, $50. It's $150 in New York. It's $170 in Japan. Why? I don't know. They're not counterfeit in the US. It's just maybe the market is different. So you can find prices that are just ridiculous in Japan because of lack of competition.

00:11:21 Kanae Daub: Performance in Seoul is cheaper here. For art it's cheaper here. In Japan everything expensive for art.

00:11:44 John Daub: That's right. If you go to performance here in Broadway you can find discount tickets. There's never a discount in Japan.

00:11:51 Kanae Daub: Yeah. In Japan for students here. Student discounts. We have a student pass or student discount ticket. We can show in front of the reception desk. We can get discount here. Sometimes we can get discount in Japan. But here it's cheaper.

00:12:14 John Daub: Yeah. I've noticed that you can get seats for under $50, especially last minute seats. It's even cheaper. Everything is like $100, ichiman yen. Right? For example in Tokyo. MoMA Museum it's Friday, it's free until 5 o'clock. They have a free day for museum. We don't have that in Tokyo. It's good for students. We can study about Japan a lot here. Japan is they don't have a lot of discounts for stuff. And that might be changing with the Olympics coming. But I'm going to show you Times Square for a second as we cross the street. But right now it's just kind of the Japanese way. They don't have a lot of discounts. Although you will find senior citizen discounts. You will find that at movie theaters in certain places. But for museums and stuff the prices are just expensive. Museums always seem more like a business. And here it seems more like teaching.

00:13:38 John Daub: The other thing I guess we can compare is cost of living. Difficulties here. We're back here. It is a little bit cold. You used to live in New York. Yeah, that's where I met her. Tell us a little bit like we can stop here in the corner. Tell us about the price differences. What is it like compared to Tokyo, living in New York? Like housing, apartment, food, living costs.

00:14:18 Kanae Daub: I was living in Astoria where it's in Queens. I did home share. Sharing the room. Then my room was very small. Just only room for me. Then we share bathroom and kitchen. And it's about $700 for month.

00:14:52 John Daub: Wow. That's $700 for sharing the room in Queens. How big was the apartment? It's just like bojo, like five tatami mats. So your room, you had your own room. Okay. Wow. So I heard in Manhattan it's more expensive. In Manhattan it's more expensive, over ten thousand. $10,000. What? For sharing. Wow.

00:15:40 John Daub: Let me see if I could wrap this up here for you about the cost of living. In America, food costs are a lot cheaper. I think groceries, things like this. Utilities are cheaper, I believe, in the United States. Rent in New York City is always going to be extravagant. But buying a house is so much cheaper in America than buying a house in Japan. I looked at the prices. Buying a mansion in Tokyo, an apartment, it could go up to like two, three million dollars. And cheap ones the cheapest ones they could find are like five hundred thousand dollars, which is about go senman yen, about five hundred thousand dollars right. That's how much a normal two bedroom apartment in Tokyo would be in New York. It's just so ridiculously expensive especially in Manhattan but if you go out to Queens you can always find deals. We have a friend who's living not too far away from where we're staying and she's got a one bedroom apartment and she's paying what about a thousand dollars a month and it's a pretty good location too but it's an old building again like New York's buildings are a little bit older Tokyo's are newer because they were constructed after World War II the vast majority of the city. So I don't know you get different kinds of deals. For me I think a day as a tourist we spend about if you include the hotel without the hotel for food we're spending about seventy dollars a day between the two of us and we're eating frugally. In Tokyo you can do it for less than that because you have convenience store food which is really good here we have like sandwiches and wraps in Tokyo the convenience store food is so good that you could probably use that as lunch or even dinner or breakfast just go to a convenience store we don't have that luxury the convenience store food here is pretty not good.

00:17:37 Kanae Daub: A Colin asks you to do a back flip can you do a can you dance and but you you will you study dance here in in yeah. You studied so can I study dance here in New York so what's the difference between dance in New York and dance in Tokyo. Yeah. Teachers are very friendly to students. Very friendly. Students feel more fun. Everybody laughing and clapping. Say nice, good. In the United States there's more encouragement in the United States than in Japan. It's very stiff. I only took class in New York. I'm not sure about other states in the US. But in Japan, we feel fun. But more serious. More serious.

00:18:56 John Daub: That's a great point. I like it too. Sorry for interrupting. More serious. She has a very big opinion on dance. She does modern contemporary dancing. This is so true. She hit the nail on the head. When I went scuba diving in Japan and I went scuba diving in other places in the world where the dive master was American or another nationality it was so much fun to do scuba diving with non-Japanese instructors. The Japanese instructors are all business. They're so tight and so boring and so serious about safety that it's not a really good experience. And I've seen that through teaching in school, in dance as she's talking about here. Training and learning and doing things it's not often a lot of fun. And tour guides, Japanese tour guides also lack personality. Not all of them. But in Japanese language they lack personality. Meaning they just want to blend in and be straight. Whereas outside of Japan everything has their own personality or originality or feel. Japan is very stiff with that because that shows professionalism. And that's... I don't know. It's just different. Sometimes it's a good point for people.

00:20:18 John Daub: The biggest, biggest difference of them all besides tips, besides standard of living and costs and cleanliness, to me is the food. The food is so different here. I have put on... I got like three chins right now. Even Kanae which has packed on a couple of pounds. She won't admit it. But actually she hasn't really gained that much weight at all. It's amazing. She can eat and eat and not gain any weight. And I've got three, four chins. And my head size has grown. So the food is so much different in the United States than in Japan.

00:21:01 Kanae Daub: But homesick in New York. Because many kinds of Asian food here. Japanese, Thai. I never get homesick here.

00:21:18 John Daub: Okay. Well, there's a Yoshinoya around the corner. We're going to stop in there. And I'm going to be making an episode on the difference between Yoshinoya in Japan and the United States. There's sushi here. And the sushi is more authentic in New York than probably any other foreign city except for maybe in California and Hawaii. And it's pretty good. But it's so much more expensive in New York than in Tokyo. But then again, you know, it's just a different... Hey, Ellis is in the house. Thank you. Thank you to Lenny and Tasty and everybody for the super chats. We'll be putting that towards lunch, which is super expensive here, especially in Times Square. But the food is just more butter, more pizza, lots and lots of cheese. I mean, you've been eating lots of cheese, right? Everything has cheese and bread. And it's so good. And you can't just stop. Cakes, pies. I had Tasty cake. It's just like, wow. It's just so much. Don't eat whole cakes. I don't eat a whole cake because I love that butter frosting. We don't have that. They use whipped cream. It's so light. And what a disappointment. Cheesecake and frosting on cakes is so buttery, sugary good here. You have to have it. This will explain why everything is starting to sag. Thank you. I love America. We ate a lot of cake. My brother Neil can attest to that. I ate my weight in cake. Oh, check it out, guys. Taking a picture in the middle of the road. Probably not a good idea, dude. But we have... it seems to be okay. We feel safe. I feel very safe in New York. The food is totally different. And I have to tell you that whenever I come here, and you do it too, a little bit, not as much, we try to eat as much as we can because we know we're not going to be back in America for a while. So we just eat because we don't know when the next time we're going to be eating this delicious food again is. It's delicious to me. I got no problem having three chins until I get back to Japan and then add it to...

00:23:27 John Daub: And that's maybe the last thing, maybe. People are just bigger in the United States. The cups are bigger. Everything is bigger. We mentioned the seats are bigger. The cup holders were huge. In Starbucks, we have a small size. Only in Japan, right? There's a tall, grande, and venti size, and those are the three sizes in New York. In Japan, we have a short size. Some places still have it, but generally speaking, yeah. The sizes are just massive. And the plate sizes, the portion sizes on food is huge. Last night, we ate so much food. Our friend ate so much food that we had a doggy bag. We call them doggy bags. You can take them home. What am I going to do without my cheese and butter and bread in Japan? We still got it, but it's not the same. They don't put enough on. You can't take your food home in Japan. So if you eat too much or too little, you can't take it home.

00:24:43 Kanae Daub: Why don't they have doggy bags in Japan? Because if someone gets sick after back to home, so the shop cannot get the response also. I think you don't typically Japanese people...

00:25:07 John Daub: All right, I'm going to answer for you. In general, Japanese people don't order doggy bags. They order more than they need. If you go to a buffet, they won't make a mountain like I do. I make like the buffet mountain. I take everything because you can always go back. Japanese don't waste, so they take less than they need because they know they'll be going back. So at restaurants, the portion sizes are usually what exactly people can eat. I've never had too much food in Japan. In fact, at first it was too small, but that's the reason why. And that's the reason nobody ever asks that. We just don't have a culture of taking the food home. Right? And it's not sanitary.

00:25:46 John Daub: All right, let's walk back towards the hotel now. So that's Times Square. Times Square is like Shibuya Hachiko and Shinjuku all wrapped into one. Times Square is just incredibly bright and vibrant. And we'll be doing a meet up here tonight at 7:30 p.m. in front of the Michael Cohen statue. So check out the information on Facebook. It's a Facebook event. That'll start at 7:30 until about 8:30, I would say. But probably it's going to go a little bit longer. The meet ups always go a little bit longer. America is just, for me, this is my home. And this is what I want to wrap up this live stream. America is my home. This is a place that I truly do miss when I'm away. There's so many great things about it, but there's so many great things about Japan too. And the thing about my experience being an expat living in both of these countries for half my life. The first half of the year the second half in Japan. Is that I've taken away a lot of the good things that Japan has to offer and a lot of the good things from the US has to offer. And that just makes a really amazing experience. And a little bit of that stuff we talked about in this live stream. But all in all, I've had a pretty incredible life between the two countries. And coming back here, it's always such a treat. I guess not just to see family, but also to eat and to be in the middle of all this. It's just so vibrant. And there's so much energy in New York. That's another thing that I love about coming back home. And you always have to stop in New York if you're on the East Coast. Boston's pretty nice too, but I've never been there.

00:27:23 Kanae Daub: Yeah.

00:27:24 John Daub: That's about it. There's one more thing I have to tell you. Coming to New York every time is a culture shock for me. Alright? Because I'm not used to the way everybody... It's just the way that the city moves is it makes me uncomfortable in a way because I'm not used to the way... I'm used to the way that Tokyo moves. People line up in the escalators. People are so orderly lining up in a certain way. I'm used to that so much so when I come back here, at first, I'm somewhat uncomfortable by the chaos of it all. And gradually, we get used to it again. It takes a little bit. But the first time we arrived in New York just people were bumping into you. If you stop suddenly, people get angry. They show their emotions more. These are things that kind of shocked me. But today, we're back... I'm back to the way... Back to my Americanism a little bit more. But at first, it's always kind of a culture shock because I'm more right now used to the way Japan is than the United States. I don't know. Am I more American or Japanese?

00:28:40 Kanae Daub: Why? In Japan, sometimes I forgot about John is American. We speak Japanese in Tokyo. We speak Japanese only. And in the United States, we've been trying to speak more English. At least, Kanae has. Then when we back to US, I realized, oh, John is American. Like this.

00:29:10 John Daub: That's true. And then another thing is I think if eating all of the American food too, your body smells a little bit different, no? Karura. I think so. I think the foods are different. I eat more vegetables, I think, in Japan. Maybe it's just because I'm addicted to the cheese and the breads and all the bad stuff here because I eat as much as I can. But in Japan, we eat more vegetables maybe. Just the diet is different. I make big rice. Big salads and, yeah, rice is more...less meat. Here it's meat and bread and cheese. Ah, stop it, Joanne. I'm getting hungry again.

00:29:49 John Daub: All right, guys. That's it. Thanks so much. We're going to be doing a meet up at 7:30 and I'm going to be live streaming that. So you want to tune in. 7:30 Eastern Standard Time. It's probably going to start around 7:45, the live stream. We're going to go to lunch now. It's lunch time. I hope you have a wonderful day, wonderful night, wherever you are in the world. Thanks so much, everybody. And see you. This is the first live stream with you. Happy New Year. Happy 2019, by the way. Hey, Mark Mendoza, have a great trip and eat well. Thank you. Happy New Year to you, too. Enjoy it. Don't worry about the fourth chin. I think you just saw the fourth chin, Mark. Thank you, guys. Thank you so much, very much for that. And we'll see you tonight, in about eight hours from now. Bye meetups on Times Square and behind the Michael Cohan statue in the center of the square.