00:01 John Daub: Greetings, everybody. I'm now at a hotel on the Shimanto River, and I'm going to walk in and show you the room, a little tour. Are you ready? Let's do this. I've already entered, so that's why my suitcase is there. Very nice. I like it. So this is the Shimanto River, just to give you guys a little bit of context. Shimanto River is in Kochi Prefecture. Kochi Prefecture is on the island of Shikoku, which is one of the four main islands of Japan. Shikoku being the least populated and the smallest of the four, the others being Hokkaido, Honshu, and Kyushu. Shikoku is really natural. I've come here for a few days to film a main channel episode, but I thought I'd bring you to this hotel room. So let's take a look.

01:02 John Daub: I'm starting from the entrance here. By the door is a sink. There's the door. Very nice. This is the name of the hotel, by the way: the Seira Shimanto. I haven't paid yet. I think it's about 10,000 yen a night. I'm going to show you why. Okay. All right. I'm going to turn the lights on. First of all, there's an amazing view. Two beds. Here's the view of the Shimanto River. This is one of the reasons why this hotel is so nice, because you have one of the best views. This is from Shimanto City. It's about 120 kilometers away from the city of Kochi, which is where the airport is. They told me not to open the window. So I'm going to turn off the light and do that. Just panning around a little bit.

02:11 John Daub: This is one of the unique features of the room. It came with a little tatami room. Look at this. So I can close the doors, get a little bit of privacy. I like it a lot. On the table is tea and some snacks that usually come customary with each Japanese-style room. And again, you have washi paper sliding doors. Very nice. I like the light. Nice touch. Could be Ikea. I'm going to turn the lights off and then I'm going to open the window, despite what the manager said. That's what the management told me to do. I'm going to do it just for a minute. I did not open the window. Do not tell the manager I opened the window, because bugs apparently come in. Whoa! It's Shimanto Town right there. And then that's the Shimanto River. And then you can see the river curve around the bend there. There's a bunch of bridges. Just very narrow bridges. And I can't wait to show you the main channel episode, because we crossed an amazingly narrow bridge.

03:45 John Daub: Beautiful. I hope the manager's not watching. I told him I'm only going to open it for another minute. Such a peaceful town. You can see the sun setting, reflecting onto the river below. And the sun has just set above the mountain there. Look at that sky just come into view. Beautiful. Across the river, you can see koinobori (carp streamers), which are flying carp, koi, Japanese carp. And there's no wind right now. It's very calm. But the carp usually are flying in May. May is very famous for having strong winds in Japan. But the koinobori are very docile right now. Could have had too much to drink. No people fishing here. Down there they have canoes. They have bicycling. This is kind of an adventure town. There's a lot of adventure sports that you can do here. Tomorrow I'm going to be doing some bicycling and some canoeing. A little bit of everything to try it. Just one more minute.

05:02 John Daub: The river is one of the cleanest. I heard that this is the last river not to be dammed. And I don't mean that in like the devil damned, but dammed in terms of a D-A-M. Up the river. I know this is the internet. Someone's going to say it. But it's a free-flowing river from the mountains to the ocean. And that's pretty unique. Oh, now you got the HDR kicking in from the iPhone. Look at that. The entire area is pretty much situated in... Sorry, manager. I said like one minute, five minutes ago. All right. It is really stunning.

06:04 John Daub: So just to give you some information about this area because I am here to make a video on Kochi Prefecture, especially focusing on the Shimanto River. And today we came from Yusuhara village where Kengo Kuma has found a place to live. And we're going to be doing some fishing. In the video, you'll see five buildings designed there. And one of the reasons why he loves that town is because he was inspired by the Kabuki Theater there in Yusuhara. The Kabuki Theater, all made of wood. That inspired Kengo Kuma to use wood instead of cement. So Shikoku is such a unique area. It's more than just... ex-Mofu, thank you very much. If you do come to Japan, you've been here many times and you haven't been to Shikoku, you have to check that off your list. And one of the places to come to, there's Kagawa, there's Ehime, which is up near Okayama and Hiroshima towards Honshu Island. Then there's the other side. Tokushima is a little bit closer to Osaka, that side. And then there's Kochi, which is facing the Pacific, which is really far away. It's further away because it's not facing any of the mainland. In order to get here, there's no Shinkansen. You have to fly pretty much. And that remoteness of Kochi Prefecture makes it such a jewel. Just like Miyazaki is a jewel of Kyushu Island, and Nagasaki too in many ways, but Miyazaki especially, it's because it's so off the normal track to get to Miyazaki, to get to Kochi. You have to, it's best to fly from Tokyo or even Osaka. Or take a ferry. You can take ferries here, which is pretty cool. I believe you can. I know that there's some that come around from Tokyo, leave Odaiba. I remember coming from Odaiba to Tokushima by ferry, and it took about 15 hours and it was an amazing ride. It cost half the amount of the Shinkansen, I believe, or the train that it would cost. And it was about the same amount of time, no, it wasn't the same amount of time, but it's always nice to take a boat.

08:20 John Daub: But I really have been enjoying my time in Shikoku. I try to come here at least once a year to make an episode or a show. The last time I was here, I think, was when I did Dogo Onsen. That was two years, more than two years ago? Dogo Onsen and the square watermelons of Zentsuji and the Sanuki udon. So I have three episodes from Shikoku. This will be the fourth. So I'm looking forward to it and to feature Kochi Prefecture. Let's take a look at this room now. This is the tatami room, and we're gonna go and have some tea. I thought this would be cool, to invite you in for a drink. It's nice, two beds. You know, whenever you get two beds, one of them becomes the bed you throw stuff on, and the other one is the one you sleep on. That's how it always works. And Kanae Daub's at home going, "There's two beds, why didn't you invite me?" Well, that's because you had to work, and also because I did too. The budget did not permit it.

09:21 John Daub: Room here, I'm not gonna open it. I do like the sound of the wood closing on these doors, but you have to line them up perfectly when you close them, and then the air doesn't come in. And these paper, they're kind of glued on, but you can hear them whistling. See if you do it the other side. You can see, kind of glued on. And it is one sheet. This is one big, long sheet. It's not very good washi paper. I think it's kind of like drum material. All right, we'll have a seat. Let's have some tea. In Japan, we sit on the floor. Oh, sometimes, oh I should have sat the other way. Why am I sitting this way? The background is really boring. If I turn it this way, you can see the room, right?

10:37 John Daub: Now, I don't know how much this room costs, and I bet you there's two types of people on the internet. There are the people who always ask all the information that they could simply Google, and then there are the people who will go and Google it themselves before they ask the question. I don't know what kind of person you are. I'm the Google type of person where I, or Bing or whatever you use. I'm that kind of person that will always do it because that's part of my job. I don't know how much it costs, but I'll tell you this. This is half Japanese, half Western. It's a unique style, and you don't see these rooms. In fact, that might be the title of this. The Shimanto River Hotel experience is okay, but half Japanese, half Western hotel. That's what this is. It's kind of weird, and if you go into the lobby, and it's so unique. This is a really nice hotel. It's not one of these chain hotels like the Intercontinental or Holiday Inn. This is a local hotel, I believe, and it's unique. When we came in, it looked like one of these art deco. Everything's made out of that cement, like really stylish cement, and then I'm inside of a traditional Japanese room, so the styles don't exactly mix, but that's kind of Shikoku in a nutshell. It's this really amazingly designed place, this island that sort of conforms with nature more than anywhere else that I've ever seen, and they come up with really modern designs. This could be from the influence of architects like Kengo Kuma, but he's not the only architect in Japan. There are loads of them that are really creative with the buildings here. I've seen so many stylish places here, and it really makes me happy when I went to Yusuhara, and they have a lot of great things. They had redone the town, and I asked some local people about how it got so stylish and trendy, and it's actually really hard. I think a lot of cities really wanna do this, but it's actually really hard work because 50 or 100 years ago, the roads were narrow, and in order to make the roads wider, you have to get one row of people to vacate their houses so they can make a bigger road for the 25,000 people. And they really got to the point where they've gotten much more expensive buildings to build to the first century, and to do that requires like buying them out, and which isn't even legally possible in many situations, or them agreeing, and it could take like decades before they do that, which is why I made the gate tower building, highway through a building episode in Osaka had nothing to do with the fact that a highway went through a building. That's pretty cool, but it's the fact that the compromise was struck between the highway authority and the building owners from the Edo period. They couldn't get the rights to tear down that property and the sellers wouldn't sell and that was their right. And instead of going around it, they compromised and built the highway through it. I like that story a lot.

13:44 John Daub: All right, look down here. Yeah, you get a tea set. Is this not cool? Cool, there's some towels. This is where the tea bag will go. I like, they gave me one cup. Do you know why? Because they know only I'm staying here. So they gave me only one cup. I like that. The details matter, everybody. It's the little details that people notice that matter. May not matter to you. It matters to me, the little details. All right, now this is not matcha. These are tea bags in here. And typically there's tongs. I'm just gonna put that in there. So I gotta go and heat the water. I didn't think of this. For some reason, I thought that the hot water was going to be in this magical tray, but it's not the case. Oh no. But they're very, very smart. It's already heated up. I can feel how hot it is. So let's get the tea. It's hard to do with one. These things are always hard. Before you pour the water, you have to lock it. Oh wait, did I? Oh no. And the plug is magnetized. Okay, there it is. Now it's on. Before you pour the water, you have to lock it. And now it'll come out.

16:01 John Daub: What YouTuber would ever show you the back of a wall, huh? Only on a live stream. You get to see the little teeny details, like the back of a wall. As I transition out of it. Every room comes with green tea. It's just part of it. Every ryokan, it's not a ryokan if you go there and they don't have green tea in a tray like this. This is pretty weak. They give you always some complimentary snack. Oh, these are famous biscuits from Shikoku. Mire biscuits. These are special biscuits. I think they still taste like biscuits. All right. Some people don't like biscuits. Some people will say that you have to pour it and then you pour it again. I just drink it. Some people say you gotta wait a certain amount of time. I've seen some people do this. Kind of mixes it and wait a minute and drink it. Life is full of rules. I'm by myself in the hotel room. It's not like anyone, oh, there's 200 people watching.

17:39 John Daub: I'm not done with the tour. There's more to this room. You're very welcome. I see you guys writing in. Typically, the check-in time for these rooms is around 3 p.m. It's almost always like that. And then, checkout is usually around 11 or 12 o'clock noon. And if you tell them the day before in advance, if you want a little bit of time, you could probably get it. But some places are strict and some places aren't. The reason why is, I think it has to do with foreign tourists might not stick to their word. So they're very strict because it's very easy to be, if you're too bending the rules is not something we do too much in Japan. You don't really bend the rules. So if you, it's a tough subject. It's like, if you give a little bit, people usually will take more. Where in Japanese, we don't take everything because we know it's like wasteful. Except, yeah, no, I'm not gonna tell you. Yeah, I wouldn't say gaijin, just international visitors. So that's technical word, international visitors.

18:52 John Daub: Now, inside of your room, if it's a Japanese ryokan, you have other pillows. So if you do have guests, you've come here with friends that are staying in other rooms, you can bring these out. Or, you know, it's a family of four would, they would put all four seats out. They only put one because I'm here. There's a closet and a safe. I like it. Basic stuff. Typically in a Japanese home, you can put the futon, other futon sets underneath here, but because it's a fusion Western Japanese style hotel room, there's no futon, so they just put cushions and put a safe, which I don't have anything of value that I need to put in a safe. In here, there would be more futons and stuff. And actually, there are futons in here. This one over here. So if I didn't want to sleep on the bed I could sleep on a futon. That's kind of pretty cool. This is the futon and this is the mattress. The futon typically I believe is the upper futon. Oh this is so soft. I prefer a futon over a bed. I love sleeping on the floor. And then these are the pillows. Oh yeah. So this is something I can show you. Japanese pillows are different. Do you hear this? They have usually like mugi (barley) or barley inside of the pillows. I can't open it up. Do you hear that? Typically Japanese pillows have something in it. Sometimes they'll just be a bag of barley. It's weird. They'll give you a bag of barley. I can't sleep on this. But this is half barley. But these are plastic pellets that remind you of barley. I guess feathers or something. But Japanese pillows have something in the bottom of it. And I guess when you sleep people play with it. Maybe it's supposed to keep your head cooler. I'm not sure. All I know is that when I get barley pillows I don't use it. I'm not a barley head. I don't want to sleep on a bag of barley. I'll eat the barley. I'll drink the barley. I won't sleep on the barley.

21:24 John Daub: They knew I was coming. I think they picked out this room for me just so I could live stream and show it to you. Other things. This hotel is really nice. It's got an onsen here, I believe. Or a bath. I'm not sure if it's a full-out onsen. I think it is. Must be Kochi. So I like it. The hotel has all of their own towels. And there's a yukata (light kimono). This is the obi (sash) that you would tie around the yukata. And here's the yukata. And right here is the yukata. And right here is, in case it gets cold, they always have like a little jacket, a yukata jacket. I'd try it on for you guys but it would take forever. This is the jacket. You could wear it. I don't want to do fashion show. You can wear a hat with the yukata. And there's typically a string inside that you can tie, and then it keeps you warmer with the yukata. You like it. It's a very Yoda Jedi Knight type of stuff. That's all I got for you. I just wanted to show you a little bit of Kochi.

23:08 John Daub: And I know that people have been telling me there's a Kochi in India. That's pretty cool. I know that there's lots of places K-O-C-H-I. Oh Eric. Of course. Eric wants to see the toilet. But of course. That wouldn't actually be a full tour if you didn't have it. There she is. With a control panel and a washlet (bidet toilet). Of course. This is weird though. I've never seen a sink like this. But works. Works okay. The yukata does not fit me. It's gonna be too small. It always is. They're made for about 5'8. The large sizes I believe. This comes with a bath in the room. But most people will go to the community. To be honest with you. Nice. Actually complimentary shampoos and stuff. I like it like this instead of the little bottles that they give you. This is more eco-friendly as well. You don't wanna waste anything. Very nice. It's typical to take the shower outside of the bathtub if you do wanna take a bath. It looks like this is how a house is set up where the shower is outside of the bathtub. And you'll take a shower here and then you can get into the bath. Typical Japanese style. The hair dryer come in a cord. I like it. I like this room. It's nice. It's got everything that I need including an escape plan in case there is an earthquake. I always study these.

24:50 John Daub: If you are in the Shimanto River Valley you can leave a comment. Maybe I'll come find you. Come to the lobby say hi. I shouldn't say that. Somebody might do it. But there you go. The one last view to the 238 people that got the notification. I know some people are gonna say that they didn't see the live stream. I apologize. But you should walk around outside instead. I did but there's not really much outside. See that. The hotel is situated pretty much right on top of a cliff. If you were to look from the other side of the river bank what you would see is this hotel is pretty much on the bank and there's no place to walk down there. And I would love to show you outside. Actually tomorrow I could take you and spend some time on the river and then show you some of the Shimanto River.

25:53 John Daub: Now the Shimanto River is debatably the cleanest in Japan. They say. But are they wrong? I don't know. The only way to do it is to open my mouth and drink five liters of the water from the river and see if I get sick. It's the only way to tell. Or you could get a test tube and run tests. But it's faster to see if you get sick. The best way to see if the water is clean: drink. So we'll drink the Ganges River in India and if you get sick you'll know it's polluted. Don't go by smell. It's hard to do it. There's nothing wrong with the Ganges River. But I've seen people, a friend of mine was in there swimming at Varanasi and I thought that was crazy. I would never swim in the Ganges River and I'm half Indian. That's the half Indian side is the side that might have some kind of rationale. Because a lot of Westerners go swimming in the Ganges River and that's insane. It's the most polluted river in the world. This is the opposite though. This is one of the cleanest rivers. I wanna say the world but I'm very very biased. This channel is called Only in Japan. This channel was made to be biased. So I'm not gonna bash Japan.

27:15 John Daub: But I have to tell you something. At the last place that I stayed, and oh if you're on Instagram follow on Instagram. I put pictures. You have to see the view from the room. I forget the name of the place. It's in the Instagram post. Oh my. I remember walking in and all I saw at the window was green. It was just trees. It was the most amazing sight. Because I live in Tokyo. You gotta go to Instagram and check out the photos. It was that good. And I really love that place. And this is a different view. Instead of just trees, which you do have, you have the mountains and the river and the Shimanto River. It's just such a natural place. Ramsey Silent, thanks for sharing the link. Yeah. And it's the water's still a little bit cool. And when the rainy season hits the water level will rise significantly. But this year there was less snow in Shikoku than usual. So they're not gonna have as much snow melting. So the rivers aren't gonna get as high this year. But when the rainy season comes it will. Ayu fish, these little sweet fish are very very popular too. People go fishing in it and they bring out the sweet fish. And this is just about the season. So I'm looking forward to trying that tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll be here in this area all day filming. And then the next day on Sunday I'll be there. Oh if you are in Kochi, there's a Sunday market in Kochi. I think it's the oldest morning market in Japan. And I'm gonna be going there to film an episode on the Sunday morning market. So if you're in Kochi on Sunday I think we'll be there before 11am. And we'll probably be filming for three or four hours there. And I fly back to Tokyo in the PM around 5 or 6pm. So it's gonna be really full two days here in Kochi. And I'm so much looking forward to. I got a lot of work to do. But this is the work too. This is to go out and to film beautiful places like this.

29:27 John Daub: There's a bridge here that I crossed to come in here. It was really nice. Do you see that. That's how I drive over. And I am loving driving here because there's almost no traffic. There's almost no traffic out there. You can see that. There's a road. Look at that. See that road. Nobody. For me this is the perfect place to drive. Look. It's so relaxed and orderly. It's perfect. So I've been having a field day driving. It's just so much fun. I drove about a hundred kilometers today, a hundred yesterday, and probably another hundred tomorrow and definitely another hundred and twenty the day after. Yeah. Very very cool to drive. And you have to, I think if you come to Kochi you have to rent a car if you want to see anything. There are some trains but they're so infrequent. The best way is rent a car. This is like the kingdom of rent a car. So it's perfect opportunity. If you fly into Kochi to rent a car and to try it out. It's so easy. And the navigation system was in English, which is even better. The navi. And it even says turn left after 200 meters, turn left after 100 meters, turn left now. And then if sometimes I'll turn right just to piss off the computer. And then it says turn back around, turn right in 500 meters. I like to mess around with the computer system to try to outsmart it. And in order to outsmart a computer system you have to be dumb. Because it had to be rational. Then that's how you can outsmart a computer system. Rational behavior. Computers are rational I guess. Because they can't be stupid. But humans can be stupid. That's how we break the computers. If you're dumb enough you can break a computer. It's the smart people are going to be the first ones that when the computers take over and Skynet goes active it'll be the smart people that the computers robots take care of first. Because they're so predictable. And it's the unpredictable not so smart people that will be ruling the world. And I hope to be among them.

31:38 John Daub: Alright that's all I got. That's all I have. Seriously I took I literally took a wrong turn to try and mess up the navigation system today. It's a serious story. It's not funny. An awkward silence. Alright guys have a good day. Yeah my age is showing a little bit. We have a really nice dinner prepared from the hotel downstairs at 7:30. I'm looking forward to that. I've been doing a lot of Instagram stories, Instagram posts. So you can go over there and check out some more. I'll do some more live streams tomorrow once a day. Skynet is coming. And if it does it's coming from Japan baby. Because we are the king of robots and computers, robotics. So you can blame us or you can thank us if you're not amongst the intelligent which the computers will take care of first.

32:34 John Daub: Alright everybody. Yeah I'll show you Eric on an Instagram story. I've been having fun posting it and showing you. So if you want to fill in there's also by the way. While I've got 200 and something of you we started a Discord server. And I'm gonna put a link in the description eventually. It might not be there when you check but it'll be there tonight. I have to make sure it's the right link. But the Discord is this way that you can communicate with other people in the community. And right now Discord is limited to just Patreon supporters. In fact our Patreon supporters have been using Discord now for about three weeks a little bit more. So in order to do that you might, I'll talk about this tomorrow or when I get back to Tokyo. I want to make sure everybody gets the information. But if you want to join Patreon you can use the Discord right away. And then I'm gonna release the Discord server in a Discord server livestream. I shouldn't have said it. And you think ah why didn't I say anything? So I'm gonna introduce it. And the Discord server is so cool because at any moment I could just go live with voice and then start talking and then people start talking to me. It's weird. You have to be there. And then one time I accidentally went live and I forgot about it. And then five minutes later I heard all these people talking and I thought I'd left a radio on. But it was just other people having a conversation and I could hear them but I couldn't say anything. I had to figure out how to use Discord. And then all of a sudden it was like we're all talking to each other. It's weird. Discord's pretty powerful stuff.

34:15 John Daub: You know what? I'm not gonna put a link in the description yet because I'm still wrapping my head around it. But it's coming. Yep. There's push to talk but it's also voice activated and it kind of works good. But I'm just trying it out for with our Patreon supporters right now because I'm trying to beta test it to make sure we have enough moderators. So it can be moderated and bad people will be deleted. And right now we have about I think ten really good moderators. Ufobob who's moderating right now is one of them as well as Nosh who everybody knows. I think Jem is as well. Ramsey Silent you know the usual cast and characters. But we need probably another five or ten moderators. So if you're interested in that you can also leave a comment in the video and we'll get Nosh also can add you to the Discord server. It's pretty cool. Discord's gonna be a way that I can communicate a little bit better because the notifications on the video are awful. Some people might not get the notifications for the live streams. If you have Discord you will get the notifications. And that means that you won't miss an episode.

35:27 John Daub: That's all I got for you. I'm gonna take a bath and then I'm gonna get ready and clean myself up because I feel like I've been out in the sun all day, which I have. And then I'll have a nice dinner. And I'm gonna go to this tatami and I'm gonna edit video because that's what I do. And this is the perfect setup for editing a video for the night. Wake up tomorrow morning refreshed and ready to attack the day. I'm gonna attack this river. Alright I'm gonna attack this river. I'm not allowed to open the window. The manager told me do not open the window at night. I'm gonna attack this river tomorrow and you're gonna see some live streams and some beauty from Shimanto, the Shimanto River. Because it's just one of the most pristine and beautiful rivers in the entire world I think. Right now the sun is set and the lights are starting to come on. And this beautiful little town of Shimanto, population probably like a couple thousand. And these people are pioneers. They're like the great west. They could have a choice to live anywhere. They decided to live here. And I respect that because this is such an amazing place. And I'm right now asking myself why I don't just live here. There's no reason. There's no convenience stores at all here by the way. Not even a Lawson's, 7-Eleven, nothing. We checked because I wanted a candy bar. The manager's watching this right now I'm sure. I tagged his hotel in the live stream. Alright. Don't forget to subscribe.