00:00:01 John Daub: Greetings everybody. Welcome to Omiya Station in Saitama. I've come here—you can see the Keihin-Tohoku line leaving to go back to Tokyo right now. I've come just to explore Omiya Station. It's one of the big hubs of eastern Japan. How you doing? We're going to take a look around. I don't come to Omiya very often, so I thought this was a pretty unique chance to take a look at another place near Tokyo.

00:00:32 John Daub: Now you can transfer to the Shinkansen here in Omiya. So it is one of the closest Shinkansen stops just outside of Tokyo. This is not Tokyo though. This is Saitama. Let's take a look around and just go upstairs and see what we find. I really don't know either. That's why this is going to be called the Saitama Omiya Adventure. Because I don't come here that often. Saitama is a pretty interesting place because it's a place where people come here to live. It's a very livable area. But I live on the other side of town.

00:01:12 John Daub: We are now at the top of the escalator. Right there you can see the signs to go to the Shinkansen to the right. To the left there. And I'm going to exit the station. Right now I'm inside of JR. You can take a couple of lines to get here. One of them is the one I came on here, the Keihin-Tohoku line. This looks like the Utsunomiya line, the orange one you see there. These depart every 15 minutes going towards Utsunomiya and back towards Zushi which is in Kanagawa. It's a very long ride.

00:01:46 John Daub: I see a lot of people are starting to come out here. Already I can see they got a lot of food. This looks like a really new station. But Omiya Station was originally built in 1885. This is not a new location for Omiya Station, but it's new to me. It's new today. And this cheese tart is making me a little bit hungry. Check that out. I shall be back, ladies of the cheese tart stand.

00:02:20 John Daub: So let me get my Pasmo out here. I have an ICOCA card from Osaka. That's how I like to get in and out. Oh look at that. The Railway Museum is here. I did not know that. So let's go to the west side first. But if you take a look at the map, this is Shinjuku. This is Shinagawa. Here's Tokyo Station. That's where I started. And we went all the way up to here. So it's about a 30-35 minute ride. The easiest point on the Utsunomiya line is Ueno. That's the orange one. It starts there. But you can ride the Keihin-Tohoku line which goes all the way through the city of Tokyo on the east side and will take you up towards here.

00:03:12 John Daub: Omiya is a big hub of eastern Japan's railways and a place where you can catch the Tohoku Shinkansen. I think there's more than one Shinkansen line that goes through here. Boom. I can put this away. We are now officially in Omiya Station. How cool is that? Wow, it's a busy hub. So lots of students just got off of school it looks like. So there's a south entrance and a north entrance. This is the entrance with the Shinkansen up here. So you can sneak your way into there if you have the ticket. Oh, look at that. Above here, Starbucks is everywhere.

00:04:01 John Daub: Alright, that's the east exit. Let's do that a little bit later. I'm really focused on the west exit. This is where the Railway Museum is and it just seems like it's going to be bigger. The last time I was in Omiya was about four years ago. And before that, about ten years ago, I worked here at an English school for a couple of days. It was a unique experience. It's quite a commute from the city of Tokyo to come back and forth. But Omiya is a place where a lot of people live in the suburbs of Tokyo and commute into the city and come back here at night. There are some jobs here. It is a big place. I would say that this is the biggest station of Saitama Prefecture, one of Japan's 47 prefectures.

00:05:01 John Daub: So let's go take a look outside of the west exit. And maybe on the way back, we'll take a look at the east exit. Hopefully this gives you some good orientation. Maybe if you have a JR rail pass, you want to make a stop here. Take a look at a slice of life outside of Tokyo but close enough. It's kind of like Tokyo. It's like going to Canada maybe. Just follow the crowd because I don't remember much of Saitama. Oh, this is cool. They have like local vegetables. I do know that Saitama has got some really good vegetables because they've got a ton of farms. So that's neat to see farmers selling stuff inside of the station. It's a good use of the space.

00:05:58 John Daub: What is famous in Omiya? Maybe the Omiya Dome? I don't know. We're going to learn. Wow. This place is a lot bigger than I thought. Look at this. This is a lot bigger than I thought it would be. There's a map here. So the station, you can see a lot of the lines go through the station. It's a much bigger station than it was in 1885. Today, a quarter of a million people will cross through Omiya Station every day. And the west side is the main side. As you can see, there are tons of department stores. And if you walk down this road, I bet there's a lot of drinking establishments and restaurants. So there is some nightlife here in Omiya. You can have some fun.

00:07:06 John Daub: Check out this. So this is, these are some really big department stores. This is called Arche, I believe. Where did I work when I worked for the English school? There's a Uniqlo back there. Just about every shop that you can think about, every chain shop has a branch here in Omiya. There's several Starbucks. There's a Gap. A couple of electronic stores. Tons of banks. There's English schools. This Sogo building is quite famous. It has one of these roundabouts up on the top. Now, I thought Sogo had gone out of business, but I believe they sort of did in some places and they're still open in others. Sogo is one of the big old department store chains in Japan. Pretty long history. I think that's where I was teaching up in there. They had an English school inside. I can't remember. It was a long time ago.

00:08:15 John Daub: So let's look back at the station. Here's Omiya Station. Nature is lost. I saw that comment. That could very well be true here. Omiya would be considered like an asphalt jungle. Seriously. There are not a lot of trees in the area. But the ones you do see, you do appreciate like down here. In fact, the smoking area is like a forested area. Check that out. That's where everybody can relax and smoke in the forest. That's the Omiya Forest down there. How cool is that for smokers?

00:08:59 John Daub: Let's go down here. There's a couple of walkways. I'm not sure which one I'm going to walk through. So let's just do a loop around the west side, shall we? How you doing? I'm here just for a little bit of time. I actually came out here to Saitama to interview a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic attack on August 6, 1945. And after that, I knew that Omiya was just nearby, two stations away. So I decided to sneak over here for about 15, 20 minutes to show you around. Because I myself don't know. And every now and then, it's part of my job. I have to come around and take a look and see what they have. Because who knows? I might come back here for a story. And if I do, I want to know what's here. Maybe we'll find something to eat as well.

00:09:53 John Daub: One thing I can tell right away is that Saitama is a lot more chill than Shinjuku and some of the other places in the city of Tokyo. Check out this lion. It's got like a little lion tail. It's got lights in the eyes. Saitama is a lot more chill than Tokyo but seems to have everything that Tokyo has, except for the crowds. So I put a link in the description. You can take a look at Jack Omiya. I put a link in the description. If you want to click that, you can find out where Omiya Station is in relation to Tokyo. Several of the major JR lines go through here, including the Shinkansen. By Shinkansen, I think it takes about 20 minutes to get to Ueno Station, which is the main hub and eventually takes you to Tokyo Station.

00:11:16 John Daub: This little plaza here. The suburbs of Tokyo. One of the biggest cities in the suburbs of Tokyo, besides Yokohama. Looks like the Rugby World Cup has an event here. I'm not sure. Kumagaya. Did you see that? Rugby World Cup will be starting in a few months. September 24th. There's a Russia event with Russia. September 29th. And October 9th. There are a couple of matches here in this area. Kumagaya Rugby. Very cool.

00:12:35 John Daub: We're now walking back to the west entrance of Omiya Station. Yeah. It's pretty neat. Look at that. Do you see that on the right side? Oh geez. How you doing? Oh they're climbing the walls. Check that out. What is that? I guess that's the Kotobuki mascots. Huh? Very interesting. Pretty weird. Are they jolly people? Chiyo writes in. Are they jolly people? I think so. People seem to have a jolly look. It's jolly.

00:13:38 John Daub: Here's one of the chains. I noticed that chain. We have that in Tokyo as well. It's interesting. It's just a different contrast. It's got a laid-back feel to it. It could be similar to some of the towns out on the Chuo Line away from the city of Tokyo. I'm looking for the manhole covers. I don't see any Saitama manhole covers yet. We have a Sofmap which is an electronic store. Another Coca-Cola vending machine. I'm interested in these energy drinks. I wonder how bad they are. Guys, if you like these kinds of train station tours, click that like button so I know that you guys like this sort of content. The last one was pretty popular. Kochi Station. We walked around Kochi Station a little bit. So I thought I would take you around this station.

00:14:41 John Daub: Here's where the... Oh wow. This is the taxi queue is down here. It's like an army of taxis. And over the last... All the taxis used to look like this one. Do you see that in the center? All the taxis look like that. But I think it was in the last five years, the shape of the taxis have changed. And now they look bigger, more like the London taxicabs. You can see some of them are a little bit higher up there. There's one in the queue coming in right there. I always hope to get one of the bigger taxis because it's just a more spacious experience. There's one right there. You can see the shape of it. It looks like a hatchback. It's got more space for luggage. And it's easier to get in and out. Which means that the time it takes for the taxi driver to get the passenger in and out is cut... into 30% faster to get customers out. So you can see the mix of the new and the old taxis in here. It doesn't make sense to get rid of them right away. But I think that these sedans will be phased out over the next couple of years. Yeah. They're pretty convenient. They're like a miniature version of the English taxi. Inside, they're very roomy. They're very clean.

00:15:49 John Daub: So this is the first floor of Lumine building. Let's just go around. And I'm going to take you back inside. Some of the sights and sounds of Saitama. This is where One Punch Man is from. This is his hometown, Saitama. I don't know if it's Omiya in particular. But the next station is Saitama-Shintoshin Station. I still can't find an Omiya manhole cover. I am looking. No manhole covers. Oh! I found one! Manhole! Hold on! Looks like nature. I have to look at it from the other side. It's upside down. But let me see if I can... There you go. This is kind of a neat one. It's basic. But you can see the trees on the top. The forest on the bottom. There's flowers. And then there's some other flowers. Maybe that's sakura on the bottom right. That's pretty interesting. It shows a place of nature. I guess Saitama's got a lot of forest. Not around Omiya. But outside of this area, there's got more forest.

00:17:22 John Daub: I love manhole covers. People who go around the country collecting manhole covers are called manholers. I didn't come up with that word. The manhole cover industry came up with it because they have trading cards. Alright, this is good information. If you do come to Japan and you're traveling outside of the city of Tokyo, Tokyo's manhole covers are kind of boring. They're just the pattern of a sakura blossom. It's a big one. But the ones outside, very fine details in the manhole covers. You can go to the city office and ask for a manhole cover card. You have to do it in person. And I have about 32 cards in my manhole card collection. And it's hard to find. Not all of them have them. But the more you look around, the more you'll eventually start to build up a collection of manhole cover cards. I made an episode on the manhole covers about two years ago. It wasn't as popular as some of the other videos that I've made on the main channel. But it still is a really good look on how the manhole covers work. I go into a manhole cover factory and I go into deep detail in how they make the manhole covers more than you ever needed to know. I even went to the manhole cover expo.

00:18:45 John Daub: So down there, they have the Shinkansen. Oh, there's a Tokyu Hands up there. That's always good to know because Tokyu Hands has those sorts of knick-knacks that you need that aren't in a lot of the other stores. Simon Z. Please do more videos on train station adventures. Awesome. Thank you, Simon. I'm starting to get the vibe from Simon. Many thanks. Alright, let's go back into the station now. It's interesting to see the west side. Now, there's a Railway Museum in Saitama. I believe it's somewhere around here, but it's off of the west side. This is interesting. This is a new looking store. Part of Lumine, which is usually they have shopping malls inside of the stations. They have one in Shinjuku Station. There's a lot of Lumines.

00:19:46 John Daub: For some people, this might be their first time visiting Japan through the live streams. So I kind of bring people on these live streams to give you an inside look. To make it feel like you might even be here in Japan. That's why these live streams are not cut. And they're a little bit longer because people don't get the notifications right away. So this is the train museum. There's some pictures of it. And I guess it's not too far away. You have to get onto a... They don't look like they're too far away. So if you exit the station and start walking, you should be able to see some of the trains. That's interesting. Should we do that? What do you think? Alright, let's try it. Hey, you know, we might as well try this. Let's do it. Let's just see what we can find. I'm kind of curious now that I saw that map. Just make sure that I'm in the right direction because I don't know for sure. I could be just taking you on a wild goose chase. Meaning, I don't know if this is the right way for sure. I think this is the way you go. We'll find out in about 30 seconds.

00:21:12 John Daub: Alright, let's go down. Found another smoking area. I gotta get home too. I got a lot of editing to do. Oh, it's the lottery. Seven million dollar lottery. Nana oku-en. Cooking school! Kanai, are you watching? We should take some cooking classes. Alright, apparently very close to this area there should be the first part of what is like the Railway Museum walk. And I guess you have to walk to the Railway Museum and it's about half a kilometer away from here. But on the way, there's some little Easter eggs that they show you. And that's kind of the reason why I'm in the middle of nowhere Omiya Station. Just to see. Because that map got me somewhat curious. This might not be the most beautiful section of Omiya Station. But that building says it's the Nishikita building for Omiya Station. Wow. So back here they have a gym and a place I guess you can... a gym and golf area. Looks pretty modern.

00:22:46 John Daub: Alright, we should see something up here. If not, I'm just gonna go back. Omiya is where the Railway Museum is. I've always wanted to go there. You know, I should go there. Do a little business card exchange and see if I can get permission to come back and film. Alright, let's cross the street here. You guys still with me? Okay, here's the Jack building. Jack must stand for something. They call it the Jack Omiya. Looks like it's gonna rain. So we're gonna follow this loop. You see it above me? Around. See what we see. Somebody's gotta figure out what does this Jack mean? Jack Omiya. What does the J-A-C-K... Must be short for something. I guess that's a good... Omiya must be a good place to put the Railway Museum because there's such a long history of trains coming through here since 1885. For those of you joining us, the history of Omiya Station goes back to 1885. And I think we found something. This looks like the train museum. Alright. I think it does. It looks like an old station. This could be the original Omiya Station from 1885. I'm not sure. Looks old.

00:24:46 John Daub: So we're gonna cross the street here. And see what else we can find. So far I haven't found any trains. Jeks...er. Don't know what that means. Jeks are kids? Oh! This is like a swimming pool? What? I don't see any of the trains. But now I'm curious about this swimming pool looking thing. And then this way, if you look up here, there's a bridge. That looks pretty neat too. I wonder if we can see the Shinkansen from up there. Now I'm getting distracted. I'm gonna walk this way. This tour is going in no particular direction. That's what makes these tours so good. Shout out from Ebisu. Thanks for the streams and hundreds of hours of great footage. Hello everybody makes me and the missus smile. That's good to hear. Thanks. Hello everybody! Alright, let's go up to this bridge now. I think whenever I see a nice old bridge like this, I bet you're gonna get a good view of something. So let's go take a look what we got.

00:26:06 John Daub: David Kimura has just bought lunch. Thank you, David. Let's see if I can find something on the way back. We're gonna end this livestream back in the station. So if you're joining us now, this might be longer than normal. I don't know. I don't come here. Oh, this is interesting. This is the parking lot for all of the bicycles. Wow, this is really interesting. Check it out. Very cool. So people have permits or passes that they can just touch and they can go in. And if you want to park your bike, you can take a look at this sign on the left side. For bicycles and then bikes or motorbikes underneath there, it is available. That green symbol you see means available. So if you see this symbol, that means there's vacancy. Interesting. Hey there BSFat boys in the house. Is it safe to ride bikes in Japan? Like bicycles? Yeah. And if you get tired, you can walk them up too. Just depends on how you roll.

00:27:26 John Daub: I got a feeling. Whoa, check it out. That's like the last day of high school. All the kids will open up the back door of the school bus and run out. And the bus driver gets angry and has to close it up again. Somebody opened up the back door of this train. Must have been the last day of high school. All right. From up here, I think we're gonna get a shot of the Shinkansen maybe and some of the other trains. It's pretty neat. This is the highest pedestrian point in Omiya, which is not known for its mountains. This side of Saitama is very flat. Yeah, this is an awesome view of the station. This is a great view. And I think that this hut right here, do you see this? This is where the trains will go in to get cleaned. I wish I can go down to road level, but this looks like these warehouses are where trains will go in to be cleaned. So there's facilities for that.

00:28:32 John Daub: Oh, now I see. Up here is where the Shinkansen is. Do you see? Above? So this is the local train side. This goes here diagonally, and this one goes horizontally, the Shinkansen tracks this way to Tokyo. So that's the Shinkansen station for Omiya and the regular station. And this looks like one of the local trains coming in. Not sure what line that is. But it's pretty neat to see. Omiya is big. I mean, Omiya has a load of tracks. Check that out. And when I was coming through Tokyo to get here, I could see that there was a parking lot for the Shinkansen. And I saw seven or eight different kinds of Shinkansen parked out. Oh, this is, this looks like a train with a lot of crates on the back. Awesome stream. Always watch. Love the tech videos. Thank you, Chuffy. Chuffy Banzai Harrington. Appreciate it.

00:29:39 John Daub: Welcome to Saitama. We got a train right here. We can get pretty close. We can get pretty close right here to the corner. Let's see this train depart going towards Tokyo. This one looks like it's got gas or some kind of liquid in it. Cargo train, right Ken? Saitama is one of the big hubs of East Japan. Most of the trains, if not all of the trains that go through Omiya, oh, there's, that looks like the Utsunomiya line going towards, or the Takasaki line. There's so many lines go through here. I get confused, but almost all of the trains that are going towards Tohoku or even making their way towards the Sea of Japan, a lot of them go through, if not all of them, through Omiya. It's just one of these hubs. Very cool. Maybe that's the train I'll be taking back going the other way. You point the wrong direction. I could be. I'm totally disoriented. I'm not from around these parts. I'm really disoriented. I was looking for the train museum and it said they said that the train museum was on this side, but I can't find it anywhere. That stinks.

00:31:16 John Daub: We get calls for the cheese tart. Lucius Kwak gets us, get the cheese tart. Okay. All right. That means they got to go back this way. I don't know. I don't want to go back the same way though. You know what? I'm going to go in this way. Let's go in through the other entrance. We don't want to go back the same way that we came in. Dewey. I don't want to see the same stuff. For those that are watching. I'm planning to meet with Jennifer on July 4th. That's two days from now. Oh, hello. Someone's watching. So I'm planning to meet with Jennifer two days from now. So that should be pretty, that should be a lot of fun. I haven't seen Jennifer, especially in a live stream in a long time. We're going to be busy. We're going to be filming a sushi episode in Ikebukuro. So that should be fun. How you doing? Yeah, I'm going back to the station. Yeah, I think I'm going to go down and around to the towards the station. Okay. All right. I guess we made a new friend. Here's the platform for the train. What is that train? It's going towards Kashiwa. Kashiwa is in Chiba. Interesting.

00:32:50 John Daub: All right, let's make our way. Let's make our way down there. The police are waiting for me. But we're going to go back towards, we're going to go in through Omiya to the east exit. Higashiguchi or nishiguchi? You can go to the right and then go to the east. Thank you. All right. I asked how to get there. I didn't want to take the shortcut. Police are great. The police in Japan, if you have a car, if you ever get lost, you want to ask the police officer for directions because the police know where to go because they, police are locals, right? I guess you could say they know what they're doing. They know where they are. All right. Look at this. Underneath the bridge here, we have some local art and we have our friend here. So let's, let's meet our friend. Some local urban art underneath the bridge. How you doing? Oh yeah, probably. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Come on over. Wow. Wow. We've actually, we never met, but we've had interactions online. Hi, how you doing Kip? Good. Nice to meet you. You live here in Saitama? Yes. Awesome. That's right. Beautiful. Beautiful downtown Saitama.

00:34:26 Kip: Kip, what is here besides Omiya Station?

00:34:30 John Daub: No, actually, there's a, if you're, somebody's coming here, they want... Kip, there's a capsule hotel over there. Okay. And another one at the far end, the far end of the south end. Yeah. And there's a new one right there. It's called Easy Stay. Okay. It's brand new. Brand new capsule hotel. Do you hear that? And the train museum's on the other side, right? Right. To get there, you just take the new shuttle one stop. Okay. And it stops right there at the, at the, at the museum. At the museum. So I'll be back because I did not find anything. I couldn't find anything with the train museum. I guess you could walk there, right? It's like 20 minutes. You could. Yeah, but you know, if you're gonna, like you're your family or something, it's kind of a long walk. So you wouldn't want to do that probably. Yeah. Kip, how long have you been here? Not as long as you. Not as, not as long as you. But here. Nine years, about nine years. Nine years. Yeah. Yeah. How, you like Saitama? You like Omiya? Yeah, I like, yeah, it's, yeah, it's fine. I don't have no problem with it, you know? Yeah. I know, I know this side is really nothing to do. It's on the other side. Honestly, yes. Oh, it's on the other side. The west side. Oh, I forgot one other thing. Down that way too, there's a, I know there's a ramen place. Yeah. It's up on the like, I think on the second floor. Okay. And it's, there's like an old, like a, there's an old Don Quixote down there. It's not, it's not opening, but, but I know there's always people lined up there to go and use it. Yeah. I, I think there's a lot of hidden treasures in, in Omiya. Right. You just have to, you have to know where to go. Like, like little ramen shops on the corner. Right. that have the best ramen in Japan. You just never know. Not everything is in central Tokyo, really. No. Also, there's a bunch of like little alleys down there on the, on the left side. Okay. Go down there and look. You're like, it's surprising. Yeah. There's some really cool places down there.

00:36:23 John Daub: All right. That's where we're headed. Is, is that okay guys? Let's head, let's head, I'm going to head there next if you want to check it out. Do you live, live far from here? No, it's, it's, local, here. Don't go, stay away from the soap lands, people. which are all right over there. How, how far is Omiya Dome from here? Omiya Dome? Yeah. Isn't that the big Saitama Dome? There's a big, oh, Saitama Super Arena? Super Arena. Yeah. It's the next station. Saitama-Shintoshin. Oh, that's what that is. Okay. That's, they're going to have the basketball there for the Olympics? Yeah. The basketball will be played here. The golf too is in Kawagoe. Kawagoe, yeah. The golf will be there. And I think some of the soccer games we played at Saitama 2002 stadium. The Rugby World Cup is in Kumagaya. Yes. That's a strange place to put it, isn't it? Kumagaya is... I was like, why would you go there? I mean, seriously. There's no reason to go there. Unless you're like living way out far from Tokyo. Yeah. I mean, seriously, there's no reason to go down there. And like there it is, out in Kumagaya. There you go. I guess, you know, with rugby, you want to put some of the events... Rugby is really big in these old steel towns, tough towns. And Kumagaya is probably the toughest town outside of Tokyo. It's got that feeling to it, rugged Kumagaya. You know, there's not much there. Also very hot. Very hot, yes. Actually, that's the hottest place in Kanto, right? They always do the temperature readings from Kumagaya. And it's always three or four degrees hotter in Kumagaya than the rest of Tokyo. Last year, I had the hottest temperature ever recorded in Japan was there. Wow, yeah, Kumagaya. Yeah, last July. It just heats. You could break an egg and fry it on Kumagaya's sidewalks.

00:38:23 Kip: Down here... That's a shotengai (covered shopping arcade). Yeah. Where the Easy Stay is. Easy Stay. See it down there? Yeah. You can almost see the sign down there. And to the left. There's some restaurants down there, too. It's a pretty cool shotengai. Right. And then, like, you kind of go, like, there's, like, the Raccoon. There's a bunch of stuff there, like, you know. Yeah. Tom Quixote and stuff.

00:38:47 John Daub: Super sad gesture. Thank you. Sorry. No, it's okay. I got my arm in the way. But just here, let's keep going. I'll show you where the alley is. Okay. Because, like, it's... I just... I never noticed it myself. I go like, whoa, that's pretty cool. How did you know it was me? Dude, who else would be walking down there like that? What can I say? I look a little bit funny. I'm walking around with this gimbal. I'm talking to a phone. It's not the normal thing to do, but... Especially in Saitama. In Saitama. There's not any... There are no other YouTubers here. I don't think so. Okay, you see where it says West Side Street there? Oh, yeah. It's really narrow, but there's a bunch of stuff down there, too. Okay. Restaurants and stuff. It's interesting. If someone were to jump off to Shinkansen in Omiya, just so they have a chance to go and have a look around, probably the west side is better? Yeah, if you're looking for really nice places, the west side. The west side. But this is the east side, but this says west side. That doesn't make sense. Down there... But down here... Down there, there's a whole bunch of little places down there. Oh, yeah. Look at that. And one of them, they have like... Everything is like 500 yen, right? Yeah. Like pizza, drinks, and everything. Yeah. And it's just down there. Interesting.

00:40:02 John Daub: All right, let's take a quick look. I have unlimited bandwidth. It's no problem. And then I'm going to sneak back in to go back home. I've just literally taken like 30, 40 minutes off to take a look around the station because I haven't been here in forever. Where are you coming from? Do you know Yono? Yeah. I went to Yono to interview a Hiroshima survivor. Oh, really? Oh, wow. About the war, yeah. I just showed it because back home, if you're watching, you're like, what? There's a sumo wrestler cut out in front of the pachinko parlor. You are a restaurant for pachinko foot power. That's pretty funny. Yeah. I see there's a whole bunch of restaurants out here. Yeah. A ton of restaurants. So this is a... Hinoya is a curry rice chain. Very cool. Do you come down here sometimes? Once in a while. Yeah. I'm a pretty quiet person. Keep to yourself. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, yeah. It gets really crowded here in weekends and stuff. Well, this vending machine is not 100. It's 80 yen. Wow. Talk about... Yeah, that's cheap. So... You put in one coin, you get two in return. That's not too bad. Interesting. Oh, this place looks pretty cool. It's closed. Nothing's open yet. It's not quite, you know, people getting out work yet. Yeah. Yeah. In a couple of hours, this place will be roaring. Very cool. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny how you just, as you said, you kind of look to the side. Sometimes you find that you never realized it. I know. You can't stay on the main streets. You take a bus. You take, you hang a right or left, go down a small alley. Boom. You find this amazing street where they've got some pretty nice drinking establishments. Look at this. Looks like it's with the phone wires above it. Very cool. We'll have a look. We'll look back at the end of the street and see what we find. I bet you it looks a lot cooler from the end. This ramen place, Abura Soba, Yusoba. Looks pretty good too. It's massive. Oh man. Wow, there's a hanjuku tamago too. Look at that. Nice. Very nice.

00:42:36 John Daub: All right, let's take a look back. This is where we just walked. This is a very cool little alley with a ton of restaurants. If you do, this is on the east side of Omiya Station. It says West Side, the sign there. So that'll make it easy to find east side of Omiya Station. Sign says West Side just to make it more confusing and fun. Very cool. All right. So we're now on the east side of Omiya Station just to look around a little bit. It's actually gotten better. It's gotten better? It has actually. They've been building stuff and really kind of improving the place. You know, I worked here about 10 years ago on the west side at an English school. I just came here for a couple of days and it was pretty modern. They'd redone the station by then. It's always been Omiya Station has always been kind of like a modern, really, really nice station. But yeah, it looks even better. Now, a lot more shops, a lot of construction. They're building stuff on this side now. Well, like, oh, see this building right here? It's all new. Oh, this one here? This and that. Okay. The Kintokyos got these electric shakers, so they don't even have to. You know, you know that they have these electronic shakers inside of the Kintokyos thing, so they don't even have to use the chopsticks to turn it. It's pretty cool. Yeah. So this is all new. Yeah. Look at this. So they got some, they got a pretty good economy. Oh, this is all new. Yeah. This shotengai. I guess this is it better to walk down here or there? Maybe. I don't think I can ride my bike down there. Okay. But yeah, this is the Orange Road. The similar thing like that, like you saw down there. Yeah. It's just, yeah. Sort of the similar thing. There's more restaurants down there. Oh, this is what I'm talking about. The way that they do eggs in Japan. Honestly. There's no other country. That's an onsen tamago, but that's definitely hard to do. It's hard to do. Oh, that's the chain, the Udon chain. Marugame Udon. There's a Mambo Mangakisa up there. You see it? I have a video on that, the main channel. Right. It's like three floors though, this one. Yeah. That's a cheap, if you ever run out of money, you need a place to crash, I think it's a thousand yen to crash. I think I crashed there for the night. Two thousand yen for like six hours or something. Oh, okay. And not that it's, you know, but that's not too bad. That's not too bad at all. That's cheaper than a capsule hotel. Yes.

00:45:25 John Daub: We're now walking back to the east side of Omiya station right now. Now this is, all of these are new shops here, recently, the last four or five years. Is there anything? This place here is always aligned here. Always. What is it? It's a cha place. Oh, is this one of these? Oh, this is one of these. These tapioca places? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. The tapioca boom. The tapioca boom is real, folks. There was a story on the internet that the mafia was opening up shops because the profit margins were just so insane. It costs 50 yen to make one and you could sell them for 500 yen. So they're starting pop-up tapioca shops because they get cleared $25,000 a week. It makes you wonder. Yeah. How do I get my hands on some tapioca and make some royal milk tea, right? Right. Oh man, that's a, they got a racket going on, don't they? That's what you can call it there. The Yasai. Let's keep that to ourselves. The station there is a place called Pearl Lady. Okay. And there's always a line, they sell food there, there's always a line there too. Always. Ah. Like they'll say, like, the line, the end of the line is like way over here. And that's also for the tapioca. Is that a tapioca drink? Yeah, I think that's like just drinks. Oh, okay. But it's called Pearl Lady. Pearl Lady. Sounds like tapioca. I can't imagine what people will be waiting for. This katsu sando looks good. Oh man. That's hide katsu, ebi katsu, cheese, milfy katsu, and menchi katsu. There's the, the, all four of them are there. I did a Japanese sandwich episode. Introducing it. The katsu sando. The katsu sando is good. Very nice. And unfortunately, you go down here. Yeah. All the like, well, you can imagine what it is. Okay, hotel. Ah, that's the Love Hotel area back there. East side folks, for those of you who are looking for love and all the wrong places, you want to go to the east side. Yeah. It's like, that's pretty much it. Yeah. And that ramen place is just probably about 50 meters down that way on the left. Okay. Very good. Yeah. Well, Kip, this is cool. Thanks for, thanks for catching up with me. He's literally just riding. You saw me. Yep. Literally riding along and there he is. Do you have a YouTube channel or something that you want to? No. No. Okay. No. All right. Nothing to plug. No, but I have, I have been on TV. Really on TV. Really? I have really been on TV though. Oh really? Yeah. Okay. We'll go. Yeah. We can go around this way. So, yeah. So like, I'm not, I'm used to people watching me. It's a different, it's a different thing, you know, to be. Yeah. To be on broadcast YouTube, right? Yeah. What is this? To me it's similar because I've done it. Yeah. So there you go.

00:48:35 John Daub: This is the backside, the sign for Omiya Station from the east side. It's a little bit older. This side looks more retro, but that's cool. I like that. It has personality, I like to say. I like retro Showa era Tokyo. It's kind of nice. And in August they have a festival here. Okay. On this side of the station. On the east side. Okay. Yeah. So it's the first, second and third of August. And it's over here on this side of the station. All right. I might, I might be coming back to Saitama. I definitely want to get that train museum. So I'm going to have to make another trip back here. So got to keep in touch with Kip. This is Kip's town. Kip owns it. The mayor of, mayor of Omiya. That's why I have a crabby bicycle. Yeah. Oh yeah. You're riding a motorcycle. You're packing a mama cherry here. That's right. Very sweet ride. It'll never. That's true. No one ever, no one's ever going to steal that thing. That's right. That's why I do it. That's smart. My bike is, my bike would be stolen here. I just got a new one. Do not steal my bicycle. All right. So. Very cool. Thanks for the tour Kip. I appreciate it. No problem. Yeah. Keep in touch. You too. Have a nice day everybody. Yeah. You heard it from Kip everybody. See you later. That was awesome. That's nice when people, people come up and, and say hi and then take you on a tour. I learned a lot from Kip, you know? All right. So this is the east side of the station. We're going to go now in back into Omiya station and then we're going to say goodbye. And that's the end of our one hour. This has taken an hour. I can't believe that we've been an hour in this live stream. Wow. This looks good too. I'm getting hungry. I have to sort of, I'm supposed to save my appetite because Kanai is making dinner. She's making Thai curry. If I ruin my appetite, she gets, she can tell. She looks at my face. She knows I ate. So I might be able to get a cheese tart though. I think, I think that's doable, right? Yeah. Big thank you to Kip. That was really nice of him to make time for us and show us around his, his neighborhood.

00:50:53 John Daub: I've just gotten on the slowest, slowest escalator ever. Let's go the express lane. Stand on the left. Walk on the right. It's up there in Osaka. Stand on the right. All right. So we're back in Saitama. And check that out. I was going around here, but I found one of these digital vending machines. Do you see that right in front of you? That is a digital vending machine. So let's touch. Look at this Pucchi Coke. This is a new one. Oh, it's got a little, there's like a little vibration to the screen. This is fun. How fast can it go? It'd be pretty cool if you could match them. This one and then they hide and you have to find the match. Pyoong. You win. And then a bottle comes down. That's how it would be in John's world. If John set up the vending machines, that's what it would be like. You know those games? If you could find the matching pair and if not, you have to pay double. I think the vending machine makers would make double their money that way. Give one for free every now and then makes people want to play. For those that are joining us right now, just to show you, Omiya is right here. And to go back to Tokyo, you have to get on the train and go all the way back down here. It's about 35 minutes. It's about 20 minutes on the local train or 20 minutes on the Shinkansen. And you can see the Shinkansen line is right here. It goes pretty fast. It is after all the Shinkansen.

00:52:40 John Daub: All right. I wanted to get a cheese tart. Where did they go? Oh, it was inside the station. I was going to go in now through the North Gate. Did I come out of the North Gate last time? I'm so disoriented. Where was the cheese tart? Was it this way or the other way? What do you think? What do you think? All right. Let's go this way. I'll see if I can grab something to eat and then we'll say bye-bye on the train platform. So there you go. This is the inside of Omiya station that takes you between east and west exits. The west side is built up with new shopping malls. The east side is more subdued and retro. It's got Showa era bars and some nice alleyways. So it's good to get a little bit of local knowledge. If you do come to this area. Let me see. Yeah, I have my coke. All right, we're in. Let's see what we can find. Wow. This big, this is so big. This inside of the station here. Check it out. That's a really long corridor. There's restaurants left and right. Let's see what we can find. Wow. That's a nice looking bakery right there. That has melon cream inside that. Look at that. Ueshima. Wow. Getting hungry. I might go back. All right. I think I'm going to go back and get that. If I can't find the cheese tart, which I don't think I can. There's another bakery. Oh, I love bakeries in Japan. Oh man. Cholesterol level just spiked looking at this. All right. I'm going to go back and get that melon cream inside of melon pan because I can't find the cheese tarts. And I promised our friend we would get cheese tart. That's as close as we can get. Go back to gate numbers three and four for the cheese tart. That sounds complicated. Let's keep it simple and get what's in front of me before I get lost. I still have to go home. Kanai is waiting with Thai curry.

00:55:23 John Daub: All right. Let's get something from here. This shop looks good. Oh, they have peach cream or melon cream. Let's go with the melon. Ginza cream melon. That looks good too. The Aomori Ringo. Thank you. Oh, thank you. Yes. Melon with melon get. Very nice. All right. We can eat this inside the station. It's a melon pan but inside of it is melon cream. So it's a melon pan with melon cream. I've never had anything. No. I've had this before I think, but it looked really good in the window. Now watch as I walk around towards the gate I'm gonna find like a dozen other things that I'm gonna want to eat this is what happens I always get in trouble I'll walk I'll buy something and then five minutes later or like five seconds later I'll find something else this is a famous sandwich maker I featured them in the only in Japan sandwich video has kiwi in it kiwi strawberry and an orange. Wow buy one for Kanai I'm gonna buy Kanai something but I can't buy her that because she's making Thai curry so I'm gonna buy her something else okay I'll see if I can get her some omiyage omiyage means gifts all right this side is this side goes back to Tokyo oh this is the bentos let's check out let's see if Omiya has any special bentos this is the Takasaki dog bento it comes in a box that looks like the head of a Daruma and inside you have some delicious looking stuff there's some nice looking ikayaki and this is shishamo bento I guess it has a little fish in there I'm guessing that's chicken good looking bento they do have pictures down here that's $8 for that one this one is the oh this is the Omiya bento this one is from this area Omiya and it's got all of the it's got unagi potato chicken vegetables that's called the Omiya bento very interesting send I do this one is char grilled beef that one looks good too but I can't eat that because Kanai is cooking dinner eyes on the prize I don't want to get in trouble what's that over there check it out this is like everything with a bit of a difference between the two so I'm gonna melon just gonna take a quick look here look at the colors oh man that looks great melon no on bronze is that Shizuoka melon this is a Shizuoka melon wow that looks so good that's about 20 25 dollars for these cakes here seven dollars for a slice i'm just gonna say pass oh and they got peach over here they have peaches just peach season just started that's a lot of melon all right there we go this goes back to Shinjuku the Saikyo line um i kind of want to go back to Tokyo station so oh the Tohoku Keihin line Keihin-Tohoku line is where i'm so disoriented all right i want to show you this so stay tuned for a minute i'm going to show you this bread but i'm here and then it shows here the platform numbers i guess Keihin-Tohoku line is platform one and two it's like i went to i went completely in the wrong direction that happens all right back we go through the corridor oh 210. this smells so good do you see this this is like karaage do you see this ah this looks anyway wow check this out oh so it is god i eat this guy this one wow like can i i'm not ruining my my appetite i better pass i better pass that was so good escape escape thank you ladies for the free sample run away i i i'm running away because i want i want to buy like 200 grams of that but i know it's not it's gonna totally root Kanai's gonna be angry because she's cooking something tori ten tori means chicken ten means like tempura 210. that was so good very juicy oh man i want to go back now i got i'm gonna have that taste in my mouth for the next 30 minutes going back to tokyo dreaming that i had bought bought it oh should i turn around and get some no i better just go home eyes on the ball that's interesting so the Narita Express will go to Omiya i didn't know i need the express goes to Omiya oh there it is i found the entrance so the Tohoku Keihin line Keihin-Tohoku line sorry i always mix it up it's here it's all the way in the back so it's easy to miss that that's good to good to come here to practice kane tohoku line goes towards yokohama so going here i am going to eat my before we leave i'm going to show you this i got a melon pan for with melon cream inside and i'm only going to take eat half of it before the train leaves all right let's do this real quick i'm going to buy something in tokyo for kanai this looks really good it's got green color just like a metal that's really good oh that's good all right i'm going to say kanai half she's not going to want to eat half of this all right getting on this train here all right everybody thanks for thanks for joining me on this Omiya Station joy i hope it was educational and you enjoyed it see you next time the next live stream maybe tomorrow but hit this hit the like button and subscribe and i'll see you next time