00:00:01 John Daub: This is a site that makes us feel so happy. This site makes us feel so happy after a long trip away from Japan. We are now in Haneda Airport. There's Kanae. And we're going to eat a bowl of ramen and talk a little bit about our trips. Hey everybody.

00:00:22 John Daub: So right now we're gimbal-less, but it's very tight in a ramen shop. You're not supposed to talk so much. What do you have? What are you eating? This is a normal soy sauce flavored ramen. Yeah, just a normal soy sauce flavored ramen with egg. Aww yeah. It's that egg that I just truly love. Look at that. A half-boiled egg. Yeah. And this is mine. It's a very simple chicken salt ramen. It's also got egg in there and underneath there. But the reason I got this is because I'm not that hungry actually. I just want a little bit of soul food before we go back home.

00:01:00 John Daub: So let's try this out here before we go. How do we do this? Geez, what could I—why don't you go first? Let's see how your ramen is. Oh, you always go for the egg, huh? Oh, you go for the soup first. All right, let's see. It's good. That's tonkotsu, right? I'll show you ramen. They also had a tonkotsu ramen here and they have a chicken ramen. Look at the smile—welcome back to Japan. It's nice.

00:01:53 John Daub: All right, so I always go for the egg first because that's what I do. Look at this hanjuku tamago (half-boiled egg). Uh, it's got that nice color to it. Big piece of chashu with noodles after that. I also go for the noodles. I don't know why I never go for the soup first. Yeah, there's chicken. This is a salty chicken ramen—umami. And it's, you know, ramen is kind of like a soul food for Japan. It's like if you're having a bad day, you go and eat a bowl of ramen. If you're having a good day, you go eat a bowl of ramen. Any day, you just go and eat a bowl of ramen.

00:02:57 John Daub: Now, one thing to point out—if you do get the red spicy ramen, make sure you don't slurp and get it all over your shirt. Don't wear a white shirt—probably the best thing to do. Yeah, this is nice. So Kanae's was about ten dollars, 1,200 yen, and mine was 980 yen. Yeah, that's pretty good. Ah yeah, these are kind of thicker noodles. Well, you know, these are normal noodles. They're not wavy. The ones in the north, in Fukushima, there's a place called—um—and that's very famous for wavy noodles. And wavy noodles catch the broth, they say, so you get more of the soup. And these are just normal straight noodles, but it's still pretty good.

00:04:25 Kanae Daub: Two what? Another two? You got more eggs than me. And you got menma (bamboo shoots). I didn't get any menma.

00:04:44 John Daub: Okay, so he's eating ramen. How is it, ramen? Good. All right. So I'm gonna go and eat ramen.

00:05:14 John Daub: Okay, all right. Yeah, we're probably gonna get nailed for the background music. Sort of can't be helped. But we wanted to share a little bit of the ramen experience at the airport. Now this place is open 24 hours a day. A lot of the restaurants here are. So if you're laid over, like a layover in Haneda, you can come here and have a bowl of ramen. There's a couple of other restaurants that seem to be open later, but this one is one of the few that's 24 hours, which is a good thing to know. It's in the international departures. It's not in Terminal 1 or 2—it's international departures. Right, yeah. So if you have some time, you're late, you have your layovers in Terminal 1 or Terminal 2, you've got to come over to international departures. I don't think that there's any 24-hour stuff open in the other terminals. And it's upstairs. Uh, there's also a new donburi restaurant. And I know they have a restaurant for just about everything. There's yakiniku (grilled meat). There's even Chinese cuisine, which we ate too much of in Beijing. And then there's a couple of sushi shops which are really good.

00:06:25 John Daub: Hey everybody, welcome back. Uh, behind me is the ramen shop right there. Kanae is gonna eat a little bit more slowly than me. I slurped mine up. I was out of noodles and everything else. Mine was a little bit smaller. So the thing is, we had just a window in order to live stream this because we're not going to be able to film or live stream in a restaurant or do any filming when you're in a tight place. And the people next to us, both on both sides of the tables, had just left. So we had like a corner of the restaurant to ourselves. So always be really mindful if you ever do film or take pictures of the people around you—even if it's on a train from Haneda going to Haneda Airport, like we did last time. Just try your best to be really mindful and polite with the people around you.

00:07:11 John Daub: Now this is the shop that we're in, and I'm going to take you a little bit around this part of the airport at night. And you get an idea of what it's like here if you are stranded at Haneda Airport. Yes, it's nice to be back in Japan. You see, there's our suitcases here. Check this out—you can leave your suitcases at the door. Nobody is going to take them. And there's places inside there, and there's a lot of places that you can leave your luggage. You see? All right, we were—there's Kanae right there through the window. We were away for four days, and she didn't have internet access. And I just wanted to give her some time to also catch up on her mail. But we were both dying for a bowl of ramen.

00:08:13 John Daub: Here's right here what's on offer at this restaurant because they got a lot of foreign tourists that come through here. What they do is they do displays like this so then you get a better idea of what your ramen is going to be like. And then you can get a better idea of what your ramen will look like. I think that's really a good idea for this shop. This is what I had—it's a chicken salt ramen. It's only 980 yen, which is about nine dollars. You get one half-boiled egg, but it's smaller and cheaper and it's lighter—probably the lightest of them all. This is just a normal ramen. This is the cheapest of them all—I didn't see that on the menu. Uh, this is the one that I got. Check out the toppings on that—three pieces of chashu (braised pork) and two hanjuku tamago (half-boiled eggs), some negi (green onions) on top, some menma (bamboo shoots) on the left side—you see that? And then there's some seaweed on the top. So it's a beautiful ramen presentation.

00:09:04 John Daub: This is tonkotsu ramen (pork bone broth ramen), which is a thick pork bone ramen—very famous in Kyushu down in the south and Fukuoka region. There's a little bit of spiciness to it—you see that in the center? Some spicy miso, I believe that is. And a thick cut of chashu steak—it's really nice. And this is—I almost got this one, but I remembered that I'm not hungry and it would have gone to waste. Check out all that tonkotsu, all that chashu steak on there. And that tonkotsu ramen—very spicy, very delicious. I think that's one that a lot of people—and it seems to be like escaping the bowl, you see that? But it's nice that they put the displays out like this. You can also get gyoza (dumplings) and other stuff. And they also have tsukemen (dipping noodles), which I also highly recommend. It's one of my favorites.

00:09:59 John Daub: Yeah, it's really nice. It's really nice to be home. We had a fantastic three and a half days in Beijing, China. I always say Beijing, China because in Japan, Japanese, we don't say Beijing—we say Pekin (Peking). Pekin—good. Yeah, and that's not what we say in English. That's not what the Chinese say either—they say Beijing. I wonder why in Japan they still keep saying Pekin. I don't know. Pekin duck, Pekin duck.

00:10:32 John Daub: This one is the ticket system. Do you see over there in the center of your screen, behind the man there? You put in the money into the machine and then you just grab it, which is good because you can just leave the restaurant really quickly. So that makes it quite convenient.

00:10:58 John Daub: Yeah, so let's take a look at the other restaurants and while we're walking around here, we'll talk a little bit about our trip. Oh, that looks really good too.

00:11:17 Passerby: What can I eat there? Oh really?

00:11:17 John Daub: Oh yeah, I'm just live streaming right now. Yeah, this is the GO. You want to say hi to everybody?

00:11:36 Passerby: Yeah.

00:11:40 John Daub: You were there a couple years ago. We got to go back. Are you getting a bowl of ramen or—no?

00:11:48 Passerby: No, we actually going to climb Fuji on the 14th. So yeah, we need to be there with our friends. We came in with a different flight.

00:11:59 John Daub: Okay. Yeah. Good, good. It's gonna be a hard climb. Are you ready? It's freezing at the top. Sometimes there's still snow there, so you need a jacket for sure and hiking boots. So you're going somewhere from there?

00:12:21 Passerby: Yeah, we're going home. We were in China for four days.

00:12:21 John Daub: Oh yeah, we just came back. And the thing we had to do was go get a bowl of ramen after eating Chinese food for four days. We're like, we need ramen.

00:12:38 Passerby: Yeah, sure. Please take a picture.

00:13:12 John Daub: Selfie time.

00:13:26 John Daub: This is Chinese restaurant and yakiniku restaurant.

00:13:38 Passerby: Thank you.

00:13:49 John Daub: You can click the like button and subscribe. The best, the best, the best. Wanna love the food. She's the best guy. Thank you. I'm sure they really love these guys here. Thank you. Alright, see you around.

00:14:02 Passerby: Yeah, see you around. Have a good trip. Good luck climbing Mount Fuji.

00:14:05 John Daub: Thanks. Have a good trip. You too. Uh oh, I better take my bag. Bye bye. That was nice.

00:14:17 John Daub: Can I check this out? That's what I was saying—look at this. A yakiniku champion roll. Have you ever seen this before? Is this Japanese? I don't know. It says it's Japanese. It's like kimchi in there. It's like a Korean-Japanese combination with kimchi yakiniku, a little bit of lettuce, sesame wrap. That looks too good. Oh man, yeah, we'll be back. Yakiniku in general comes from Korea, right? It's sort of like a Korean—I can do it. They do have—if you're looking for your last wagyu steak, they have it here. Check it out. If you're looking for a wagyu steak, boom—it's at Yakiniku Champion. That's what this place is called, Yakiniku Champion. Um, I don't know—this one doesn't look like it's gonna be open 24 hours. But I do know that the ramen places—and if you're thinking—apparently the yakiniku restaurant is quite famous because the people who walk by just said, well, there's a Yakiniku Champion here. Some of the ramen places are already closed, like this one is done for the night. Looks like they've covered up the displays. I think yeah, maybe only the ramen shop.

00:15:38 John Daub: Yeah, so at least if you're flying in the middle of the night, at least you have one choice—ramen. And that's not a bad thing. If you're looking for vegetarian ramen, they don't have any in there. If you're looking for halal ramen, it's all meat-based, so you're kind of out of luck there.

00:16:02 John Daub: I like this little area. This is maybe our fourth live stream here because we've been traveling so much. When you do these kind of Only in Japan Go's, you have to work with where you are. And this is where we are. Oh yeah, this is closed. A lot of them are. Oh, this is the shabu-shabu (hot pot). Oh man, at least this is good to know that we have this as an option. Yeah, it's shabu-shabu and sukiyaki (beef hot pot). So you can get your fix on Japanese food one last time at Haneda Airport. And that's pretty cool.

00:16:39 John Daub: The other one we wanted to check—Kanae wanted to get—actually, you didn't want ramen. You wanted udon, right? She actually wanted udon, not ramen. This tonkatsu (pork cutlet) restaurant—it looks like it just closed. So I'm guessing the closing time is like around 9 for most of these places. And Kanae's udon restaurant that she likes is here. It's closed. I knew it. And it looks like it just closed too. It just closed because there are some customers in there. So this closes at 10—10 or 11. 11 o'clock it closes. So that's pretty late. That's kind of good. This udon shop is very famous. Look at the vegetables in there. It's really healthy. You can find this shop at Roppongi and Yurakucho.

00:17:49 John Daub: I didn't cover anything in Beijing because with the VPN, the signal was not strong enough where we were. And the other reason was that I learned that you can use VPN in China, but unless it's an authorized VPN, you are illegally using a VPN and you can be stopped for that. So I just wanted to be extra careful. And I just didn't—I filmed a lot and I might put something online, but I just wanted to be careful.

00:18:27 John Daub: You want to see Nihonbashi? All right, let's see it at night. I can't, but we did it two weeks ago. It's kind of different in the middle of the night. And we also got to get our last train back too. It's 11:18. So this is almost a midnight snack. Let's go up. Bye bye restaurants. Hello Nihonbashi.

00:19:01 John Daub: There is no authorized VPN in China? All are illegal? That's not what I was told by people in Beijing. A lot of people had them. I don't—to be honest with you, I really don't know. This is coming from Daniel M. Leong. I really don't know if there's a legal one or not. I'm just telling people what I was told by people in Beijing.

00:19:22 John Daub: Here's the international departure terminal at Haneda Airport. It's really pretty, especially with this little green tea cafe that they have on the corner of the escalators here.

00:19:45 John Daub: I've never had to sleep at Haneda or Narita for that matter. I've never been laid over here. This looks like a really nice place to crash. Look—there's like beds almost. These red bed places to sit. This is a recreation of Nihonbashi, which is famous in a lot of woodblock prints. Again, just some more people crashed. This is the perfect place to sleep too. This is a recreation of Nihonbashi, made of wood. And actually, Kanae and I, we checked in there four days ago. You remember Kanae? We checked in there four days ago. That's Air China's departure. And I think it was before we went to the United States, we asked everybody to take a selfie. I had about 50 viewers sent me this selfie picture, the screenshot on Instagram. Yeah, 50 people—about 50 people sent it. So that was pretty cool.

00:21:17 John Daub: Hey, Diana of Markem writes in, where's the capsule hotel in Haneda Airport? Good question. I'm guessing that's not here, right in this terminal. But let's go and ask. It's a good question. I will go and ask.

00:21:47 John Daub: We're going to go back to the elevator. We just wanted to come up here and check this out. Beautiful what they've done with Haneda Airport. Narita, I think, is going to get a renovation sometime soon. I think because they do have to compete. Airports, when you have multiple airports in the city, it is a competition. And JAL and ANA both leave from both Narita and Haneda. But Narita is turning more into like an international hub for the other airlines. And I think it's a little bit cheaper to depart from because the size of this airport isn't as big.

00:23:06 John Daub: Alright, so let's go find out where this capsule hotel is. And then we're going to take the Asakusa Line, not the monorail, to go back to the city. I think it's at the other terminal. Hey, Danny! Danny says, welcome back, Kanae. We're going to have waffles for breakfast. Guess what we're having on top of that, Danny? Canadian maple syrup. Alright, we're going to ask that information for Diana's question about capsule hotels. It's a good one. This is what Haneda Airport looks like at 11:30 at night. Oh, this is at Haneda. Good catch, Kanae. Teamwork. There is a post office post box in the center of your screen. So if you have any postcards you want to send, they're in the international departures, right there by the escalator.

00:24:17 Kanae Daub: [Asking staff in English] Is there a capsule hotel in the airport?

00:25:03 Staff: Capsule hotel is in the domestic Terminal 1. This is international terminal. So you need to move to domestic. It's halfway. I don't think so. Yeah, like 5,000 about...

00:25:54 John Daub: Alright, so it's about 5,000 to 6,000 yen, which is about $50 for capsule hotel. That's pretty pricey. I don't know, Kanae. That was kind of expensive. The gachapon (capsule toys), I don't know where... I believe it's when you arrive downstairs on the first floor. The gachapon is probably on the first floor, but we're going to take you down to the Asakusa Line, and then we're going to end it. Thank you, Diana.

00:27:10 John Daub: It's in Terminal 1, the capsule hotel. $50. It's kind of pricey. I think it's better if you make it into the city. If you just want to try a capsule hotel, maybe that's neat, but I think it's the First Cabin. I bet you this is a more stylish capsule hotel, but I got to tell you, I don't know. I think maybe it's fun to try. They're not for families. Capsule hotels are typically places to crash, but if it's like First Cabin, it's more of a touristy thing, I think. It's basically just a room. This is the arrivals hall. This is where we came in. So that's what it looks like when you arrive. It's like more of an orange color. All trains are below, except for the monorail. There's some other stranded people. Hey, everybody—bowls of ramen. Get bowls of ramen, stranded people, upstairs. One guy's sleeping in the fetal position. I don't blame him. There's a Lawson's in here with Kit Kats—Tokyo Banana Kit Kats.

00:28:01 John Daub: Where's the cat? If it's on the top floor, it's on the second floor. Oh, it's on the second floor. Well, if you make a mistake, you're never going to forget it. Why don't we go down? In Narita, you would go down. This is the bus area. This is where you catch the bus down here. And apparently, you can sleep on the bus. There's a car park waiting on some of these benches. This one's going to the other terminal. But the Keikyu Line is right here. The Keikyu Line turns into the Asakusa subway line. The Asakusa subway line will take you between Narita and Haneda. We prefer that because it turns into the Asakusa Line. It takes you straight to Asakusa and Ginza for that matter.

00:29:46 John Daub: All right, let's welcome back. This is the arrivals. The Rugby World Cup—there's a lot of people here. The Rugby World Cup, you can see behind us, will be here in a month. I think it starts in September. And the signs for one year to go for the Tokyo Olympics are already up all over the city.

00:30:21 John Daub: When is the last train?

00:30:27 Kanae Daub: Okay.

00:30:32 John Daub: So we actually don't need tickets. You're still on Beijing time. If not, we gotta... Okay. No, no, it's okay. Go ahead. Uh oh. We are now on the run. This is one of those moments where we're fighting to catch the last train. Can we just take the escalator? All right. The gimbal died. Oh man. Kind of the last train. Is that it, Kanae? I think this is one of the last trains. Are you sure? Sanju yonpun wa (3:34)? Ah. Yonju yipun (40 minutes). Okay. Yeah, we better take this one. But that's not the Asakusa Line. It doesn't continue as the Asakusa Line. It stops in Shinagawa. This one goes towards Yokohama, so we can't get on this one. This one goes the other way. We don't have eleven minutes. We have to take Shinagawa. And then if we have to, we can take a taxi from there. Yeah, it happens.

00:33:19 John Daub: So now we got about six minutes, so we can tell you about Beijing. How was China? Your first time?

00:33:26 Kanae Daub: I like it. The food, very, very nice. I like dumplings a lot.

00:33:34 John Daub: Yeah, we had a dumpling party. Chinese people are very friendly. I thought so too. I don't know why we're surprised at this. Maybe because the tourists that come to Japan are a little bit hard to handle. They're kind of outgoing. But in Beijing, people were very—and it might just be Beijing, I don't know, but people were very polite, very friendly. I don't know, maybe because there's lots of security cameras all over the place. Beijing is 30 years behind Tokyo? I don't think so. Beijing has 20 subway lines. The highways are as clean as Tokyo's. All brand new cars on the highways. I was in Beijing 20 years ago and you can't even compare Beijing then to now. It's like a totally—Beijing is more modern than the United States. And that's strange for me to say, just because everything is new. The infrastructure is all new. They tore it down for the 2008 Olympics. And they've still been building it up. It's a different city than I remember it. And almost all of the transportation is battery powered. It's all electrical. So they're starting to—almost all, all the buses, the bicycles have batteries in them. Even the cars, most of them are hybrids. The guy that we drove to the event was driving a Tesla. And Tesla is one of the biggest—China is one of the biggest markets for Teslas. So, I don't know. China just has a lot of money right now. It seems like they're doing very well. And that's why people are probably really friendly. I don't know. But we had an awesome time in Beijing.

00:35:21 Kanae Daub: I like the palace too.

00:35:22 John Daub: The palace too. We went there this morning. We couldn't go to the Forbidden City because on Monday you can't get tickets, I think. But we went into the park with beautiful views. All this is on Instagram. You can see our today's video. We're going to walk through Beijing on Instagram, which was just an amazing experience for us. It was her first time in mainland China. She'd been to Hong Kong, right?

00:35:51 Kanae Daub: Yes.

00:35:52 John Daub: I want to go back?

00:35:54 Kanae Daub: Yeah. I want to go to other places. Xi'an. Chengdu.

00:36:06 John Daub: China's pretty cool. But one thing that really made me sad—and click the like button. Midnight snack runs—this counts as a midnight snack run, okay? We ate, and it's almost midnight. All right, so click the like button if you like midnight snack runs. So the thing with China—they used to have these night trains where you could just sip tea and just go really slowly and look out the window. People in Beijing told me that the night train culture is just about done. They don't have them—they all have just high-speed trains like shinkansen. And that made me kind of sad because I love just eating instant noodles or Chinese food from each station, drinking tea—chrysanthemum or jasmine tea—watching China go by. And it seems like that culture has ended. That was 20 years ago though—2000, 2001, 1999. I was riding the trains for a month through China a couple of times, and it was just an amazing experience. And China's just changed. Beijing used to be all bicycles, and now it's all cars—very less bicycles. So I don't know—just for me, every time I go back to mainland China, it's a culture shock. Not because of the culture of Chinese culture—just by how fast China has been moving.

00:37:22 John Daub: Yeah, good. Um, you can actually bring your carts all the way to the train. This is another thing—pick up your carts when you pick up your luggage, and you can cart them all the way to the train. The elevator that we went into is huge. These three elevators at the end are enough to fit in like 10 carts—so I made that number up, by the way. Yeah, are you tired? Jet lag? Yeah, I think me too. I think I put on about five kilograms just from America—eating a lot of food in America—and then we just ate. Whenever we ate in China, we feasted. It was like a feast.

00:38:15 Kanae Daub: How many dumplings did you eat last night?

00:38:17 John Daub: No, I can't count it. Yeah, I ate at least 12 dumplings, and I could be off by two or three because we had five different kinds of dumplings. And I want to see what's inside, and then I forgot which dumpling was which one, so I had to try them again. So I ate at least 12. It's crazy. So I might have a third chin, but we'll do something about it. It's summer. All right, um, we gotta catch up with the live stream, so we'll do some more on the main channel. We have a really interesting ramen episode coming up in a few days—so that's some good news for the main channel. And actually, I have four, five episodes already done that will be going up in August and the beginning of September. I've been wanting to get them out like a lot of them really fast, just to see how the channel changes as a result of it. And another new channel, I believe, will be up in September, but I want to have the opening done for that.

00:39:18 John Daub: Here's a train. Thanks everybody for waiting with us. If you do like midnight snack runs, once again, please click the like button because that tells me that you're interested in that content. And that's all from us. We're back home, and it feels good to be back in Japan. That means just more Only in Japan because, you know, we're back. So have a good day, have a good night wherever you are in the world. We'll see you not at an airport for a while. Bye everybody. Is that Disney? I think they're playing a Disney tune.