00:00:02 John Daub: Ah, what a beautiful view of the Sea of Japan. This is Sado Island in Niigata. It's a beautiful island. About an hour by jet foil from the mainland from Niigata Prefecture. This is the Aikawa town, and I'm here. This is the Only in Japan Go channel, what you subscribe for. Live streams from all over Japan. That there on my shoulder is Jaya from Tokyo Llama. You ready for this? And we're about to take you to some abandoned houses that go from the sea here up until the hills. We're going to be walking with you for about an hour, so you want to buckle in, get some popcorn, get something from the refrigerator, and enjoy this live stream. The signal seems to be strong, which is important even out here. We have a very good 4G signal. Yes, we're live. And you're going to want to make sure that you subscribe. We'll get a drink on the way. I'm going to show you everything that you need to know about Aikawa. And Jaya is going to fill in the rest with all his information on abandoned houses.

00:01:48 John Daub: That was a lot worse than I thought it was going to be. Thankfully, there's some steps here inside the building that we're going to be taking you first. Ruth, who you saw last summer on Sado Island, as well as in an Enoshima SPA episode in 2018, is going to join us and give us a little bit of an introduction into this area of the town. You can see up there, there are some roads. This is an old town. It's a gold town. Right. I'm not so sure too much about the history, but this is a gold town. They had a gold rush, just like in the United States. The rush is over. It's very quiet, and that means there's a lot of abandoned houses. We're going to be introducing you more tomorrow than today. What's called the Akiya Bank. Akiya means abandoned house. And a bank is just a database. It's not actually a bank, is it?

00:02:05 Ruth: All the houses.

00:02:06 John Daub: It's a listing of.

00:02:08 Ruth: Help you out with finding and information about how to buy or rent, I think.

00:02:13 John Daub: Right.

00:02:13 Ruth: A bit more tomorrow, I guess.

00:02:15 John Daub: Yeah, yeah. We're kind of waiting. Tomorrow night, we're also going to be having dinner with people from the Akiya Bank here and talking more in depth. And I think they want to try to get these houses filled with people. The population has been sort of going down. That's not a good thing for any town. And it's even right now. It's so quiet. Right. There's a couple of cars. Here's Jaya's got a map right here. Let's take a look here. We've just walked a little bit from the sea. We were right around here, right somewhere around here. And this is an old map of the area. So this part of Sado Island, which looks like a butterfly if you look at it from Google Map—I put a link in the description—we're on the west side of the island and we're going to be walking I guess up this way towards an old abandoned prison. And on the way there's a bunch of akiya inside that brown new-looking building. In the center of your screen is where we're going to meet Ruth.

00:03:42 John Daub: On the right though, just a quick note: that's the only convenience store on this side of the island. It's a Lawson's and they've toned down the sign. They've made it black instead of blue, so it sort of fits in with the neighborhood a little bit. I think a lot of you've heard about this, like Seven Eleven convenience stores—they can't have really bright colors. They want to fit into the neighborhood and it's a condition of them being here. And Lawson has done that. Sado Island is also famous for this bird called the toki which went extinct and was brought back and is now starting to repopulate the island. So maybe if we're lucky, we'll get a chance to see one. It'll come land on my shoulder or in Jaya's head, right. So you've never been to Sado Island?

00:04:09 Jaya: Interesting. Like a mysterious hidden island somewhere.

00:04:15 John Daub: It is pretty mysterious. When you get off of the ferry, it's like you've come to a different world. And I was talking with Ruth before—it's like. And she asked me this question. It's like when you came to Sado, how do you feel? How did it make you feel? I guess it makes me a little feel free from all the stuff that I left on the mainland. When I come here, I don't really think about work. Right. I don't know. Are you thinking about renovating your house?

00:04:42 Jaya: No, I'm trying to give my shoulders a rest. I've been standing.

00:04:45 John Daub: I'm tired. Good. This is a nice little vacation then. Instead of building houses, Jaya is going to get a chance to just look at them, examine them. This is the Sado Gold and Silver Mine Guidance Facility. It's a long—welcome.

00:05:07 Ruth: Good morning.

00:05:08 John Daub: Good morning. Ohayo gozaimasu. Yeah.

00:05:12 Ruth: How you doing?

00:05:13 John Daub: Good. So this is Aikawa.

00:05:15 Ruth: This is Aikawa, yes. And this is the new building. It's called Shining Kirari. Kirari means shine. So Shining Place.

00:05:27 John Daub: Shining Place.

00:05:28 Ruth: And it probably has something to do with the gold mines, because they have the huge, biggest, most wonderful gold mine that funded the whole Edo period in Aikawa. So Tokugawa got all his money from here. That's basically the easy way to say it.

00:05:44 John Daub: From Sado.

00:05:44 Ruth: From Sado. From this gold. So up here in the back would be where the gold mine is.

00:05:49 John Daub: Oh, up there in the mountains.

00:05:51 Ruth: And right now we're going to actually leave Kirari Umu, which I have to practice a million times to say correctly. We're probably right around here right now, or maybe here.

00:06:01 John Daub: Yeah.

00:06:01 Ruth: And we're going to walk through the little town and see one of the ryokans that needs help, which is an Akiya. And then we're going to go and walk up this street and go all the way to this place called Kamicho.

00:06:14 John Daub: Kamimachi.

00:06:15 Ruth: Kamimachi.

00:06:16 Jaya: And.

00:06:16 Ruth: Yeah, so. And then there's some Akiyas along the way, so we'll be able to check those out.

00:06:20 John Daub: Well, this map looks not like the present day, right? This is a—

00:06:23 Ruth: No, no. I didn't see this guy this morning. Did you, Jaya?

00:06:25 John Daub: I don't remember this guy. No, that guy.

00:06:27 Ruth: I didn't see him.

00:06:28 John Daub: The bald guy in kimono. I didn't see him.

00:06:30 Ruth: I haven't seen many of these people. No, but that's kind of like the problem with Sado right now is that you see all these people walking around. And when you go and walk around today, you won't see as many people.

00:06:40 John Daub: All right, it's completely different than the gold rush era. Of course. That's Sado Island, right here you can see it's shaped like a human lung, or more beautifully, a butterfly.

00:06:49 Ruth: A butterfly. And so we are in the Aikawa area right here. Sorry, it's all in Japanese, but. So when we arrived, we came to Ryotsu.

00:06:59 John Daub: Right. The ferry from Niigata City arrives here, and we took a taxi all the way to the other side, which took about 50 minutes. We cut across the mountains, which is beautiful.

00:07:08 Ruth: Yeah.

00:07:08 John Daub: No cell phone signal, so. Yeah, couldn't do any Discord or Instagramming there.

00:07:13 Ruth: And then the Manotsuru sake, which is very famous, is right from around here. So that's one of the sake breweries that's famous here.

00:07:22 John Daub: Right. And the Earth Celebration is held down here.

00:07:24 Ruth: Ogi. Yes. So this was traditionally where all the big ships would dock.

00:07:30 John Daub: Oh, there.

00:07:31 Ruth: Yeah. Here. So this is like a fishing village down here. And that's where they had a whole bunch of interaction in terms of culture and things like that.

00:07:39 John Daub: Right. And that's where Robert De Niro's sake place is. Over here.

00:07:42 Ruth: Exactly. So this is where Robert De Niro is getting drunk whenever he actually—sorry, Mr. De Niro, we saw your photos in the in the sake place. Nice people in there.

00:08:01 Ruth: Yeah.

00:08:01 John Daub: Everyone's friendly here because maybe there's not a lot of people where the—We're special. We're special.

00:08:08 Ruth: That I've noticed about this place is you can tell that they're really putting a lot of effort into making it welcoming. So having this little, nice, beautiful tourist destination sort of visitor center spot, yeah, is very helpful. And that takes a lot of money to build a place like this.

00:08:23 John Daub: It is very nice. I was—I was gonna remark I would not expect in a place that has a—I guess you would say a shrinking population would have something so nice. But if you want to attract people to come back here, you're going to have to have some nice places.

00:08:36 Ruth: And this is not—I mean, I travel all over Japan.

00:08:40 John Daub: Yeah.

00:08:40 Ruth: And I love the fact that pretty much everywhere we go in Aikawa today you're going to see there's English. Everything for the signage, which is—that's totally ahead of other places.

00:08:51 John Daub: It is too. And they have facilities for the disabled, multi-purpose toilets and all sorts of things that I didn't expect out here. I mean, blue trees and—

00:08:59 Ruth: Yeah, blue trees.

00:09:00 John Daub: That's not blue trees. They wrapped them up for the winter. I know. You can't trick me. All right, I'm gullible, but I'm not that gullible. We showed the only convenience store earlier, the Lawsons, which had a very subdued sign. They made it in with black colors. It's very interesting to fit in with the neighborhood. And this is, I think, one of the only places open for lunch. I think actually this is the ramen place. Jaya was looking for the ramen.

00:09:25 Ruth: Oh, okay. Well, here it is.

00:09:27 John Daub: Look at the big smile Jay has. Finally we got a smile out of him when you get ramen.

00:09:32 Ruth: And the interesting thing about Aikawa—

00:09:34 John Daub: Yeah.

00:09:35 Ruth: Was that it was the city—well, not city, but the little town. So they had 120,000 people here before that was their population. Now it's down to 40,000. So this little island is built for 120,000 people. That's why they need more people to come, because now it's less than half of what it was at the peak.

00:09:55 John Daub: Yeah.

00:09:55 Ruth: And this little town, Aikawa, was the gold mine town. So it's all very organized. And they had everything here. They had brothels, places—I mean, everything was in this little organized town. So it still is very compact and clear. So it's a fun place to come because you can pretty much walk around everywhere.

00:10:18 Jaya: That's true.

00:10:18 John Daub: We did pass what they called a snack club—

00:10:21 Ruth: Yeah.

00:10:21 John Daub: Snack bar. Manhole. Wait a second. Manhole. We got a manhole cover right here. This is a significant manhole cover. Are you down on your knees, Ruth? You're down on your knees. Not even—I get that crazy for manholes.

00:10:35 Ruth: You have to have the—the view from above because this is the divided mountain. So this is where the gold mine is.

00:10:44 John Daub: Oh, so that—that space between the mountains represents the gold mine?

00:10:48 Ruth: Gold mount gold mine.

00:10:49 John Daub: Aikawa is down here with the flower.

00:10:52 Ruth: Yes.

00:10:53 John Daub: Oh, nice. So there's—wait a second. So in this building, do they have the manhole cover cards? If you ask, maybe—

00:10:59 Ruth: I don't know.

00:11:00 John Daub: I'm gonna go now. I'm gonna come back and ask. Because I got a manhole cover card collection. That's right. I do. I'm a manhole collector.

00:11:08 Ruth: Like this tiny little sign they have in English in random Aikawa is such a nice thing. I'm just so impressed.

00:11:14 John Daub: Oh, the English underneath it. That is a big deal.

00:11:16 Ruth: And it looks new. And somebody really thought this through. And I'm—I'm very impressed with how they're trying to do the infrastructure correctly.

00:11:23 John Daub: So to go to Kyomachi, which is our destination—no, it's Jomachi.

00:11:28 Ruth: Right, right. So first we're going to go to Shitamachi.

00:11:30 John Daub: Yeah, which is downtown.

00:11:31 Ruth: Downtown. And then we're going to go Jomachi from there.

00:11:34 John Daub: That's right. Which is uptown.

00:11:35 Ruth: Yeah. So let's go look at the ryokan. Okay. It's this way.

00:11:39 John Daub: Oh, this way.

00:11:42 Ruth: Obviously, it's an old building.

00:11:44 John Daub: Yeah, it is. I love the signage here. And now that we get away from—from the—the coast a little bit, where things might be a little bit newer, we walk back here and it's like we're going back into time a bit.

00:11:57 Ruth: So this wouldn't have been a fisherman town, right, Jaya?

00:12:00 Jaya: Okay.

00:12:01 Ruth: This would be a place where the gold mine workers and the traders and everybody lived. So it would have a little bit of a different feel than a fisherman's town, like where fishing is the main thing here.

00:12:16 John Daub: Brothels were the main thing. No, sorry. Gold was the main thing here.

00:12:19 Ruth: Gold was the main thing. So it's a little bit different on the docks, right, because you would have different docks for fishing boats as opposed to trade boats. Right?

00:12:28 John Daub: Yeah. I just saw here—just Meo writes in "Gloomy Day." But actually, actually it's not that bad. This island is very famous because we're out in the middle of the Sea of Japan. It's—it's very famous in the winter being super windy and cold. And today is a blessing because it is actually really warm compared to other days.

00:12:49 Ruth: Look at this. I can take my hat off and I'm not freezing yet.

00:12:51 John Daub: Really?

00:12:52 Ruth: One, two, three. Oh, I got cold again.

00:12:54 John Daub: Yeah. One, two, three. Okay. I can't do it. I can't do it. This is an Akiya ryokan.

00:13:02 Ruth: Yeah. This is the one that would fit like about 30 or 40 people. And we're going to see inside tomorrow.

00:13:06 John Daub: Yeah, sorry—we lost the super zoom from the—the YouTube app took away our super zoom ability. So I have to walk backwards, but. Okay, come over here and tell me from the—from behind the mics here.

00:13:20 Ruth: This is a very typical story of one of these Akiyas, right, Jaya? Is that the own—there's an owner who loves this place. It's probably been passed around through generations in his family, so he decided he was going to try to fix it up on his own. So you'll see that the door looks pretty new inside. He's sort of set up like a—like a bar area, kind of nice. But, you know, once you start to do it, you realize how much work it is, how expensive it is. And the guy's like 75 years old, so he can't do it on his own. There's not enough young people on the island to help him do it. So that's why they come to people like us. Like, would you be interested in making this into a guest house or whatever?

00:13:59 John Daub: You know, is there anything that you see in—in this structure, Jaya, that you can—seems interesting to you? Besides that the vines growing through it looks like ivy, right, or something. It's got some vines on it.

00:14:10 Jaya: Yeah. I mean, you've got the wood paneling. You could tidy that up. It looked quite nice, I think, give it a bit of a paint. So they're looking for someone to come in and take this over and get it up and running.

00:14:22 Ruth: Yeah, yeah.

00:14:22 John Daub: You up for the challenge? You got your own challenge. He has his own challenge. He's not here to—Oh. Although in the future, maybe Jaya will be back to renovate. Sure.

00:14:37 Ruth: Like, this kind of thing bothers me. Right. Because you can tell that that's, you know, it's been left by itself for a while. So this tells me you would need to get an architect in here to really look at the foundation and the structure before you decided whether you could do it or not. Is that correct?

00:14:56 Jaya: Yeah, you might not—yeah, architect would be good. But if you could get down yourself and just have a, you know, a look through the foundations and so on and get an idea, I think that would probably be enough to start with to know whether you wanted to continue.

00:15:13 John Daub: Yeah. That—around the edges, when you look at—look around the back, you can see it—it needs a little bit of work, doesn't it?

00:15:20 Ruth: Well, I mean, it gives me an idea of how long this has been left on its own, because when people are telling you about akiyas, sometimes they can't even remember when the last time this was operating was or when people were living here. So you kind of have to guess by looking at it to see if someone has come in every week to sort of check if there's, you know, little intruders getting into the building or not.

00:15:44 John Daub: You mean like rats?

00:15:45 Ruth: Yeah, and, you know, things like that. So you—I always try to look at how often does it seem that someone has been coming here to take a look at it, because that will give you a good hint on how the whole structure is.

00:15:58 John Daub: Be pretty creepy if we saw some old lady just walk out into the window right now and the light hits her face. Then she looks down at us.

00:16:08 Ruth: Run away.

00:16:08 John Daub: Run away. Jaya, what are you doing? Get out of my way. All right, we better keep it down. We're a very loud group here. Well, these aren't all abandoned, are they? What about this house next across the way? That looks abandoned as well. There's nothing—the—the paper—the shoji door there, it—looks like it's falling apart, and even the mailbox slot is busted open. And if we—we put the lens in—right, you can kind of see inside there. Yeah, it's hard to see in there, but that—I saw an old tire, so that could be abandoned as well. Hey, David. Kimono—good for you and your guest. Thank you, David. Ramen later. Ramen later. I think that might be possible. Yeah. So we're in Aikawa for everybody who's watching us—this is on Sado Island. Welcome. Give us a thumbs up. And because we're going to be making our way up a hill gradually and on the way, Ruth is going to be showing us some abandoned houses. And Jaya is going to give us some input in what makes these houses different than the one that he's renovating on his channel. You give some input? As much as he can. Chef Prav—planning our first trip to Japan next December for three weeks. Only 316 days to go. He's counting those days down. And Shortcut—I have my drink. This is for your drink later. Thank you, Shortcut. Much love. Thank you. This is interesting building here.

00:17:42 Ruth: Are—Are jewels?

00:17:44 John Daub: Tell us—observe.

00:17:46 Jaya: I really like the wood paneling right up to the roof. And look at the—the windows there, the wood covering there. It's really nice.

00:17:53 John Daub: It is. Do you think because it's so windy, maybe this kind of a paneling knocks the wind down so the—the windows don't shake up on the second floor?

00:18:00 Ruth: That's so true.

00:18:02 John Daub: Really? You don't know that?

00:18:04 Ruth: No, but that's why you wouldn't have to put the tapes and things on the windows because if you have that wood in front, it would protect your window.

00:18:10 John Daub: I was—I just made that up.

00:18:11 Ruth: It's much prettier that way too.

00:18:13 John Daub: Yeah. Wow.

00:18:14 Jaya: Nice little shop space. Workshop space down below.

00:18:17 John Daub: Yeah. I have a very vivid imagination. Sometimes that imagination comes true.

00:18:22 Ruth: So here's one that's been redone.

00:18:26 John Daub: Oh, so this was an AKI as well. So Ruth isn't sure if this is an akiya, but you can see it's just—it's an old house that has been redone. And the paneling in it—is that real wood? That's real wood, but it's—it looks like—So Jaya's going to get a closer inspection of it and we'll get some feedback from it. But this—

00:18:47 Ruth: I get the impression that this must have been an older house that they fixed up. Maybe it wasn't enough yet. It does look like an old house that they've fixed.

00:18:55 John Daub: Yeah.

00:18:55 Ruth: There's all the rust on the garage door.

00:18:59 Jaya: Look up on that one. There's some really nice unpainted paneling up there.

00:19:04 John Daub: Oh, yeah, look at that. You can see that this is start—someone's putting some work into there. The new wood on there is an indicator. This does look from the front of the house, it looks really, really pretty. You wouldn't expect this. About five years ago, this town was in decay and it's nice to see some people have come in, taken some of these akiya and have fixed up the houses. And tomorrow we're going to be exploring, explaining in more depth what you need to do if you want are interested in coming here to get an akiya yourself. If you—if this is something you're interested in, you're going to want to subscribe and join us. Tomorrow around the same time, Ruth is going to introduce us to some people who are going to show us some of the akiya. What do you think of this place?

00:19:48 Jaya: Paneling up there? Exciting. The natural wood looks really nice.

00:19:52 John Daub: Yeah. What's different? What would you—what did you have? I guess you had like a mini roof, a copper roof up around that area on the siding. We've got a little bit of this around our genkan. But most of the wood siding—well, most of the siding is like a galvanized metal with a bit of insulation on the inside, which is mostly in Ibaraki they use that. And this is considered a little bit more expensive, really. And apparently doesn't last as long as—but it looks really nice. I want to get some of my place.

00:20:23 John Daub: It does look nice. I know that insulation is a big problem in Japanese homes. They just don't have any. So it's very famous—it's well known. Let's just say in Japanese homes you're hot in the summer and you're cold in the winter. And that's why the spring and the fall is just such a wonderful time. Okay, so Ruth, tell us—hearing the mic.

00:20:49 Ruth: Now it's not the poster that's a politician.

00:20:51 John Daub: Yeah. This is the birth home of a famous poet or a haiku artist named Yamada Hanasaku. I don't know how to read that. There's probably some other way of reading that. His first name or her first name.

00:21:03 Ruth: So his—he was born in 1876. So if this is the place he was born, that means that this structure, at least this thing has been here that long.

00:21:50 John Daub: Wow. So interesting. 1876.

00:21:53 Ruth: That's a long time ago.

00:21:54 John Daub: Yeah. That's a hundred and fifty years almost.

00:21:57 Ruth: Yeah.

00:21:59 John Daub: There's a little bonsai tree, a leafless bonsai tree. Do you see that? That's nice. You'll see when you walk—I've always encourage people and look, there's some—there's some car seats just sitting there. I always encourage people when you come to Japan to visit, spend one day just walking around and getting lost and immerse yourself into the neighborhoods. You see a lot of the culture. Just observing and seeing how the layout of all the places are. You might meet friendly neighborhood people who will also guide you to local restaurants and things like this. This has happened to me over and over during my own travels. A lot of you probably know that I like to hitchhike. So I started in the—in the south of Kagoshima in the south of Japan and went all the way up to the north and strangers had picked me up. Several of them asking me to stay at their house en route. And I got a very local experience. That's what I love about the Japanese countryside. People are just really, really friendly.

00:23:01 Ruth: What do you got here, everybody? Something—so I've been to Sado—this is my fifth time. I have never seen this street ahead of us. And the lady at the tourist center didn't even put this on our little walking—what? But this is so—even Japanese people don't know how cool their places are because now we get to walk through that. The Aikawa Tendo Dori.

00:23:19 John Daub: Yeah, this looks like a little shopping street on the left and the right.

00:23:23 Ruth: So cute.

00:23:25 John Daub: The businesses don't seem open, but that's maybe expected in the summer. What's—What's it like here in the summer, Ruth?

00:23:32 Ruth: It's pretty live because people come here to surf. They come here all different kind of water sports. It's very hot, though. It's not like this is a cool area.

00:23:42 John Daub: I mean, cool as in—

00:23:43 Ruth: I mean, it's cool cool, but it's not—

00:23:46 John Daub: It's not hipster cool.

00:23:48 Ruth: It's hipster cool, but it's not cool weather.

00:23:51 John Daub: Oh, okay.

00:23:52 Ruth: Yeah. So—no, but summer is really fun.

00:23:55 John Daub: Oh, that's a creepy, creepy song. I hate that song. That song creeps me out. The Hina Matsuri song. How could that song be for little girls? Huh? Hina Matsuri is a festival for little girls. It's a creepy, creepy song. Whoa, look at that.

00:24:21 John Daub: Whoa. This is ancient gachapon. It's so old. There's nothing left. It's sold out. Must have been really popular.

00:24:26 Ruth: Oh, my gosh. 200 yen.

00:24:30 John Daub: You should put some money in and see what you get.

00:24:33 Ruth: Okay.

00:24:33 John Daub: No, no, don't do it. You're going to get air. You're going to get an air capsule.

00:24:37 Ruth: I wonder how much they cost now. Does anybody know? Because 200 yen seems a little expensive.

00:24:42 John Daub: I know you can get 200 yen ones. It just depends what they were. This was a one piece collection, series one. That's like from the beginning, but these would probably be 100 yen more. Inflation isn't very—it's not very high. These look pretty creepy too. Wow, look at these signs, these windows. Look at the cobwebs in here.

00:25:06 John Daub: Whoa. Jaya, I'll give you five bucks if you go in there like Indiana Jones. Just go in there, come out with spiders all over your back. Do it. Five bucks. It's pretty crazy in there. So it looks like someone's in there, actually. All right. Jaya, don't do that. Someone's in there. Your bail money will cost more than $5. Yeah, sure, let's go into Kodama. This is definitely copyrighted music, income music. Copyrighted income music. All right, gonna fight through that. It's funny, though, that they play—it's funny that they play music here on the shopping street. All right, we're going to take you inside of this little shop here. I think we're okay to go in here. This is the Kodama liquor and foods. I don't think I have my "find me" find me—you found me cards, but I don't think anyone's going to find me out here. What do you think? Do you think anyone's going to find me? I don't know. This is sort of a ghost town. There's nobody around here. All right, let's go in. Wow. And the hoshi imo is all sold out. They do have some confections. Here's some mochi pan. Maple flavored mochi pan. That's interesting. I like these. Yamazaki maron, Danish chestnut Danish. Wow, this is all made here in Sado. These are homemade soba chips made from soba. Maybe we'll get a pack of that. I think that's a good idea. I'll see if I can get some—get some coinage out here. Yeah, I'll get a bag of this. The soba chips. So, yeah, just take a look at some of the items in the Japanese convenient Japanese supermarket here. Here's a sandwich. Now, it's not— I don't think they're all as fresh out here. Usually the things in the supermarket out here have long shelf lives.

00:27:54 Ruth: What is that?

00:27:54 John Daub: Peanuts. Peanuts, honey. I've never seen anything like this. Jaya, did you see this? Honey peanuts that—looks like Ibaraki and Chiba are very famous for their peanuts. A dollar fifty for that? Yeah, it's a dollar fifty for that. Ah, there's not a lot of people in here, but they do have snacks. I—you know, we're staying at a hotel called Osado. O—Osado, I believe it's what it's called. And up there on the hill and it's about a—it's about a 20 minute walk to get down here, but there's nothing around the hotel. Oh, these are awesome. There's—the almonds are on top of crackers and they're embedded in cheese. Oh, man, I love that. I love that. Let's see what else they got here. A lot of stuff that I don't see in Tokyo stores. There's a bento area. It's pretty nice. Any local—local specialties? No, not so much. This is yakitori. These are hearts. Yakitori chicken hearts. I'm going to get one of these. Taser cookies. What? Why me? Oh, yeah, I just eat his cheeks off and then I lick the rest to death.

00:29:36 Ruth: And then I got you some water.

00:29:37 John Daub: Okay.

00:29:37 Ruth: And we actually have to go out that way and turn left.

00:29:40 John Daub: Oh, okay.

00:29:40 Ruth: A little bit the wrong way.

00:29:41 John Daub: All right, and there's some local fish here. That's—that's nice to see. So is this local fish? Yeah, yeah. Very good. Local eggs, my favorite. Yeah, hijiki is nice.

00:29:56 Ruth: So healthy. Yeah, I got you water already.

00:29:56 John Daub: Thank you, Shortcut. All right, let's get—oh, cup noodles. See, again, things that have a really long shelf life you'll find inside of here. And of course, there's some booze back here. They got some sake.

00:30:12 John Daub: They got some sake back here. Sado Island is very famous for—oh, I gotta buy—I gotta pay for this. All right, take this from right now because it's going to confuse them. Let's pay for this, Gucc—Are we coming out the front? Okay, so follow Ruth. It's kind of nice to be in a supermarket.

00:31:04 Ruth: And they're playing "Like a Bridge Over Trouble Waters."

00:31:06 John Daub: Like a Bridge Over Troubled Waters. Soy milk. They do not have to—they do. Oh, yeah. I was looking for this. That's a big one. Toki milk.

00:31:19 Ruth: That is so cute.

00:31:19 John Daub: How do they milk those little birds? What are you laughing at?

00:31:22 Ruth: I hope it doesn't hurt.

00:31:24 John Daub: Geez. How do they get all those—a little milk out of the little birdies? Did you see the toki milk? Gosh, it's—these are called King Khan. And I really love these. You can eat these with the skin on. You eat it as is. You know that you can't—

00:31:42 Ruth: Oh, yeah. They used to grow in the back of my house so we could eat them.

00:31:42 John Daub: I used to try to peel them, and then I was like, this is not a lot of fruit in there. And then some old lady came—you shouldn't really peel the fruits. Just eat it like this. And she took one of mine and she popped it in her mouth. And I was like, oh. And then we sat there popping King Khan. She ate half of them, and I had to buy more.

00:32:02 Ruth: So now it's kind of the adventure because I made a mistake. And we came into the wrong—But we're supposed to turn left, supposedly.

00:32:09 John Daub: Okay, so we see some more—akia, right.

00:32:11 Ruth: Yeah. Up on the hill. We're heading up towards that direction. Do you see those buildings at the top of the hill right there?

00:32:17 John Daub: I do that. Oh, we're going up there.

00:32:19 Ruth: We're kind of going around there.

00:32:20 John Daub: We got a hike up there. There looks like a cool building up there.

00:32:23 Ruth: Yeah. Water for you.

00:32:25 John Daub: All right, so this is some soba. And Jaya got karin. Karin. Karin. Right. Try some of these. They're recommended by the—by the supermarket owner. These people are pretty friendly.

00:32:50 Jaya: Oh, yeah, they are hot.

00:32:51 John Daub: Yeah. Karinto is hard. Whoa.

00:32:57 Jaya: Nice.

00:32:58 John Daub: All right, let's switch—just cut into a hard—yeah, have some cutting, though.

00:33:14 Ruth: Cutting—break your tooth, man.

00:33:21 John Daub: I know. Whoa. This would be good with—without water. Oh, my word.

00:33:31 Jaya: Yeah.

00:33:38 John Daub: Really hard. Karinto. And this is soba—like a fried soba with some sort of sweet. All right, we're going to need some snacks just in case we get stranded up on the hill. All right. Are you dancing? I saw that. Very little gets beyond past me. All right, we're going—we're going straight up the mountain now. There's a nice little shopping street, so they have a supermarket, a bar, a few other things there. So this would be—this would be the hub of life. That would be where you would get your supermarket. That's the only supermarket in town, isn't it? Yeah, I think so. There's the Lawson's, which is open 24 hours, I believe. Look at this. Kissaten. An old cafe, like lost in time, the 1950s. And it's got such a nice little antique feel to it. Look at the—you see the pancake in the middle there? Stack of butter on there. Very nice. Very quiet here. Oh, this is—this has been renovated here. It wasn't like this a couple years ago. Yeah. This was an abandoned house that has been turned into something beautiful like an open space, I guess, for events. That makes sense too, because it's on—it's kind of on an intersection. This road wraps around and all the cars have to go by this. So this would be a great place to have an exhibition or something. So that's what they've done. They've sort of made an exhibition hall in here. What do you think, Jaya? Anything interesting besides the crunching of these karinto? There's an udon and soba restaurant right there. How cool is that? It's open. Check it out. Did you see anything? I didn't see anything.

00:36:10 Ruth: What do you want to do?

00:36:10 John Daub: Which one has the most abandoned houses? We want to show houses.

00:36:13 Ruth: We have to get up to the top to get to the abandoned houses anyway.

00:36:16 John Daub: So what's the fastest way to get up to there? And we won't lose a signal. That look—that looks like death of 4G signal zone. Experience says that if we go this way, it will be the end of the stream.

00:36:42 Ruth: And then we turn left. That's where we want to go. Coming—

00:36:46 John Daub: Okay. Go up this way.

00:36:46 Jaya: Go past.

00:36:49 Ruth: Okay.

00:36:50 John Daub: It's not—It's good that they have maps here. Wait, we're just at the beginning of this map. Oh my word. Okay. All right. That's good because—Yeah, I'm getting hungry for real food. I like that you're karinto, but hey, that doesn't do it for me. You can't stop eating it. You can break a tooth.

00:37:12 Jaya: I'm not going to be able to have room for my—my ramen like that.

00:37:16 John Daub: Oh, okay. Oh, thank you. This is water from the local area. Deep sea water. Is it salty?

00:37:22 Ruth: No. I guess they—how do they do that? They must take the salt out.

00:37:28 John Daub: Really? All right. So we're now deep into Aikawa. I don't know. I'd say about almost a kilometer away from the sea. Now we're in—we're in—desalination they call it. That's interesting. Look at the berries on the side of this building. Can you eat those, Jaya? I'll give you five dollars if you eat it. Five bucks if you eat it. You'll do for ten. Oh, really? I'll do it for—Do it for eight.

00:38:18 Ruth: Don't eat it, John.

00:38:18 John Daub: Who's going to stop me? You and what army, Jimmy Pran? Thank you, Jimmy. Jimmy writes in for a local snack. Could it be a berry? Can we eat it as a berry? Those—those blueberries, plastic gutters. And what about the roof here? Are these different than the ones that you're working with?

00:38:52 Jaya: Same material,

00:38:54 John Daub: but they're all—all interlocked, right?

00:38:56 Jaya: Yeah, all of my—mine are interlocked as well. But these don't have the handles to walk on.

00:38:57 John Daub: So wait, if one of these breaks, you have to remove them all. To fix the broken one, you have to remove a few around it?

00:39:04 Ruth: It seems to me that somebody is trying to maintain this building because they put in new—new shingles. Is that correct? Like, if they didn't care about this building, they wouldn't work on fixing these.

00:39:17 John Daub: That's true.

00:39:23 Jaya: Stay in pretty good condition for a long time.

00:39:26 Ruth: Okay.

00:39:26 Jaya: And you look at the gutters, though, they're in a pretty poor state.

00:39:30 John Daub: I don't want to think about gutters.

00:39:32 Ruth: Why?

00:39:32 John Daub: You've been working on gutters too much. They do have a copious amount of maps.

00:39:40 Ruth: Yep.

00:39:43 John Daub: That means you are here.

00:39:50 Ruth: All right.

00:39:50 John Daub: We lost—Is that what you—is that that sound? Sounded like we're lost. Yeah. For those joining us, we're in Niigata Prefecture, Sado Island, which is an island out in the Sea of Japan. It's a one hour jet foil ride to get here. The island is shaped like a butterfly, stings like a bee, and—and we're on the west side of the island. It's a very remote area. We're now walking through a cemetery to get to abandoned houses. So thanks for joining us. Definitely give us a thumbs up and if we can get to 500, I will hit a vending machine or anything that we find along the way. So give us some love. It's up to you, community. And I have a feeling that there must be vending machines around here. Jaya has a channel called Tokyo Llama, and he's renovating an old Akiya house in Ibaraki Prefecture. And he's come along to join me on this adventure and look at some abandoned houses in another area of Japan. Wow. Oh, yeah, we can—so we've walked quite a ways, haven't we? It's 40 minutes ago. We started this live stream. We started way back at the edge of the seaside over there. But so quiet in this part of town. Did you find something? Okay, so it's this way. All right. Follow Ruth. She knows—she knows where we're going, so we have to go down to go back up again. Okay.

00:41:37 Ruth: All right.

00:41:37 John Daub: Get worried. Was this an abandoned house?

00:41:43 Ruth: I think someone has probably lived there and they've taken very good care of it.

00:41:46 John Daub: Yeah, it is really beautiful. Not all the houses you can tell, the ones that have been cared for. This one looks really beautiful. The white part of it underneath the roof looks in really good shape like this—to keep and maintain the old look of it, but keep it—keep it in good shape and livable. We walked by some houses that on the way here from the hotel that were just spectacular. They—they—this is not—this is definitely in like akia mode. It could use some help. Look at the side of it here on the corner. Jaya, you think you could help these people? Are they beyond hope? Look at that. What is inside there? Is that like a metal pot? What—I dare you to put your hand in there and grab—grab something.

00:42:43 Jaya: Bamboo right inside.

00:42:43 John Daub: There's going to be something creepy in there. That's scary. I scared you a little bit. I scared—I scared some people. The grudges inside another manhole cover. This is an—Did you say elementary kindergarten? Yochien. So there are kindergartners. But I wonder how many kids are actually in attendance there. Today's a Sunday, so nobody. But—

00:43:27 Jaya: I've noticed that the wood paneling on these houses goes right up to the roof.

00:43:28 John Daub: Is that different?

00:43:28 Jaya: I don't know. It's different to Ibaraki, but I don't know if it's different to other parts of Japan.

00:43:36 John Daub: They probably have a different architecture, different way of building it because of the high winds. We are so fortunate today that there's no wind at all. I could get some pretty cool drone shots, one of which is on Instagram if you want to go over—Only in Japan TV. I just posted a drone shot of this neighborhood from a distance, I think it was a kilometer away. And I took a picture from about 150 meters up. This building definitely looks like no one's living in there. This is so Akiya. Like there's not even a front door. Ruth—look, it's just like blocked. This is Indiana Jones stuff. How do you get in the front door? You gotta kick it open. Like there's the steps to go up. How do you—it just boarded up and then it's been webbed in by—by nature. It's crazy.

00:44:33 Ruth: This is the kind of house that they have 8 million of these all over Japan.

00:44:33 John Daub: Like this?

00:44:33 Ruth: Not like this, but all in different stages. So that's the Akiya problem. Right.

00:44:37 John Daub: What stage is that? Stage 4—hopeless stage. Hopeless stage. Stage rot stage. Stage no door.

00:44:48 Ruth: Yes. Sorry. But we're going to have to probably smash this one, right?

00:44:52 John Daub: This one looks like it's going to have to come down. So if somebody were to buy this and it was an akia, they would have to pay for the demolition themselves.

00:44:59 Ruth: Right.

00:45:00 John Daub: It's got some bamboo growing up there too.

00:45:03 Ruth: You could probably demolish—

00:45:04 John Daub: Super interesting.

00:45:05 Ruth: But then you would have to figure out all the land—the rules about the land, like how much of a house you could build on it, how much it would cost to build on it. So there's all these restrictions for building that you would have to look at.

00:45:19 Jaya: Well, that was actually one thing when we bought our house—one thing when we bought our house. If we had to knock it down, if it was beyond rehabilitation, we might not necessarily have been able to build as big a house or because the road—it was something to do with because it was ex farmland.

00:45:43 John Daub: Ah, so some restrictions.

00:45:43 John Daub: There comes a delivery truck. Looks like—that is not Uber Eats. Is that Uber Eats? No, that was not—they don't got Uber Eats here. It's like two restaurants, silly. Well, he probably gets like two customers a day, the Uber Eats guy. Oh, this is an Akiya.

00:46:23 Ruth: I would rank this as a level three. So if level four is hopeless—yeah, level three. This would be for somebody who just loves trying.

00:46:29 John Daub: Come on back here with me, Jay. What do you think—is this—would you be able to do something with this?

00:46:47 Jaya: Yeah, it would be quite a lot of work. I mean, look at the roof. The roof would need to be retiled, I'd say. Look at the ridgeline. Look at the state of the onigawara, those end pieces on the ridge. See the—it's got plastic gutters.

00:46:57 John Daub: Yeah. It's not in—but it's not hopeless. It looks like that structure is there. We don't know how sound it is until you really get in there and then you can take a closer look at it.

00:46:57 Jaya: Look at the foundations.

00:46:57 John Daub: Yeah, it looks like someone has been put some berries on on the—is that a TV antenna? Obviously they don't have cable out here, do they? You never know. That's true. Do they even have Internet? I wonder do you have any Wi-Fi signals? Are you getting any of the neighbor's Wi-Fi signals? Can you—just—I'm just kind of curious if anybody has it. The roof on this looks brand new, though. Look at it. And if you step it—this is kind of just—there's some Wi-Fi's here, some three Wi-Fi's. So people do have Internet here. So, like, this is my feet here. And if I keep walking, it's kind of weird. You're on top of their roof. So this is the end of the road. You don't want to go walking on the roof. Yeah, look, that's the roof right there, Ruth. And the roof looks really nice. Look—has it been—why is it all shiny like that? Is there something to it, Jaya? I don't know.

00:47:59 Ruth: It's just lacquered.

00:47:59 John Daub: It's lacquered. Yeah.

00:48:04 Ruth: So it's really interesting because basically little towns like this—that's what's fun about them is that they're a hodgepodge, you know. So somebody had to build this road and they built it really close to the roof of the house that was already there.

00:48:17 John Daub: They did. It's weird. The house is down there in the valley. I know—the gutter. I don't know if I want to live there. I'm afraid of a car would drive onto my roof. Why you laughing? That's not funny.

00:48:31 Ruth: Maybe you could park there.

00:48:31 John Daub: It could be your park—on my roof. This car's probably on somebody's roof. It's a nice looking roof here. Again, we're going up towards elevation towards the prison eventually. And Ruth is going to introduce us to some more abandoned houses. Are there some more up here? Some roadside—roadside Buddhas here. Why are the Buddhas here on the roadside? Do you know the little ones here? Oh, this is the gold mine road.

00:49:13 Ruth: Yeah. So this is like a totally lucky road—lucky, lucky, lucky road. So they would put, you know, jizo everywhere to protect, you know.

00:49:23 John Daub: It's called a jizo. Yeah. There's a lucky—rosie, I got gold—lucky road kind of thing, right. I got some gold. Eureka.

00:49:30 Ruth: Okay.

00:49:30 John Daub: And another thing is called the Eureka Road.

00:49:32 Ruth: This would be like major security along this road.

00:49:36 John Daub: Like cops.

00:49:37 Ruth: If you stole even the tiniest little bit of gold, you were in major trouble. So they were checking because that was Tokugawa's gold and it had to make it all the way to Edo.

00:49:48 John Daub: The shogun's gold.

00:49:48 Ruth: Yep. So look, you can see the entrance to that.

00:49:50 John Daub: Oh, wow. So that's where they got into this to the—Yeah. So Tokugawa, who was the last shogun of—of Japan, he—his gold, all of his wealth came from Sado Island. Well, gold wealth anyways. Wealth is, you know, property, land.

00:50:09 Ruth: Well, it funded the whole building of Tokyo.

00:50:09 John Daub: This island was built on—on Sado's gold.

00:50:13 Ruth: Really? Yes.

00:50:14 John Daub: And that's why that mountain no longer exists. Right. It's chopped in half to fund Tokugawa and his insane building projects made of wood which when lightning struck was completely obliterated. Lightning could take care of Japan—Japanese homes, towns were famous for fires. One fire could wipe out an entire—kind of lightning strike could wipe out a castle, you know.

00:50:44 Ruth: Yep. So we're going this way.

00:50:44 John Daub: Oh, this way. Okay.

00:50:50 Ruth: Basically funded Tokugawa's building of Edo, which is now Tokyo. And I don't know if John is going to have time sometime, but they have the—the gold mines, the ancient gold mines and the more recent gold mines because they were in operation by Mitsubishi until like the '70s, maybe.

00:51:09 John Daub: Right.

00:51:10 Ruth: They have totally reinvented the gold mines with all these life—life-size like dolls, robots inside that are doing the work. See, you can see exactly how it used to work.

00:51:22 John Daub: Like the Abashiri prison. You can see the—and I had Peter, one of the narrators, give them life and put voices to them. A very controversial thing to do. But they have the same thing at the gold mine where it looks like you get to see what they were doing inside of the place. I like that. Peter, if you're watching, we can animate those.

00:51:37 Ruth: And the thing I liked most about it was that it's so well explained. Just like every—all the streets here have the English signage in those gold mines—it's explained, explained so well how it all worked. And it was meticulously organized. So it's like you see how Japanese sort of organizational strength started.

00:51:56 John Daub: Yeah. Of course. When gold is involved, organization happens because—or you lose it all.

00:52:05 Ruth: Or you all get buried.

00:52:07 John Daub: Buried alive and bold. Gold finger. Hey, it's copyright—it's copyrighted material. You sing it differently—the different tune. "Go Finger." He's a man. I can't do it like—it's going to do awful. Everyone's like turning off now. You get the point. Is this an Aki? This is not abandoned house. But we would call this maybe this Eureka Road—is a lot of abandoned houses along here.

00:52:56 Ruth: Has anyone ever explained the concept of the danchi to everybody? Danchi—that building right there that you see, that would be referred to as a danchi.

00:52:56 John Daub: Okay.

00:52:56 Ruth: Danchi was famous in Japan because it was sort of like, I guess, not low income housing, but housing for people that were working in the mine or working—so they're small apartments. And the big thing about this was—are you guys ready?

00:53:13 John Daub: Do it.

00:53:14 Ruth: It was the first time most Japanese homes got a bathtub in their apartment—in the danchi.

00:53:18 John Daub: In the danchi.

00:53:19 Ruth: And they were government built. And so it was a really big deal to have your own furo in your house. Everybody else, everybody had gone to sento before then. So the fact that there's a danchi left in Sado tells you that the gold mines were in operation until relatively recently. So that would have been where people stayed who worked at the—

00:53:40 John Daub: I can tell you one thing. The prison was in operation from 1954 to 1972.

00:53:45 Ruth: Okay, there you go.

00:53:46 John Daub: I—I googled it.

00:53:49 Ruth: You got it going on, John.

00:53:52 John Daub: This is a local neighborhood. This is why we don't bring Ruth anywhere with us. Just kidding—Just kidding. We love—

00:53:58 Ruth: Maybe they thought it was a toki bird.

00:54:00 John Daub: No, no, that's Ruth. They all know it's Ruth just by the pitch. Down there they're going, ah, it's Ruth. It's a Ruth bird.

00:54:08 Ruth: No, that's a—

00:54:08 John Daub: To flying up there.

00:54:11 Ruth: Can I talk about the bamboo?

00:54:12 John Daub: Okay, talk about the bamboo. Okay. You can do it with a normal voice.

00:54:16 Ruth: Sado is the most northern part of Japan where bamboo grows. So Sado bamboo is known as the strongest bamboo in Japan. And they use it in building. They use it in bamboo art. And here's some bamboo.

00:54:28 John Daub: Yeah. And you can see it's on an angle because of the wind as well. So the wind—yeah, because we're on an island and it's, as Ruth says, the northernmost point where bamboo does grow. So Tohoku doesn't grow—Oh, wow, I didn't know. So Hokkaido and Tohoku in the north, you don't have any bamboo.

00:54:47 Ruth: Maybe you could grow it if you planted it, but it doesn't grow naturally.

00:54:50 John Daub: Doesn't grow naturally, she said. Because I'm not sure—cut with the coffee asterisks, but somebody—yeah, I've heard that as well. This is the northernmost place where bamboo does grow. It's an island. So you have a kind of a more temperate climate in the summer, I guess. And because of the high winds here, the bamboo are strong. So in construction, the bamboo here were—was very prized because it was stronger—just to—I don't know how much stronger. Maybe 15, 20 percent stronger than the bamboo on the mainland and was more useful, more prized for construction. And here's some bamboo right here. And I'm tempted to cut one down and take it back to Tokyo and build something from it. Jaya, you need some bamboo for your house. Can't hear me. Better catch up. All right, we're getting to the top of the hill here, for those that are just watching, right now we're in Sado Island in—in Niigata Prefecture, an hour from the mainland by jet foil. And Ruth here has invited us to look at Akiya. We're getting up to an ocean view and Jaya here is still eating his karinto. Do you have all your teeth?

00:56:06 Ruth: Are you, like, sucking it first to make it soft or are you just chewing it right away?

00:56:06 John Daub: Wow, that's a good way. You suck it.

00:56:08 Ruth: Yeah, I was thinking of sucking it next time.

00:56:10 John Daub: It's good. Just suck it. Just suck it. The Internet said do not sing or they're going to unsubscribe. No, no, seriously, they're not wrong either. I could sing—just be selective. I know how you think, Internet. Jaya, do you ever sing when you're working?

00:56:34 Jaya: I'm a terrible singer.

00:56:36 John Daub: So you don't.

00:56:38 Ruth: I always like to sing.

00:56:39 John Daub: Really?

00:56:40 Ruth: I love to go a wandering, a rucksack on my back, and as I go I love to sing, a rucksack on my back and then the best—rack.

00:56:56 John Daub: Our viewers are dropping. Stop it. Our viewers are dropping. Whether we just lost like 20 people.

00:57:02 Ruth: No.

00:57:03 John Daub: All right. Beautiful view from here. We started right down there. Do you see on the banks? I jumped and almost fell and hurt leg. And Jaya was laughing internally.

00:57:24 Jaya: Yeah, this is a nice plot of land. Look at this house.

00:57:26 Ruth: They've got their garden, grapevines—

00:57:29 Jaya: Grapevines knocking down.

00:57:29 John Daub: That is a nice house. So that—that looks like it's—it's in pretty good shape. And whatever they're doing, they're building a garden here in the middle of it, looks like.

00:57:53 Ruth: And Sado hasn't had a very good history of getting along with Niigata and the rest of Japan. So they've always tried to be self-sustainable. So you'll always see gardens. You'll always see people talking about how they got the fish that night or that day. So this island tries to stand on its own.

00:57:53 John Daub: Why—Why are they—Why do they dislike one another? I mean, that's the thing. There's so many Japanese regional areas. It goes all the way back, like hundreds of years. They cannot work together. They don't get along. This hurts my job in tourism because one area won't help another one. I said, I want to go to this area. Can you tell me about something about it? You know what they do? They recommend another place in their town. They won't tell me. I'm serious. They went like—Tottori Prefecture and Shimane Prefecture, two places in the Sea of Japan. They hate each other with a passion, yet they share the same area. So much so that there's an airport in Yonago that takes ANA, and there's an airport in Izumo right across the border, which takes JAL. They're different prefectures, but they're only like 20 miles apart or something. It's crazy.

00:58:49 Ruth: I think that's also—could that be true at Tokushima and Kochi too, or something like that? Like Tokushima, you have to go on ANA coach—you go on JAL or something like that.

00:58:51 John Daub: Something like that. Although I flew into Kochi with Dana.

00:58:52 Ruth: Oh, you did? Okay, so maybe not. But those are pretty close too—Ehime and—maybe Ehime and Takamatsu and—Tak. This is a nice street here. Hey, Jason Lee—nice to see Singapore's got the super chat. So now we're starting to get some super chats. Thank you, Jason Lee.

00:59:18 Ruth: Are we able to see our hotel room here?

00:59:18 John Daub: Yeah, it's on the corner, so we walk—Oh, my word. We walk quite a ways. Do you see that right in the center of your screen? Do you see that hotel? That's where we're staying.

00:59:28 Ruth: Yeah. Of the Drake.

00:59:28 John Daub: What's it called again?

00:59:30 Ruth: Hotel—

00:59:30 John Daub: The Osado. O—Osado—Big Sado. Big Sado. And I flew my drone, which I believe is legal—right there. There's a little park in the front, 30 meters away. All right, getting winded. That was the name of your song. All right, for those—for those who want to forget it, the name of the song is "knapsack on your back."

01:00:05 Ruth: People sing that—at least in—at least according to my parents, people sing that when they're hiking.

01:00:05 John Daub: We did actually lose people. We're under a thousand viewers now. I'm just saying. I don't know. It's not you. It's me. It's me. It's her. It's her. These look a little bit run down, but there's a car in the front of it, so it makes me feel like somebody with a brand new car is living here. That's kind of weird. What do you think of these structures, Jaya? It's a lot of character in these two.

01:00:34 Jaya: I like all the different roof levels.

01:00:34 John Daub: Yeah. The—the three structures looks like three different structures, but they're all—all combined together, but each one of them has different levels to it.

01:00:41 Jaya: Yeah, that little middle mini roof looks really cool.

01:00:45 John Daub: Yeah. There's one on the side there.

01:00:47 Jaya: That one there looks like a copper roof.

01:00:49 John Daub: Oh, the one underneath there. That green?

01:00:51 Jaya: Yeah.

01:00:52 John Daub: Interesting. I'd like to get a closer look. Ruth is talking to some locals. She might be lost. We're taking you to show you on Sado Island here in Niigata some abandoned houses. We're coming back tomorrow and doing a live stream. We're going to go inside of them, but I thought this would be a pretty good way to get an overview of this whole town. And Ruth, who's been here—how many times have you been to Sado? Fifth time. Fifth time makes her a veteran.

01:01:25 Ruth: Has anybody seen the movie Ring Ring Ring?

01:01:25 John Daub: The horror?

01:01:25 Ruth: Look—

01:01:28 John Daub: What?

01:01:28 Ruth: That's where the monster comes from.

01:01:29 John Daub: No, don't say that at night. You're coming back here at night. I'm going to make you sit there.

01:01:34 Ruth: So this used to be a house. This has now been—the house has been raised. And the way you can tell is because there's still the rocks on the side that used to be the boundaries of the house. And—and you still have the well.

01:01:45 John Daub: Oh, yeah. They can't get rid of that well. So what's down there? Why is it covered? Why is it covered, Ruth? Huh? I'll give you five bucks if you look in there.

01:01:54 Ruth: Because they don't want the other little cats and stuff to fall in there. That's why.

01:01:59 John Daub: Cats would fall in there. Yeah.

01:02:00 Ruth: Various things will fall.

01:02:01 John Daub: Curious humans, too, might fall in there. Exactly. Jealous wives might push their husband in there. Thankfully, Kanae is not jealous of anything. Hi, Kanae—don't push me in the well with the monster. And then—and then leave me in there. You can't hear the shouts either when it's covered up like that. Scary. Oh, they found another well over here. It's interesting. There's not—this road curves over now to the left. So we're getting closer and closer to the prison. That's another well, Jaya. Oh, this street's got a different personality to it. So what she said was—these are the random design points that she loves in Japanese houses.

01:02:57 Ruth: Like, who would have thought to put in this nice tile into the concrete just to make a nice little design? I mean, thank you for doing that. Whoever.

01:03:10 John Daub: Maybe they just didn't have enough tiles. And they said, well, let's improvise. And what can we do? Well, we can space them out and make it look artistic. That's what I think really happened—some—sometimes the genius behind the stuff happened accidentally.

01:03:10 Ruth: Yeah.

01:03:10 John Daub: What do you think, Jaya? What's your expert eye?

01:03:13 Jaya: I do something like that on my—

01:03:15 Ruth: The whole point of it—the—the thing that makes Japanese architecture sometimes very interesting is that the randomness is part of the design. So it's not balanced. So you have 2, 3, 1, 2, 1, 2. Yeah, it's very interesting to me.

01:03:30 John Daub: So some old guy I know—did you hear that? He just shouted. Oh, really? No, that was—that was—an old guy. It's something. Seriously. Maybe he could be—for some tea. Oh, look at the striking mailbox.

01:03:51 Ruth: Check it—this is the road.

01:03:51 John Daub: This is so nice. Look at this. All the old wood buildings here. I—I did not expect this. This looks like a museum. And if they're not in really—I mean, here's the wall—you can see the—is kind of falling apart here. But they look like they're well painted. The wood—this one looks like it's been taken care of. But we're going to be going up this way and they're not as well taken care of. I think it's interesting here—the mailbox is the old school type. It's probably been here since, I don't know, like 60, 70 years most likely. And they just painted it red every few years—they give it a nice paint job. Mailboxes can last forever. Well, what happened to Ruth? She's gotten—she's—she's moved into this little local shop in English—open 9:30, close—it's at 4. What do you got there?

01:04:58 Ruth: Look, it's an original sweet bread. And look, can you see the gold inside? He's got gold leaf inside.

01:04:58 John Daub: Whoa. Kind of king. Oh, gold mine.

01:05:03 Ruth: Is this your store? Really? Very nice. So when could I buy?

01:05:11 John Daub: Rich gonna buy one. That's nice, right? Angus will ask—Angus will ask Ruth about her professional thing. Let's take a quick look inside.

01:05:28 Ruth: He watched my NHK show.

01:05:28 John Daub: Oh.

01:05:30 Ruth: And now he's got you here, so—and now we do Easy Japanese for Work. So everybody should watch it—we teach like easy Japanese.

01:05:42 John Daub: Yeah. Ruth, they're asking you on the Internet—what do you do?

01:05:45 Ruth: I'm a consultant for revitalizing Japan through tourism. That's what my company, Jarman International, does.

01:05:53 John Daub: And she does some NHK too.

01:05:54 Ruth: Yeah, I'm on NHK World. It's a show called Easy Japanese for Work.

01:06:00 John Daub: I was in a skit a couple of times when she was doing the—do you remember me in the skit? They were really bad. I've been working with NHK since 2008. It's a really pretty little shop that he's made here. There's not anything up here on the hill, so when it's open, some everyday stuff for the neighbors, like curry rice. You see there—they have that there. And if you've forgotten some stuff, there's some—some soba noodles. There's also some mustard, some condiments, some—some ajinomoto, some spices, basil, some rice that you can microwave, things that you might need for cooking in a tight spot. You can just walk over here and pick it up. That's really nice. There's some salt and then some vegetables in a little bakery that we bought. And there's some little things of ramen.

01:07:15 Ruth: So this gentleman is third generation, and this was a house that they always owned, and it was always a little local store. So he just decided to sort of change it up a bit. And you can see all the bamboo products, right? Because this is the bamboo—bamboo sort of art center—Sado.

01:07:19 John Daub: Interesting. So he—they kept it in the family and keeping it running as a shop.

01:07:19 Ruth: And his sister lives in Ibaraki, near where Jaya lives.

01:07:23 John Daub: What? What—so like your neighbor by family? Family neighbor. Interesting.

01:07:31 Ruth: Would you like to try?

01:07:31 John Daub: Yeah, let's get some—let's get it out in the sunshine and let the gold glisten. I've been eating a lot. You can see I have—I hurt my knees and can't run as much. So the thing with Japan is it's very easy to put on weight if you're not running every day, and I haven't been able to do that.

01:07:50 Jaya: But—

01:07:53 John Daub: You're looking at yourself in this—in the selfie screen picture. It makes you look a little bit bigger than you really are. We did have really good sake for dinner last night. I posted some stories on Instagram if you want to check it out. It's nice. This building's been three generations in it. And he's renovated it. It looks brand new. Look at the gold—you ate the gold, didn't you? Okay.

01:08:22 Ruth: I don't know. I did—I—I hope I didn't eat it all.

01:08:22 John Daub: This is—this is—

01:08:23 Ruth: It's so sweet. Oh, there it is. Sorry.

01:08:26 John Daub: Gold. Because this is the road to the gold mines. There's a little bit of gold in there.

01:08:30 Ruth: So smart.

01:08:30 John Daub: Yeah, this is—this is—so this green is from matcha or it could be—tell me, how do you make it? The little gold in there really brings it out. I love this road—just goes up to the gold mine.

01:09:20 Ruth: I think this is an a—

01:09:20 John Daub: Well, this is an akia. Here, let me get—move back a little bit.

01:09:31 Ruth: Yeah, the walls are connected inside. So they share a wall. Somebody—

01:09:31 John Daub: Oh. So the—this one is an akiya and this one isn't. This one is available. So if you're interested in—you could actually try to purchase this. They do share a wall. There's no space in between them. You brought—don't forget your water. This Aki though shares a wall. So if you do do any work, you have to be mindful that there's only one wall separating—is there anything you could do with that? Maybe—

01:09:59 Ruth: And then I guess you would have to discuss with your neighbor how you would fix it up. But I have actually went inside this one. It's very cool. It's really long and there's like a little area way out the back—I don't know if you can even see it all the way at the back.

01:10:14 Jaya: Concrete tile.

01:10:14 John Daub: Oh, these are concrete tiles. Jaya said so they're different. Does—so they're heavier, right.

01:10:20 Ruth: Do you see how long that is?

01:10:20 John Daub: Well, this is long.

01:10:22 Ruth: Yeah.

01:10:22 John Daub: So that's—

01:10:24 Ruth: Isn't it interesting?

01:10:25 Jaya: Yeah. So from the front it looks really small. But then—

01:10:27 John Daub: Yeah, can have—

01:10:29 Jaya: Got a second floor.

01:10:31 Ruth: Yeah. There's a—there's a second floor and then it's kind of—okay, all right, here we go into the most—the interesting stuff. So a lot of the people that were considered anti-government in Kyoto were sent here from ancient times. So they built houses like they were in Kyoto. So some houses in Kyoto are built like this where they're very long and then there's like an open area in the back—like a nakaniwa kind of in the back—I don't know how to explain.

01:10:55 Jaya: Someone just commented—yeah, like a machiya.

01:10:55 Ruth: There you go. Yes, exactly. Thank you. Thank you.

01:11:00 John Daub: Who said that?

01:11:00 Ruth: Thank you. That's so true. Yeah, yeah—like what did he say? Machiya. So machiya. So the machiya style is here because people—rich people from Kyoto were sent here.

01:11:23 Jaya: So actually this is a cheaper alternative than in Kyoto. If you were interested in buying a machiya and renovating it, you come here instead of Kyoto.

01:11:26 Ruth: Yes.

01:11:27 John Daub: Oh, that's good information.

01:11:29 Ruth: And it's not overrun with people.

01:11:30 John Daub: Yeah, there's—yeah, obviously there's no people. It's like—look at the street. We're walking down the middle of the street and there's not—not a soul in sight.

01:11:37 Ruth: But you saw that young guy who was so nice. Right. So I get the feeling here that people are very ready to welcome newcomers, being so friendly. Yeah.

01:11:46 John Daub: And the fact that he's baking his own bread and putting gold in it—he's—they're looking for ways to attract people to come here. I like that. The street again—the street has a ton of AAs. So if you were to search the AIA database here, you probably will come up with a lot of these. They do require—No, you wouldn't—no, they're not—they're unlisted. How do you know?

01:12:06 Ruth: So you have to be connected with the people here to inquire about this. So that's why we're not really saying that you can immediately buy these because the city itself hasn't really decided that that's exactly what they want to do, but they're very seriously thinking about it. So we would love to hear everybody's opinion. Right.

01:12:24 John Daub: So these—these here old houses—they have brand new cars in front of them. Were they Akia? Are they just like third generation or fifth generation? They're continuously lived in, so probably passed down through generations. And instead of the family, people would go to university in—in Osaka or Tokyo and they would never come back because their job was there. And then when their parents passed away, they wouldn't come back and this house would just would collect dust and then be abandoned. And that's how they get lost. But sometimes families will come back after a while—people don't want to work in Tokyo, Osaka, they come back to their hometown and young people like the—the business owner that we just went into—he'll—he'll fix up his parents house, right? Oh, this is an Akiya. And then start to rehabilitate the town. And you're going to see maybe in like five years—maybe it'll be like trendy—these will be like trendy cafes or there'll be—brothels. I don't—no, I don't think that'll happen. But you never know.

01:13:29 Ruth: Yes.

01:13:29 John Daub: Yes.

01:13:30 Ruth: This is one of the ones I think that they're going to show us.

01:13:32 John Daub: Okay. Oh, inside of here. So we might be able to get a chance to go inside of here tomorrow.

01:13:38 Ruth: Yeah, tomorrow we're going to spend the whole day like looking at AKAs inside AAs. That's what I've requested. How many they show us? I'm not sure.

01:13:44 John Daub: All right. Oh, there I am—in the reflection with Jaya. There you are too. So give us a thumbs up if you want to see us show you the inside of this tomorrow. And Jaya, you're—are you going to make something for your channel too, right?

01:13:57 Jaya: Yeah, I'm going to—

01:13:57 Ruth: Yeah.

01:13:57 Jaya: I'm not doing anything live, but—

01:13:59 John Daub: He's not doing anything live. But he's going to get some—he's going to put together something for the Tokyo Llama channel. And I'll have something for you live. And—and we're going up to the prison—ha—in five minutes. Then we're going to end the live stream in front of the prison. I'm going to take the video of the prison and then I think I'll try to upload it tonight in 4K. And all up to you. We got to get this video up to a thousand likes by then, so definitely click the button. I want to bring you the old abandoned prison. Spooky—very spooky—it's spooky, right? It's spooky. Totally spooky. Abandoned prison where they did experiments. Did they do weird experiments on the prisoners? No, they didn't. Sorry—no weird experiments. What?

01:15:00 Ruth: I have a feeling that they have renovated already.

01:15:00 John Daub: Oh, this used to be an Akiya.

01:15:01 Ruth: They renovated it and they don't know what to do with it. So I think I can think of a few things they could do with it.

01:15:10 John Daub: Like what? Give us one.

01:15:11 Ruth: Like have somebody come live here in half of it and then do an Airbnb on the other half.

01:15:17 John Daub: Yeah.

01:15:18 Ruth: Or things like that. Right.

01:15:21 John Daub: So I've renovated Akiya and now they don't know what to do with it. Now it's becoming Akiya again. Wait, wait a minute. So you're saying like—this AKEA was fixed up and now it's an Akiya again?

01:15:34 Ruth: Yeah. So no one—so the city—so the city fixed it up, but they don't know what to do with it, so they're wondering what to do with it. So what I would suggest, my personal opinion is have somebody who loves this little town come live here and where as they're living here, fix up a several of the other ones and start a little sort of Airbnb kind of—I don't know—machiya guest house, you know, village.

01:15:58 John Daub: How connected are you to your town—in Tok—near Tokyo? You can move out here to Sado.

01:16:04 Ruth: Yeah, exactly.

01:16:04 John Daub: Put some life into this in this puppy. Look at it. It's long on the outside and long in the back, isn't it? It's probably one big massive room. How much would it cost to live in there, do you think? Yeah. What's the rent like in this area? It's interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

01:16:24 Ruth: 70,000 yen a month.

01:16:24 John Daub: 70,000. So under $700 a month for that entire house—with—with the electric. Does it have electricity? Oh, of course it does. Yeah.

01:16:33 Ruth: I think that what we would try to do is you would make enough off of the guest houses that you're operating that that would pay for your rent there. Right. We really feel like having people come in is actually helping this town so much. Yeah, that's exact—that's actually where they should use some of their resources to bring people in who would do that kind of thing.

01:16:54 John Daub: I agree. You know the kind of person—there's not a lot of jobs here. Right. You know what kind of person should live here? A YouTuber. A YouTuber would live here. Seriously, you get a lot of material, you can make your own adventures. What do you think? Any YouTubers out here? Any YouTubers out here want to come? No. Well, yeah.

01:17:18 Jaya: Start a YouTube channel.

01:17:20 John Daub: You can start one. Right. There you go. This is an Akiya here. This one right—this one right here is an Akiya. Gosh, I wish YouTube app team would—would enable the wide lens. I don't know—this isn't the wide lens. It's hard to tell. Yeah. Look at the windows are—the windows are kind of like taped up there. This doesn't look like an Akiya. I like this—the guy has a lot of motorcycles. And because maybe his love of motorcycles, there's a little garage to this building. It's nice. We have a very rare day for those joining us. We're in Niigata Prefecture on the Sea of Japan side. This is Sado Island, an island 60 minutes by jet foil away from the mainland. And we're looking at Akiya, which are abandoned houses in an old part of the town on the west side called Aikawa—Aikawa town. And Ruth is here—she's a consultant and she's helping the area, especially their abandoned house problem. And we're getting a chance tomorrow to look at it and you're going to join us. So you definitely want to subscribe. And click the thumbs up. Make sure you don't miss any of these live streams because tomorrow is going to be a lot of fun going inside of the abandoned house. This is a post office, Ruthie. I can't believe they have a post office here. It's closed because it's Sunday. But that is a post office. Full working post office with an ATM and everything inside of it—and on the top of it, someone's living here—someone's living over the post office. That's so cool. That's the Aikawa Jomachi something ba post office. They have a full working post office up here.

01:19:22 Ruth: That have been successfully renovated—

01:19:22 John Daub: Okay, successfully renovated. Akia. Got it.

01:19:24 Ruth: This one here on the left is now like a cafe. And they also show movies and stuff here.

01:19:28 John Daub: Interesting.

01:19:29 Ruth: Yeah.

01:19:31 John Daub: Oh, yeah, look—it's got now showing—yeah. And we're supposed to whisper. This is the problem for me. I don't think I can enter—way too loud for this place. Jaya, you can enter—you don't speak a lot. Go inside. You guys be quiet out there too. Ruth—I didn't even have to offer her five bucks. She's just going in there. Ruth's went in there. Hi, YouTuber. This was an Akiya. This has been renovated from an Akiya to turn into like a local cinema.

01:20:41 Ruth: It was built in Showa June—and so that would be 1920. Oh, very good—1920s this was built. All right, let's go take a quick look inside.

01:20:49 Ruth: Look, they have that big movie machine right there.

01:20:51 John Daub: Like—oh, check that out. What is that? Do you see that? That is massive.

01:20:57 Ruth: That's the old style for the movie theaters.

01:21:00 John Daub: All right, let's get a quick look in here—gotta take our shoes off. Thank you. Sometimes boots don't fit well. Thank you.

01:21:41 Ruth: So this is an aa. So this was original.

01:21:44 John Daub: Wow. We're inside of an abandoned house that's been renovated.

01:21:46 Ruth: Renovated.

01:21:48 John Daub: Whoa.

01:21:49 Ruth: They made it into a movie theater.

01:21:51 John Daub: Look at this movie theater.

01:21:51 Ruth: Guys, look at all this—tatami stones. They're so cute. Ah—

01:22:01 John Daub: So they—they cut—close the curtains and it becomes dark in here to show cinema. How cool is that?

01:22:06 Ruth: They took all the tatami out, so they made it with tatami—

01:22:09 John Daub: Oh, right—used to be—used to be tatami. Jaya is also not into tatami. It's very hard to care for. And I want to see a movie here. Oh, look—you can see in—in front here in front of the screen—I could see myself coming here with Kanae on date night and just look—just hanging out with a bunch of people laughing at a movie.

01:22:46 Ruth: Can I say—so this year used to be two rooms in the house. The area you see a little bit beyond this divider was the outside hallway. So that would have been outside.

01:22:53 John Daub: Oh, this—this marker being doors would close and there would be a 1 meter gap between the two. Now it's all been opened up.

01:23:00 Ruth: They would also have like sliding doors—on that side—so you could open it up in the summer if you wanted to. It's a good way to insulate your house.

01:23:04 John Daub: Jay, this is what you're doing too, right? You're taking out the corridor—your ninja passageway—

01:23:06 Jaya: No, we're keeping the corridor.

01:23:07 John Daub: Okay. Front corridor.

01:23:07 Jaya: We're keeping along the windows.

01:23:08 John Daub: Interesting. You see the—the railings for what was a shoji door? Yeah—one of the paper doors, sliding paper doors. And now they've taken them out, and it increases the size of it.

01:23:41 Ruth: And this room would have been the place where you welcome guests. So this would have been the room where they—it's tatami. And you have your guests here. And if you look up here, that's the former place where the kamidana little sign would have been.

01:23:41 John Daub: Now it's the movie—

01:23:53 Ruth: So—

01:23:53 John Daub: Oh, yeah.

01:23:54 Ruth: So I was wrong. It wasn't the kamidana. But when you go to the old houses, you can usually find the kamidana—

01:23:58 John Daub: Former where it used to be. Right. Same with—same with your house, too.

01:24:03 Jaya: Was here.

01:24:03 Ruth: Okay.

01:24:04 John Daub: Was up there—one of these rooms.

01:24:08 Ruth: Yes.

01:24:08 John Daub: Yeah. Interesting. So you see some similarities between your house and this one. Okay. So the—so the—the purpose of the build—the Japanese homes are typically the same no matter where. Interesting. I like what they've done with it. It's so genius.

01:24:32 Ruth: I really like it. It's everything. And they've used the closet space here, right?

01:24:32 John Daub: Oh, yeah.

01:24:32 Ruth: This is all closet. This was all closet space where you would keep your futons.

01:24:36 John Daub: Right.

01:24:36 Ruth: And now they've opened it up to put storage for blankets, for people's knees, for watching the movie and—

01:24:46 John Daub: Fascinating. I like how they put the projector up here because there's no other place to put it.

01:24:51 Ruth: That's why I thought—

01:24:51 John Daub: Yeah, it's genius. And I'm—I'm very interested to see this old—this looks like the ticket window. Right.

01:25:00 Ruth: So this was always the kitchen.

01:25:01 John Daub: Oh, my word. Oh, my word. I've never seen so like this before.

01:25:07 Jaya: Yeah. So this projector was from the cinema in the center of town. It was a big cinema, but they knocked that down and they rescued the projector. Wow.

01:25:19 John Daub: Do they still work?

01:25:22 Ruth: It's Japan made. Look—

01:25:25 John Daub: Is the name of the company that made these. Look at the parts on these things. This is really—

01:25:33 Ruth: This is typical Japanese plaster walls, too.

01:25:37 John Daub: Yeah. And you can see here's—here's a newer projector, but these projectors probably go back to like the early 20th century or something. Must be—I don't know—I've never seen them so big just to produce the light—light bright enough to make a beam. Here's another one in the side. Looks like almost like medical equipment to me—looks like some sort of medical equipment. But these are movie projectors.

01:26:09 Ruth: Plaster is also quite traditional in Japan. They have the—

01:26:09 John Daub: All right—the old warehouses. Yeah—hopefully the signal holds up, guys. Sorry if the signal drives down a little bit. I have never seen this before. I've never seen that before. Glass inside of the paper—shoji. Whoa. Look what they've done with this room. Hi—YouTube—I am sorry. Look at this bookshelf that they've made. Outstanding. So they've renovated this old abandoned house and turned it into a cinema. And I guess it would be like a cultural center—you can just take a book and read it in this cafe. And they've turned it into a cafe. You can see here's some tables to sit there—you can get a coffee or—I smell some curry. So they're probably serving curry rice in here. And there's little—little antiques that they have as well around here which make it add a lot of personality to it—a machine. Yeah. Oh, look at that—these are old—old sewing machines. You see the tables are made and—

01:27:36 Ruth: They even have it written like the original writing—

01:27:39 John Daub: Ah—

01:27:39 Ruth: Hi—

01:27:39 John Daub: The name of the company. There's some—some LPs, some records down there.

01:27:55 Ruth: It's used for when they store the rice—that covers for the places where they store the rice—

01:28:05 John Daub: That's backwards there—it's got—it's got a really muffled sound from the speakers of this radio. But it still works. It's nice. It's on—is it?

01:28:27 Ruth: I don't—these—they've carved out the inside—the original inside. And they've put a speaker—

01:28:27 John Daub: Oh, okay. So—

01:28:28 Ruth: So they have the original—

01:28:29 John Daub: They took the guts out and put another speaker. I would have done the same thing. Cheesecake brownies—doesn't live here. Sorry. So they have a vegetable curry and I guess that's the main dish and then some snacks and juices. It's nice. I love curry rice. You come here for dinner—it's very reasonably priced. Just $6 for some curry rice and a coffee is about $3. So less than $10. There's the kitchen inside there—it's a nice new-looking kitchen too, isn't it, John?

01:29:58 Ruth: So this was the little window that was the bathroom. And this was the little window where somebody says give me some soap or—and then this was—this was outside and that was where they heated up the bath—that was—

01:29:58 John Daub: Oh, right there.

01:29:59 Ruth: That was the little chimney place where they put the wood in to heat the bath.

01:30:02 John Daub: One area here.

01:30:03 Ruth: Yeah, I guess that must open down at the bottom.

01:30:06 John Daub: So these are things that are obsolete now for everyday life, but they've found a way to—to live around it or even use it in another way. It's interesting—interesting. And you see the—the reels up there. I love it—I love it. What do you think? Jaya—

01:30:28 Jaya: asked me about my place, whether—

01:30:28 John Daub: we were going to turn it into—

01:30:29 Jaya: a cafe or restaurant. A lot of people assumed that's what—

01:30:32 John Daub: we were going to be doing.

01:30:35 Jaya: A lot of people are doing this, and it's really cool.

01:30:38 John Daub: It's very cool. So you can take—not just—not just live in the Akiya, but you can also renovate it and create it—and turning into a business like this. This is another reason to live here—there's so much more now when there's stuff to do here. At the end of the hall, there's a sink. Do you want to see it?

01:31:09 Ruth: Yeah. Let's go look at the bathroom.

01:31:37 John Daub: Oh, it's nice—airy. You can see they've constructed walls here, but typically the—the—the bathrooms would have a lot of air—they'd be outside and cold, so the smell would stay outside.

01:31:59 Jaya: Beautiful.

01:31:59 John Daub: Oh, that was nice. One last look at the—at the cinema here. See the movie theater—the screen is in the back there—beautifully—what they've done with this room, I think it's giving Jaya some ideas, huh? I'd love to see a cinema—we'll all come over to your place. Oh, seriously, you could—oh, wow. They got me mikans from the island here.

01:32:36 Ruth: Nice.

01:32:36 John Daub: There you go.

01:32:36 Ruth: Okay, thank you. I'll put it in my bag. And then with just a little more—few more steps up and we can see the wall of the prison.

01:32:48 John Daub: Oh, right. Okay. We've been going on for an hour and a half.

01:32:52 Ruth: Yeah, sorry. It was really fun.

01:32:57 John Daub: The—the office that we talked to said, oh, it only takes 30 minutes to get to the top. They didn't realize who they were dealing with.

01:33:02 Ruth: Yeah, exactly.

01:33:03 John Daub: It takes me an hour just to put on my shoes. I can't do it with one hand. Can you hold the gym? When you get—when you get—when you get your—

01:33:16 Ruth: Yeah, okay.

01:33:18 John Daub: All right—just hold it there.

01:33:20 Ruth: All right—

01:33:24 John Daub: Do your work. One, two—

01:33:29 Ruth: What time is it? I wonder?

01:33:32 John Daub: Probably one or two.

01:33:34 Jaya: No, 12:41.

01:33:36 Ruth: Good, because we have to—I have to be back by two.

01:33:39 John Daub: Oh, so maybe you should leave and not do the prison—we'll do the prison. Oh, okay.

01:33:45 Ruth: Oh, no, we'll do the prison. I—I can leave halfway through.

01:33:47 John Daub: We're going to do the abandoned prison. Let's get out of here. That was nice. This a renovated abandoned house, everybody. And I—I—I like that because she doesn't live here, right?

01:34:02 Ruth: She said she—but I think she lives up the street, cuz I met her and her husband when they were renovating their place—just up the street on—

01:34:11 John Daub: She should be a YouTuber.

01:34:12 Ruth: Yeah, okay. But see, the good thing about this is that you have people who've already done it living here, so you have all these people who can give you good advice.

01:34:24 John Daub: Yeah. Shortcut has a 9 by 16 foot movie screen in your backyard. You could definitely move here, create a cinema. But if you moved here, you have a competing cinema. So you'd have to play racier movies or something and get people to come in here. Yeah, yeah. Jaya's still in there. There he comes. All right, we're making our way up there. That was nice. And she gave us some local mikans. So this is an Akia as well. Another abandoned house. This could be yours if the price is right. You can tell pretty much because you can just look through the windows and you see it's not kept—the shoji paper, the sliding doors there—the paper's just coming off of it and it hasn't been maintained at all. So you know that it's probably been abandoned. We're walking up—you can see the ocean on the horizon down there. We've been walking for the last hour and a half all the way up the hill and we're almost there. Thanks for staying—sticking with us. The last thing you're going to see in a couple of minutes is the old abandoned prison, which is an operation from 1954 to 1972. And the—the thing with this prison is that it's still in the original state as it was left in 1972—it's—it's pretty creepy. This would be a perfect location for a movie. There's still a lot of artifacts in there too. Oh, so this is under renovation. So this is—they're turning this one right now. It's still being worked on, but it'll be a cafe soon. But it's nice though—you see, people are already starting to buy up the Akiya here and turn it into something special.

01:36:40 Ruth: So this is a couple doing it themselves.

01:36:41 John Daub: Oh, wow.

01:36:43 Ruth: They're doing three—one, two, three—

01:36:43 John Daub: Oh, so also here on this side of the street, they're working on it—you can tell—

01:36:56 Ruth: That down there is also another Akia that they fixed, but they don't know—

01:37:11 Ruth: Here we are.

01:37:17 John Daub: Jaya's making friends.

01:37:20 Ruth: See that big wall?

01:37:22 John Daub: Yeah. Oh, that's at the prison.

01:37:23 Ruth: Yep.

01:37:24 John Daub: It's—Prison is fascinating to me. I've been reading a little bit online. There's very, very little information in English on it, but it's—it's a rare prison because it's made of wood.

01:37:35 Ruth: Okay.

01:37:35 John Daub: How do you make a prison out of wood? People can just, like, break through it, right?

01:37:40 Ruth: Yes.

01:37:40 John Daub: Well, they didn't think of that back in the 1950s. They just needed a place to store the prisoners, and it shut down in '72 and they moved back to the mainland.

01:37:53 Ruth: I think that this was like a temporary holding prison.

01:37:53 John Daub: Yeah—temporary holding prison. It's free to enter because it's a prison—exit will cost you five. No, I'm kidding—it's free. On the corner of the prison—

01:38:11 John Daub: Oh, yeah—

01:38:13 Ruth: It was scary—like, roof for some reason over there—That's—

01:38:17 John Daub: That's pretty creepy—like—what—they—what—it's like they put their kids out there for if they were bad—some stories here that I do not want to know, but this is also an aki—abandoned—abandoned house that's available across the street from the abandoned prison. And it's not a medical prison where they did experiments on inmates—it's not that kind of prison—just—just saying. Because if it was, it might be a little bit—you have some freaky people wanting to buy that place. All right, and this is where we're going to be ending the live stream, everybody. Thumbs up for you. That's the prison.

01:39:05 Ruth: And there's a big bird flying above telling you better watch out.

01:39:05 John Daub: That's that bird that likes to eat dead animals, isn't it? What do you call them? Buzzards. Seriously, what is that?

01:39:12 Ruth: It's a toki.

01:39:12 John Daub: It's a tombi hawk—it's not a buzzard—it's—it's circling us. I think it doesn't think we have much time left. Yeah—it's Tony hawk. Or is that Toby?

01:39:32 Ruth: Thank you for everybody really learning about this place with us. What an exciting part of Japan.

01:39:34 John Daub: Did you make a friend?

01:39:34 Jaya: Yeah, he showed me the inside of his cafe.

01:39:36 John Daub: Oh, cool.

01:39:37 Jaya: Yeah, it looks really nice—really open—a nice natural wood feel. It's going to look really good when it's—

01:39:42 John Daub: done, I think so—they're really putting a lot of love into it. And I think when you renovate a project—just like your house—you have to put a lot of love into what you do and that—and people are going to want to come and see this cafe, I think in a few—few weeks, few months when it opens. I figure this is such a nice street—it's—it's so quiet too. So that's the prison. Jaya, this is where you'll be staying tonight—you think I'm joking? I am. But we're going to do this—I'm going to film this in 4K and upload this tonight as a stream—not a live stream—and—and we'll get a chance to look at it. And tomorrow Jaya and I with—and Ruth are going to be back—we're going to be back on live through these abandoned houses, right?

01:40:35 Ruth: Yeah.

01:40:36 John Daub: Learning as you go, so—but I—I have no skills at all in this, so your inputs very greatly appreciated. And we're going to get—also, will there be somebody with us to give us information? I also—I'm very, very interested—I asked yesterday in a live stream when we were coming here if I could get some feedback from you and questions that you thought were very interesting or pertinent—if you were interested in coming here to get an IKEA house—if you wanted to live here, what did you need to do? This is some of the things we're going to answer tomorrow in the live stream. Probably around the same time.

01:41:09 Ruth: Yeah, probably around the same time.

01:41:09 John Daub: Yeah, around the same time as now—sometime between 11am and 2pm that's usually when I do live streams. And we'll answer your questions live and you can ask and do catchball with us live by asking questions. And Jaya will be here to give some input and I'll be here to make really tasteless bad jokes that nobody listens to. And Ruth will be here to sing—

01:41:28 Ruth: And I'll be here to sing—

01:41:29 John Daub: No, please—don't—it's all right. Smash the like button, guys. Do subscribe and make sure you click always so you don't ever miss a live stream—Instagram has notifications as well as Patreon, so you might want to support there. Thank you, Jaya for joining us on this trip—for the next—we still got 48 hours to go—What's your channel called? Tokyo Llama—Ruth, do you have a YouTube channel?

01:41:55 Ruth: Jarman International—kind of.

01:41:55 John Daub: Her consulting company is called Jarman International.

01:41:57 Ruth: You can look at her Facebook page. That would be nice—Jarman International.

01:42:00 John Daub: You can check out her Facebook pages. She does a lot of stuff. Yeah, she's multi talented.

01:42:05 Ruth: I don't know if anybody remembers Hana, but she's in charge of our Facebook page.

01:42:09 John Daub: Can I tell you what your relationship is to Hana?

01:42:11 Ruth: I'm her mom.

01:42:13 John Daub: That's Hana's mom. That's Hana's mom right there. Hana, if you're watching and she does because she puts a table of contents in all the videos. Okay, Hana, you've been watching for now 100 minutes and now you discovered that that's your mom.

01:42:28 Ruth: Yes.

01:42:28 John Daub: Thanks, mom. Oh, Hana's watching right now—Hana's watching right now. Hana, why—what are you doing up so late? She's on New York time, right? What are you doing up so late? Hana—Hana's watching. So your mom's in prison—sorry about that, Hana. Yeah, we'll let her out—Or should we? Or should we not? You let us know, Hana. Thanks, guys, for watching. We'll be back tonight in a stream that I'll upload and then tomorrow in another stream from Akiya. Thanks and see you next time—the last five seconds of Ruth in prison.