00:04:00 John Daub: We are live at Yokohama Station. That right there is the Tokaido Line, one of the lines that goes all the way from Nagoya to Tokyo, but makes a stop here in Yokohama. In this episode, we're going to go over how to get around Yokohama Station, some of the transport points, transfer points for trains, some of the important things that you're going to be needing to know when you come to Yokohama Station, how to get to Yokohama from Tokyo, and where you can go to.

00:34:00 John Daub: Hey, UFO Bob says hello. We see you in the live stream. This is a live stream. You can take a look at the chats. And if you have some information on Yokohama, please put it into the chat so people can watch it when we're watching the playback. Make this useful.

00:46:00 John Daub: Now the Tokaido Line is one of the most famous lines in Japan because it runs all the way from Tokyo to Nagoya and beyond. Tokaido being that area, 53 stops along the old highway between Kyoto and Tokyo. This is the line for JR. It'll stop like a bazillion times. I think it takes like five or six hours to get to Nagoya, but it doesn't take that long to get to Yokohama. It takes just about 20, 25 minutes on the Tokaido Line.

01:19:00 John Daub: You can also take the Keihin-Tohoku Line and the Yokohama Line. All the lines are right up here. I was trying to do it by memory, but why do that when you have the signs? The Yokosuka-Sobu Line. Yeah, you can take the Sobu Line. That's also, by the way, the Narita Express. I was telling everybody in a live stream earlier, you could take the bus from Tokyo Station and avoid Narita Express. However, if you are traveling way out here to Kanagawa Prefecture and maybe the Narita Express is your ticket. There goes the Tokaido Line away. All the way from Yokosuka, which is where the U.S. Navy base is, all the way to Chiba. So it's a pretty neat train and wraps around the city of Tokyo.

02:04:00 John Daub: The Yokohama Line, it looks like the Yamanote Line, but it's a little bit different. That one goes towards Sakuragicho. Sakuragicho is a place that you want to know. It's in a place called Minato Mirai (port of the future). It's the port of the future of Yokohama. It's a pretty fun place. It reminds me of Baltimore Harbor. If you've ever been to Baltimore Harbor, it's kind of a fun place with this Ferris wheel and a roller coaster and lots of tall buildings and stuff that. But that's the place where everyone kind of goes. When you come to Yokohama Station, it sort of is just a transport point and for shopping. Because you can see on here on the platform, there's the department store Sogo.

03:09:00 John Daub: It's like the Yamanote Line. But it's different. It's not the same. So we're going to go down now and take a look at the transfer point. As I said, you can come here with JR. If you have a JR rail pass, you're probably going to want to come here with JR because it's free. But if you don't, like we, you can take your Suica card or your ICOCA card. I have this one from Osaka, Kansai region. Or you can take your PASMO cards and you can actually take another line, which is Keikyu. I'm a rebel. I go with the Osaka ICOCA card. Now we're going to leave the JR station and then go into the Keikyu line. Keikyu line is, believe it or not, the Asakusa line. And at Shinagawa, after Shinagawa, it turns into the Asakusa subway line. That line goes all the way from Haneda to Nishi-Nippori. It wraps around Tokyo. Since it's part of the subway, it's a lot cheaper and closer than JR. JR is kind of expensive.

06:43:00 Kanae Daub: Kanai, do you come to Yokohama a lot?

06:46:00 John Daub: Sometimes. Like today?

06:52:00 Kanae Daub: Yeah.

06:54:00 John Daub: There's a ton of shopping malls here. It's kind of like a hub of shopping and food. Let's go outside a little bit before we make the change. Do you know which way is the Keikyu?

07:07:00 Kanae Daub: Oh, I found the Keikyu line is right there.

07:09:00 John Daub: In Japan, if you're looking for stations, always look up. The signs are up. It's very convenient. That blue sign right there says Keikyu. That's where we're going to head to. Very easy. Let's go outside the east exit just to have a quick look around. Show you a little bit of Yokohama Station. Follow these two ladies in front. They're going to lead the way. A lot of people, even on a weekday. We're at 12 o'clock, so this is lunchtime. A lot of people are leaving the office buildings and going towards restaurants for a little bit of lunch action.

07:59:00 John Daub: So just going to go out right here. These escalators here will take you down to Yokohama Station. They take you down to the shopping mall. There's some restaurants down there. But if we go up, there's a thing with naked people. Naked statues. I'll take you up and just show you that there's pretty much nothing here on this side of the station. Anybody who doubts us, the doubters will be... What would you doubt me? There's nothing here. I'm serious. Okay, there we go. That's what's here. There's not much. Welcome to Yokohama Station. Welcome to Yokohama.

08:53:00 John Daub: Again, when I come to Yokohama, there are a couple places I like to go. I like to go to Sakuragicho or Minato Mirai. The two stations are very close to each other. They're just different lines. And Motomachi, which is the Chinatown where we went last night. We ate a lot. And then there's Shin-Yokohama, which is the Shinkansen stop. And there's not that much there. Manhole! It's a nice one. You can kind of get a feeling of Yokohama's identity as a seaport. They got another one with ships on it. Oh, it's cool. Better than Tokyo's. Tokyo's manhole covers are pretty... They're sakura. They're cherry blossoms, but they're kind of repetitive. I'd like to see more culture in it.

10:07:00 John Daub: Now, Lumine is usually at Japanese train stations. It's a big company shopping mall. They usually have choux creams and very sweet-smelling foods to get you to eat more. Here's a map of the station. Yokohama Station. Looks a little bit complicated. The backside does not have a lot here. But if you wanted to, from here you can walk all the way to Minato Mirai. It takes about 30 minutes. It's not a very good walk. It's kind of boring. This side of the station, the west side, has a lot more shopping centers around there. And Takashimaya is there. The subway is there. The Yokohama subway. There's a Marui Department Store. And by the way, this is where you're going to find Puchi Collator, which is the smallest escalator in the world. The shortest escalator in the world. I think it was four steps. And I made a video about that in the Super Escalator Adventure on Only in Japan, March 2013. That's almost at a million views, by the way, the Super Escalator Adventure. So if you want to check out if you haven't seen it. So that's at Marui Department Store. And it's represented on this map. How cool is that? It's next to the Y-CAT. It's next to the Yokohama City Air Terminal. And then we have in Tokyo, T-CAT, which is the Tokyo City Air Terminal. And you can catch buses that leave every 15 minutes. We usually take T-CAT. It's a little bit more expensive. But there's always available. You don't have to wait in line for T-CAT. It's like you get in, you get out. It's very easy, especially if you're traveling by taxi. Literally, it's on the highway entrance. So there's no traffic at all from T-CAT.

11:45:00 John Daub: Hey, guys. Thank you. Thank you for your services. Hello, John and Kanai from Arkansas. Hey, happy to catch a live stream. I finished watching you guys eating your way through Chinatown. That was quite an adventure in Chinatown last night. All right, let's get moving to the Keikyu. Yeah, we got to get home. We had a nice date night in Yokohama, just kind of chilling out and getting out of the city of Tokyo for a little bit. I was in Kyoto filming two main channel episodes. Lumine. All Lumine does is they bring all the smells out. This is Mr. Waffle. Look at that. I can smell it. You can smell it. You want a waffle?

12:35:00 Kanae Daub: Yeah. Can I?

12:36:00 John Daub: We just had a hotel breakfast buffet, though. I don't know. I can't eat anymore. Mr. Waffle. Is that a chain? I never know if these are chains or not. There's some of Yokohama's history represented on this, and you can see the plastic flowers. The cherry blossoms are out because they'll be out in like two weeks from now. It's going to be so beautiful. It's going to look like this, but these are plastic, so not quite the same. But you can see Yokohama has a history of being a port town. A lot of history where this is where the Westerners would come in to Yokohama because they couldn't go into Edo. It's one of the places where they could come into. So there's a history of as being the port of Tokyo, really.

13:27:00 John Daub: One of the things about Yokohama that I like is the architecture of the buildings. A lot of brick here. A lot of brick buildings, especially down near Motomachi in the port area. Very, very nice architecture. A lot of it a couple hundred years old, which is rare in Japan because they used to make the buildings out of wood, and when the Westerners came, they changed over to more to stone, and they changed over to brick, and those buildings survived. When you build stuff out of bamboo and wood, things tend to burn down. So Japanese castles and buildings did not have a long life. They were either struck by lightning and burned down several times in the history, or there were fires from cooking and things like that. The history of Japanese castles, you read it, they've all burned down like a dozen times due to lightning or cooking fires or something like that.

14:23:00 John Daub: All right, here we go. Keikyu. You guys remember back to the map I showed you at JR? This is the Keikyu line. Let's look at the prices to get to Tokyo from here. Of course, JR. Sorry for the flashing. It's the frequency of the electricity here, the lights. 300 yen. So it's 10 yen more to go to Shinagawa. So JR undersold them to Shinagawa, but it's more expensive to go to Tokyo Station. And to Shinjuku by JR. But to Shinagawa is cheaper. It's so weird, the pricing. I don't know how they do it. But you can see the Keikyu goes to Haneda Airport right there. HND stands for Haneda. And if you keep going all around the city, the Keikyu line will wrap to Narita Airport. And it's about $15 to get to Narita Airport to Yokohama. That's pretty cheap, really. It's just a really, really long trip. Look at all the stops. Yeah, about two hours. And you get to see everything in Tokyo.

15:39:00 John Daub: You can charge in the vending machines here. JR and Keikyu and all the other private lines, they all have touch screens these days. You can change to the language in the upper right. It will change to English. The problem is that when you do, they have an annoying, usually very loud English voice, because welcome to the ticket. Everybody knows that you're a foreigner all of a sudden. And if you want to get a ticket, it'll tell you the prices. Let's say we want to go 360 yen. We want to get more than one ticket. You can get two people, three people, one kid, one adult. So you can change this and it'll change the price. This is really fast. This will save you time. If you come here with your wife, or if you come here with a couple of buddies, or if you come here with one of your kids, it'll save you a lot of time. And then you put the money in, print a receipt and you get all the tickets coming out at the same time. So it might be something that's useful. If you have a problem, you can push the call button and somebody's head will pop out of that window. Should we just press it? No, we're not going to press. It'll automatically reset. That's pretty cool, huh? I like vending machines.

17:05:00 John Daub: Here is the schedule for Keikyu. The trains leave about once every six minutes. The local trains stop everywhere. You don't want to take that. And then the express trains stop. I think it's three stops to Shinagawa. It's a little bit faster to take Keikyu. So it's 10 yen more. And Sengakuji is the start of the Asakusa Line. I think maybe we should take that one, right? Okay. So we're leaving on the 1224. So that means our live stream will be ending in three minutes. Five minutes. All right, let's get in there. Don't lose your card. Your IC card. Welcome to the Keikyu line.

18:07:00 John Daub: We are now riding the Keikyu line. Goodbye, JR. Oh, they have ekiben here? Kanai said they have ekiben, but you typically have to take the Keikyu line. Typically, you wouldn't eat them on a train like this. You have to eat the ekiben on an express train. These look really good. This shumai is very, very famous.

18:39:00 Kanae Daub: Yes, it's very, very famous.

18:41:00 John Daub: Kanai says that's her recommendation here. This tastes so good. But they don't have any left. It's sold out. Hontou ni sold out? So there's none left. They're so popular. But the shumai is you get some of these dumplings on the top. They're wrapped up here with meat. They're quite good. But they're very famous in Yokohama. Yeah, but we can buy in Tokyo, too. Yeah, but Yokohama's where they're from. You get it from the source. Looks pretty good. I love a good ekiben. But we're taking kind of like the subway, so you can't really... Oh, this way, right? There's a little mini 7-Eleven here, too.

19:24:00 John Daub: All right, stand on the left. Walk up the right. You guys got that? Stand on the left. Don't be one of those people who stands on that side and then holds up the line. And everyone will be so polite. Everyone's so polite. No one will tap you on the shoulder and say, move to the side. They'll just stare at your back until it gets hot. You either notice the heat of a thousand people staring at you from behind and you move, or you'll never know. But people are very polite. They won't tell you to move out of the way. You have to know to stand on the left, except Osaka. And only Osaka. Stand on the left. Walk up the right. Osaka, stand on the right. Walk up the left. I don't know why. Actually, I do know why, but if I tell you, the story's ruined. So I'll save it for another day. It's a good story.

20:16:00 John Daub: All right, you can see we're going to Sengakuji because that's the start of the Asakusa Line. This one is not a bad train. It's a local train, but it's going to Shinagawa. I get to the front of the train. And then after this train departs, we're going to say bye-bye. There's the Tokaido Line. That's the Tokaido Line. There's the green train. The green car. Very cool. I like the safety. They have the LED lights in the platform now. That's kind of neat. It's new? I don't remember seeing that before. But I know that most of the stations now have gates, so you can't fall in after getting one or two more drinks than you need commuting back home. Sobu Line. Oh, that's the Sobu Line? Yeah. That's the Sobu Line that goes all the way to Chiba.

21:25:00 John Daub: So there you go. That's pretty much Yokohama Station in a nutshell. Oh, there's the kind of the Narita Express. Well, no, that's the Keikyu... I don't know what that is, but it's JR. It's Keikyu. This is Keikyu? Well, how come it's separated with the wall? It's opposite side. See, I'm not really sure. I don't ride that. Kanagawa. Yeah, there's Yokohama. I don't take that train very often. I take this one only because this takes us home. This one takes us home. All right, this one is our train, right? Yeah. This is our train. So as soon as the train comes, we're going to leave you. But that's Yokohama pretty much in a nutshell. If you have any questions about getting around Yokohama Station, put it in the comments below. If you like these kinds of station tours with Kanae Daub, click the like button so we know that you like this type of content. And yeah, we'll do another station tour then. And I think it's pretty useful to get a chance to look at all these stations before you arrive to Japan and get a sense and a feeling of what it's like to change trains and the route that you'll need to take because you can get a little disoriented a little bit sometimes.

22:43:00 John Daub: All right, guys. Have a good day. Hey, Craig. Craig chimes in at the last minute. Aloha from Portland. Thanks, Craig. We appreciate it. Have a nice day. Have a nice day, guys. Craig chimed in like right at the last second. All right. We'll give Craig a little bit of service here. All right. We'll say goodbye as the train rolls instead. Oh, this is... Yeah, this is... This will take us to the Asakusa Line and then we'll change to go on from there. All right. The lights are blinking. We're going to see the doors close. Once they close, run away. Oh, that dude. That dude tried to get in at the last minute. Don't try to sneak in. It's dangerous when running for a train. Never run for trains. It's dangerous. All right, guys. The last 20 seconds we're going to use just going through the station area, leaving Yokohama. People are staring at me. It's getting hot. People staring at us. I can keep going for a little bit longer.