00:00:04 John Daub: Greetings to Tokyo's Nihonbashi, the bridge of Japan. That's where we are today. Look at how busy it is on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, March 15, 2020. We've been here before. This is Japan's bridge as I just said. It is one of the most historic bridges in the entire country. It's the bridge with the Nakasendo—believe there's five paths that go all over connecting Edo with the countryside to this spot right here. In fact, there's a marker in the middle of the street. You see it there where that car just went by? That's the marker for the start of the Nihonbashi and there's the actual marker over there. It's ceremonial in the middle of the street right there. And we're gonna be looking at the back alleys here.

00:00:48 John Daub: Now Nihonbashi has a lot of history as you know. This bridge was made out of wood, the first wooden bridge in Edo. I believe 1603 was the year. I've got pictures. We back everything up with history everybody. This of course is a famous woodblock print of Nihonbashi way back when it opened. You can see this was a merchant area. A lot of markets, a lot of sales, a lot of activity. No cars. It's very different today. And everything changed over history. Of course it was the Great Kanto Earthquake, I believe 1923, that devastated this area. It really knocked everything down. The result was that the fish market that was here—we're gonna go take a look at the memorial right over here, some information. This is where the fish market was. Then it was moved to Tsukiji and that has now moved over to Toyosu in 2018. So Tokyo is a city that's always in change. It's always evolving.

00:01:49 John Daub: So 1923 is a big change and then after World War II, 1946, this is what Nihonbashi looked like. You can see the bridge is still there. The bridge is still here. There's an old car crossing over it. The remnants of it, those lights, those famous lights that you see right there, you can see that here in the picture as well. And then there's ruins all behind it. That's where we're going to be walking today. So this area, keep that in mind. We're going there and seeing what's there in 2020. This is 1946. It's going to be a remarkable change. In 1964 for the Olympics, that's when they built this overpass, which is the highway. Of course, after World War II, they really needed to quickly update the infrastructure. So this is the highway that goes around Tokyo. It was much needed. In 2017, they did some research and we believe after the Olympics, they're going to be removing this and giving back that picturesque view all the way to Mount Fuji. I believe it's over there somewhere. I don't know if you can even see it, but they're going to be, I think, taking this away and making this bridge beautiful.

00:03:04 John Daub: Again, that makes me very happy. I'm a big fan of history. I think that we should protect and bring back that amazing view that you saw here in 1603. I don't know if that's even possible. This here is a memorial. I guess it's kind of a memorial, but just the remains right here of the old fish market from before the Great Kanto Earthquake. And you can see there's a picture of it right here. So this history, this area has a lot of history in it. This is definitely a place you're going to want to add to your itinerary. The Nihonbashi Riverside Market left seen from the Nihonbashi from the Edo-bashi in the distance before the 1923 earthquake. Edo-bashi is the next bridge over there. We'll go take a quick look at that as well. Remains of the Nihonbashi Riverside Fish Market. Fish and other seafood for consumption in the capital were unloaded for three centuries at the market that operated along the bank of the Nihonbashi River.

00:04:08 John Daub: That's where we're going to go see today. The riverside of the market originated in the early Edo period at a sales point for fish leftover from the supplies sent to the Shogun and daimyo that lived in the Edo Castle town. Look at that. How cool is this? So yeah, everything that was left over from the Shogun's fish and the daimyo, which are the people underneath the Shogun, came here for the people. That's probably still pretty good fish. This is the Edo-bashi River. Here, I believe it's a part of the Kanda River, which is the river that's like the Yamanote line. Before the Yamanote line, before the circle line around the city, they had the rivers and the canals. And that's what merchants used to get the supplies around the entire city. You can see here the cherry blossom tree. This one's going to be beautiful in about a week. Look at the buds on her. She's just waiting to break out. Do you see that? Probably a day away before this tree just starts breaking out. And this area is going to be so beautiful. But yesterday it was snowing. I think those of you that are subscribed to the channel saw the live stream. It's such a contrast. Today, it's pretty warm. Yesterday, it was minus one. So I don't know what's going on with the weather. Typical spring weather in Tokyo.

00:05:35 John Daub: Now, I showed you in that picture about two minutes ago. This was all ruins. I think this building, Mitsukoshi, and then this side of it was all gone. And we're going to be walking in the back here taking a look at that area that was just all ruins after the great firebombing of March 9th and 10th, 1945. And it's rebounded, of course. So let's go back here. You're also going to find where Anjin-san, if anyone saw that 1980 miniseries from CBS called Shogun, also a book by James Clavell. That house where Anjin-san lived, there's a marker there. So it's an actual true real story. So we'll go take a look at the marker. I did this live stream about two years ago, but we're going to do it again because some things have changed and some things haven't.

00:06:49 John Daub: Get across the street here. I'm just happy to be outside. We're still all practicing social distancing so I'm just gonna do a left turn and we're gonna get off the main street. Last time we walked down that main street I was here with Alex from Germany. It's 2:30 right now, 10 degrees Celsius and sunny. Thank you Suruga Bank. So on the right side here this is where the fish market was on this street and uh there really doesn't remain anything—a parking lot, some buildings. Maybe this one was something that they slapped up real fast after World War II and you're going to see some of those buildings and alley walks like this. So we're going to go now deep into the back of Nihonbashi where it was completely wiped out 75 years ago. They just celebrated the anniversary to remember the people who—who's allowed to go to the fish market and they're—[inaudible] das that day um a few days ago. Unfortunately it was really downplayed because of the situation.

00:08:31 John Daub: We're gonna go down that alley first. I'm gonna take you here really quickly and show you a marker that I've been to about a dozen times to pay my respect to the great Anjin-san Blackthorne aka William Adams, the first Western samurai. And if you're visiting in Tokyo and you've read the novel Shogun, you gotta come here. It's kind of hard to find. That's why I'm bringing you in the beginning here. Like literally it's between the buildings here. Do you see it? It's easy to miss. Right here, this marker represents where his house was. John Adams' house. Miura Anjin. It says so right here. Sketched in memory of William Adams, known as Miura Anjin, the first Englishman to settle in Japan, coming as a pilot on board of the Charity in 1600 who resided in a mansion built on this spot who instructed Ieyasu Tokugawa, the first Tokugawa shogun, on gunnery, geography, mathematics, etc. and constructed for him several ships on the European model while rendering valuable services in foreign affairs and who married a Japanese lady, Miss Magome, who died on April 24, 1620. Whoa. At the age of 57 years, rebuilt by some Japanese in May 1951.

00:10:06 John Daub: So I like to come to this marker. Here you go. I touch the top. Pay my respects to William Adams. He might have had a son named John Adams. I don't know. Or was he the second president of the United States? It's hard to—history. History. I see my friend, the president of this company, has been able to put these treasure box vending machines everywhere. Wonder what William Adams would think if he saw that a king's treasure box was right next to his old house. And these are vending machines. They cost 1,000 yen or about $10. And maybe, just maybe, you'll win a Nintendo DS or something like that inside of here. Usually it's a hat with batteries that has a fan in it or something.

00:11:05 John Daub: Check this out, though. There's some more cool vending machines. This is wacky. This is a sweets vending machine. Check this out. 700 yen. And you get some sort of—like, oh, it's a grilled sweet potato ice cream. And here in a can, you're going to get—it's not ice cream. It's just grilled sweet potatoes. The same thing here. No sugar added, it says. And down here, you have oyster paste. What? This doesn't make any sense. Why would they put this here? I guess that's what makes it so beautiful. It's $10 for that. $16 for the oyster paste. Seiko. This is $26 for this seafood product. This looks like crab in a can. Weird, right? I'm not getting that. And then here you have T-shirts and stuff. Furikake. Here's some rice. Japanese rice in a bottle. That's kind of neat. That's about $6. $5 for that. Here's some more rice in a vending machine.

00:12:33 John Daub: I usually just scout the location. But I didn't see this. Sometimes you just find it live. It's interesting. This is a famous tempura shop. I believe it's a tendon restaurant. There's people lining up here to get something. So, again, in the back alleys, you're going to find a lot of interesting things. Always get off of the main street. All right, let's walk this way. They got some tempura going on here. The chef. It smells like deep fried food. Ah, nice. Let's turn right.

00:13:14 John Daub: Tony P is in the house. Hey, John. Are you planning on doing a live stream when the cherry blossoms are at full bloom? You better believe I am, Tony. Love these live streams. I try to catch them all. Much appreciated. This is a Vietnamese restaurant. Tom Burns, $6 just because of all of this history puffness. I love the history. When you know the history, the locations make so much more meaning, don't they? But when you look at this alley and you start off by looking at that old picture, for those that are joining us right now—here's what the neighborhood looked like after World War II. There's the bridge that we started off at. Do you see all the ruins back there? That's where we are right now. And that's what makes this kind of interesting to see how it's come up.

00:14:19 John Daub: Now, you're going to see as we walk more through the alleys how some of the old buildings from World War II are still here. You could see the old cement buildings that they threw up really quickly. They're still the backbone of this neighborhood. This alley. And gradually, like this building here looks like it was slapped up in the 1950s really quick. Maintained over the years. This one as well on the right side, a donburi shop. A Korean izakaya. Ton Ton, it's called. That is a don. That looks good. So the Korean izakaya is in a building that looks like it was slapped up in the late 40s, early 50s. And you could see that they're removing a lot of them just because the buildings aren't as structurally intact. This one, this two-story building, definitely something that was rebuilt after World War II that's dwarfed now. That building is dwarfed by massive skyscrapers. That's Coredo, I believe, the department store. Mitsukoshi and Matsuzakaya are here. That property is worth a fortune and they are not going to be changing. I don't think they're going to be moving until somebody knocks on the door and says, you got to get out of here. We got a court order. But they're fighters. You can tell.

00:15:49 John Daub: Wouldn't it be awesome? You just walk outside your house and you're here in Nihonbashi. I would love to meet the owner. The last thing he wants is somebody knocking on his door this time of year. So it's a pretty interesting building. You got a tree up there so you know he's taking care of his house next door to the amazing shopping area of Coredo. Yeah. The thumbnail of the photo, the thumbnail photo for this episode. And this is kind of new. It's popped up over the last seven or eight years, probably 10 because I've been here for so long. Things don't seem so long ago. There's a craft beer market in the back alley here. That's pretty cheap. You get one pint for 780 yen. That's actually a bubaku. It's a Sunday afternoon. And there's nobody sitting out having tea on a fairly warm day. It's kind of a shame. I guess it's because there's no sun here to warm up the area. It's a little bit chillier.

00:17:15 John Daub: The Tokyo stock market is in Nihonbashi, this area. A lot of banks are in this area. Again, the merchants were here. So back in the 20th century, which wasn't that long ago, this is where a lot of the money was in Edo, in Tokyo. This is a beautiful, beautiful alley. But before we do that, I have some postcards to send. Thanks so much for sending up yesterday. Let's go put these in the post box right here. Who are we sending these out to? Erica and Chris in Australia. Josh in Calgary. Stephanie in Santa Monica. Joanne in Australia as well. And Wendy in California. And Ed in Spring Valley, California. Hey, guys. Thanks for joining the Postcard Club. There you go. International mail from Nihonbashi on the way. All right.

00:18:25 John Daub: That's a very famous scene from Kyoto. On the back is a picture of me and Kevin Reilly from 2015 when I was in that exact same spot making an episode with him at the market, street food market. Now this little alley here is really, really nice on a summer afternoon walking through here. When the sun is setting. We're going to take a look back. But if you just right now, we'll pan up. It's pretty nice, isn't it? I believe that they change these two depending on the season. Right now they have it. Looks like cherry blossoms, doesn't it? Yeah. So these lanterns or chochin probably change depending on the season. They also have a really beautiful goldfish kind of an aquarium inside. I've been in there a few times. Dasai. The Japanese sake maker had a sake stand there. So I often got invited for free for media events and to drink a lot of sake. Just keep that between you and me. All right.

00:20:13 John Daub: Let's look back here. I'm going to take you into the shrine. We sort of went in here before, but it's pretty neat that this exists right next to the shopping area. Kind of a secret shrine to visit in the Nihonbashi area. And that's where we just were. Yeah. Now this shrine has been renovated. Shrines are renovated, but they're not moved. Meaning this has probably been here since the 17th century as well. Maybe longer and most likely praying for business. Whenever you see fox, foxes, you see the fox right there? Whenever you see foxes, it's usually for business purposes. And people have come here to pray on a beautiful Saturday afternoon in downtown Tokyo between all of the skyscrapers. Yeah. And it is pretty neat when you look up from here and you see a shrine in this very expensive property. So the spiritual world has a big influence in Japan.

00:21:52 John Daub: John, pan equals left or right, tilt up or down. Thank you. I'm going to pan and tilt. Now I'm in the shadow. And that's called shu-iro, the color of the torii gate there. Shu-iro, which is the color. I've been told of the sun. Vermillion, I believe is how you say it in English. And it's the color of the sun because it usually represents the sun is important for a good harvest. Rice is very important in Japan. So we give thanks to the sun. And then there's a nice little seating area here as well. I know a lot of people eat bentos here. If you come here in the afternoon during this, it's Sunday, but if you come here on an afternoon. You'll find that. Yeah. It's a lot of business people outside enjoying the fresh air.

00:23:00 John Daub: This is the Nihonbashi Muromachi Higashi bicycle parking lot. Yeah, that's right. So you can park your bicycle here. I'm just going to out of pure curiosity, I'm going to touch it. I always touch everything with my knuckle because I'm just curious. So you put your bicycle in there and you go down there with them and then you can place it. I'm not going to go down there because there's no signal, but it's interesting how beautiful the parking garages for Muromachi area of Nihonbashi. Hello, puppy love. That bike should probably go in there. Just saying. Oh, look at the beautiful scenes. How did I miss that? I was so worried about that motorcycle motorbike. I missed these little scenes that they put in the window back here and they've brought them to life. Look at that. How cool is that? Birdie birdie. Right? Representing the cherry blossoms. Oh, it's changing. What? That's so cool. What's next? Oh, same one. There's another one over here. That's the old Nihonbashi from the 17th century. Beautiful. This is all on the side of the Coredo department store. And look at this koi, koinobori. It's one of the carp windsocks that you'll see at the end of April when it gets really windy in Japan. Beautiful scene. Looks like this could be the old fish market from 1603 or this area of Nihonbashi represented.

00:25:02 John Daub: They had a really beautiful view of Mount Fuji from Nihonbashi on clear days, usually in the winter. The skies are so clear in the winter. Beautiful views. Even from Tokyo, you can see all the way to Mount Fuji in the winter. It gets hazy and it's very hard to see Mount Fuji in summer. The best time is probably the winter. It's probably between November and March, November and February when the air is very cool. On the other side of the road, I'm just going to go out here for a second to give you an idea. On the other side of the road, you'll see a lot of banks, a lot of really strong stone buildings representing fortresses of the banks, as well as the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, which is here. I had lunch there once. It was really good. I didn't pay. Somebody else paid. This is what happens. You get treated to a nice lunch at a hotel. Yeah, I believe that that's it right there. Oh, there's the Mandarin Oriental in this building. Beautiful building. And then there's that stone structure, a bank built in the old 1920s looking style. You see those in New York as well. All right, let's go back into the alleys.

00:26:43 John Daub: Boy, this tree looks old. I wonder if this is a survivor from World War II, maybe. I don't know. But it looks like a really big old tree, doesn't it? Some of the limbs have been cut off of it. Do you see? It's hard to tell if some of these trees have been here before the buildings were. Yeah. Hey, Luke's here. Do you think September will be okay to travel? Canada Health Minister now advises not to travel. ANA only let me change my trip to July for free. I don't see why not if you can travel now. But play it by ear. If it gets really bad, they're going to continue with you being able to cancel without charge. Because it's out of your control.

00:27:38 John Daub: We have a Discord server which answers all of these questions, guys. So if you do have any questions, you can go in there. We have people that are on the ground traveling right now who are writing in about what it's like here. Some of them are sharing pictures. Here is the link. I'm analog. This is the link. It's starting to get really old. Discord.gg/onlyinjapan. If you go in here, you'll get a chance to chat with a lot of people that have the same problems with traveling in Japan. I'm kind of putting it into there. So just stay on topic in that chat group. You know what I'm talking about. There's a few people who get out of line. All right. Let's go back in. This area is kind of quiet because we're further away from the historical fish market. And this is sort of getting on the fringe of moving over to Japan. So what I'm going to do is take you to the end of the street. Take a look at. Let's go through the alleys to get there. And then look at Edo Bridge, which were the two bridges that straddled the old fish market. When I say old, I mean really old, like 100 years ago old. Wow. Really nice spring day. Ancient stuff. That's right. Told by [inaudible]. Very ancient. Oh, this is a pretty alley. This is behind the shrine. It's a great place. You can get a bento and just sit outside if you want to save some money.

00:29:30 John Daub: I don't recommend getting the bentos. You can get them in the basement, I believe, of Coredo. There's places to buy bentos, maybe a couple hundred yen more. I do not recommend eating bentos from convenience stores more than maybe once during a trip. They're just full of chemicals and not very good for you. But they sure taste good. That's a good looking cheesecake. Just saying. I rarely eat convenience store food unless I'm on the run. Beautiful area. That's looking back at the shrine. You can see the torii with that striking vermillion colored gate there. Okay. Yeah, of course, there's like six of these cafes. They don't need me to promote them. They're everywhere. And they're always full. I can't believe they're so full. People go home.

00:30:56 John Daub: There's a chef on break. Those are those rent-a-cycles I was telling you about. Everyone's got one. They have batteries on them. Is that Uber Eats? Why are Uber Eats on rent-a-cycles? They're doing really good business right now. Maybe it's cheaper for them to have the rent-a-cycles than to buy them by their own, maybe. Or you could maybe they're on part-time workers. They're just working part-time and they rent a cycle for the day for 200 yen. They don't have to buy their own. They can deliver food with it. That's something I'm down for. Let's go take a look-see. Byron Bay. What? This looks Australian. This is interesting. I had no idea. Just a sign. Oh, so when they say pie, they mean like meat pies. How cool is that? I guess meat pies go good with coffee. Yummy. I had no idea they had Aussie meat pies were popular here. I had no idea. They are good. I love this alley. Lots of new shops.

00:32:24 John Daub: I like this parking garage. You see these circles here? That's how the cars go in here and then you back out. The circle moves the car around and then you exit. It's pretty cool. I like watching these in action. And inside of this skyscraper, it's just a carousel for cars. So there must be like a couple hundred cars in here. People paying by the month to have their car stored inside of this skyscraper. This is a nice little parking garage. I think if you have to ask me about bentos, I would say I would prefer the 7-Eleven ones. They're the ones doing the best job of trying to keep it chemical free. But Family Mart is getting in on it and there's a natural Lawson's and Lawson's is starting to do it now. So the quality of the bentos at the convenience stores are going up, but I still think it's always better to support a local business rather than buy it from a convenience store. Just my personal. This is an anago tempura don. Anago tempura set meal with miso soup. That's shrimp tempura on rice. It's completely packed inside there. There's people waiting outside to get in there. So it's got to be good. We're finding all the good places to eat lunch. This is marked out on my Google Maps.

00:34:16 John Daub: Let's go this way. Look at this cafe. This is the cafe. It's nice. It's a new building. Bunmeido Cafe. Very creepy. What do you guys think? Do you give that a thumbs up or what? This is slightly—it's too human-like to be cute to me. It's just too human-like. It's like a boy and a bear had a child or something. Weird. I'm just gonna get out of here. It's a nice looking pasta restaurant. Cafe. I wonder how they get the cars down without crushing the car down there. How does that work? I wonder. Does anybody know? Or does it do a like this kind of a thing? It's like you really need a lot of time to study parking garages. Here's another alley. Looks like—what is that business here? Let's take a look. I know it says noodles men. This looks like a noodle shop. Yeah, they got noodles here. It's closed though today. Curry rice in the back alley. This one looks like a bicycle shop. Closed today because it's Sunday.

00:36:44 John Daub: This looks like a haircut studio, modeling studio. On the weekdays, there's a lot more people here just because it's a business. This would be considered, I guess, the central business district. A lot of salary people come here working in the banking industry, working in the department stores nearby. On the other side is Tokyo Station. You could probably walk to Tokyo Station from here in about 10 minutes or less. Just walk across Nihonbashi and you're pretty much there. This shop, look at this one. This is a, I guess, tendon, which is tempura on rice, which is so good. Various tempura on rice. And then they put some dashi, some sauce on top of there. And when the tempura comes out fresh out of the fryer, when you put the sauce on it, it sizzles like this. That's how you know you have a good tendon. This shop is closed, but you can sit outside there. So we've seen three or four very crowded tendon shops. Tendon meaning tempura on a bowl of rice. Don is the rice bowl.

00:38:07 John Daub: Here's a—whoa. This is a gyu udon, beef and egg on udon. Look at that. That's so good looking. Oh man, alright, let's walk through here and then we're going to go to Edo Bridge. Edo Bridge. Okay, this is a new, they're opening up a restaurant here. I wonder what this is. Oh, this is the udon shop is here. This is the udon shop and this is also very crowded right now. How much is it for a bowl? Kake udon, which is the basic udon. Whoa, it's under $5 for a bowl. This one with the nikku udon, which is beef. And you can get, I like to have an egg on there. Oh, he's like welding something. That's $6. What? That's $6.50 about for this bowl. And you can get an egg tossed on there for another dollar. That's such a good deal. That'll fill you up. Alright, I'll be welding something back there. Wow, look at this tempura restaurant. The line is amazing. Alright, we're going to Edo Bridge here.

00:39:39 John Daub: We're now behind Miura Anjin's house. There's some more alleys. Again, the back alleys are where you're going to find some of the best restaurants that aren't in the guidebooks, but probably should be. Like this alley. Very cool. Again, it's a Sunday afternoon. So these are izakaya, places that you would normally drink at. Probably not open today, but on the weekdays after office people finish with work, they come here and booze with their friends. You can do some business. I've signed a lot of contracts to do work after hours by talking with, not actually signing the contracts there, but discussing all the details in a more casual format. It's very hard to do business if you're not going out after work, drinking a little bit with the people. Because after you get a couple of drinks, you can loosen up a little bit and really talk about what your motivations are in the business world. What you really want to gain out of this contract and working together. That has always happened, not in meetings, but afterwards. Love the murals, the paintings on the doors. Some kabuki. Alright, let's check out. Whoa, look at the thin tires on that bike. Alright, this is Edo-bashi.

00:41:36 John Daub: This one also has the highway over it. It's kind of de-beautified. 1964 Olympics was great, bringing infrastructure into the city of Tokyo, but it was bad in the sense that it just took the beauty out of everything. There's nothing pretty about a highway going across the city like this. And Edo Bridge was the back end of the fish market. Go Speed Racer! Do it! Do it! Whoa! Yeah, there's Edo Bridge. We're just going to wrap around here. There's some more alleys. You can go this way. And on the other side of Nihonbashi, there's also some pretty good izakaya that serve very generous portions of food for a pretty low price. But again, these highways here were built in 1964, 1963, in a very rushed way just to get everything done for the 1964 Olympics to show that Japan has moved on from the reconstruction. And the 1964 was a year that really lit the fire in Japan's economy.

00:43:24 John Daub: Here's Edo Bridge. For me, as somebody who lives here, it's kind of sad to see this. I don't know why. It's just on the other side of here, you can see in the distance, is Nihonbashi. That's where we started this live stream about 150, 200 meters this way. It's just kind of sad for me to see this overhang, the shadows here. It's kind of ugly. I can see why they built it, because it just made sense to follow the river. They followed the river to build the highways, the Kanda River. And yeah, if they ever get rid of this, it would be really nice. There's that historical stone bridge there, built in 1911. I believe the current Nihonbashi was built. And now it's just kind of not nice with all these roads. It's sort of interesting looking, I guess. What do you think? Should they get rid of the highways? Should they fix this up to make it look like it used to look in the 17th century? Maybe put a big wooden bridge that loops over? I think they should. I don't know. I'm somebody who likes to protect the history of things. Yeah. That's just me.

00:45:11 John Daub: They do tours here. On the other side of Nihonbashi, on this side now, we've kind of crossed over Edo Bridge. Down there, you see there's a walkway? You can go down there and they do river tours that go along the canals. Tokyo is very much right there. You can walk down there. I don't know if they're going on right now. I do know that because of the situation, a lot of things are closed. Including Tokyo Disneyland and Universal Studios that will be opening up in April when things get better. Some of them might be opening tomorrow. The Prime Minister did give a speech last night, which was encouraging. He did it very strongly and with a lot of confidence. I thought that was really good to see. You can feel that we're getting there. But it's not a time where we want to let up on things. We want to be safe. People have been asking me, and you can look around too, is it safe to come to Japan? I just don't think it's a good time to travel yet for a while. And if you can't make it to Japan, I will do the legwork for you until you can. I will do the legwork for you.

00:46:39 John Daub: Alright, let's go back to Nihonbashi. If you want daily updates, oh look at this picture. It's nice. It's just like a festival going on down there. Yeah. I'm doing posts on Instagram stories as well. If you want updates, you can check me out here. I'm analog now. Alright, let's go back to the main street. It's about 100 meters down this road. The back alleys is where you're going to discover a lot of things. Really cool things. Really nice restaurants. And Nihonbashi is an area of the city that you should not miss. Just there's a lot of history here. So many more bicyclers now. Muromachi. Nihonbashi, Muromachi. What is it? Sushi? This looks like a pretty fun place to eat. I'm just going to stand up on the deck. It's closed right now. It looks like really—oh, you can sit outside on the canals here. There's some seating out there. How nice is that? Wow. Alright. It's pretty reasonable. That's 1,000 yen. 1,200 yen. About 10, 12 dollars per dish. Looks like teishoku. Everything comes with a bowl of rice and miso soup. Let's have some tempura with a bowl of udon for 1,000 yen. 10 dollars. That is a bargain. Alright, Kanae. We got to come back here.

00:48:49 John Daub: We are about 3 or 4 days away from the cherry blossoms just breaking out. I think today's sunshine is going to put it over the top. Tuesday is going to be the day, I think. And yeah, you know, they've stopped the celebration. The hanami. We're going outside with the blue sheets. They're discouraging people from doing that. And I completely understand that. We don't want to meet in groups like this. But I'm still going to go there and take you there. If the blossoms are going to bloom, you better believe that I'm going to take you there with me. Alright, let's go over where we were and where we walked today. This is Nihonbashi. This is where I started right here, which is the birthplace of the Nihonbashi fish market. That's where we started, right here, at this marker. And we crossed the street and then went down this alley. This is where the tempura place and where Miura Anjin—he has his own street. Anjin-dori. So, William Adams, the first Englishman samurai to live here in Japan, his stone is right here. It's listed right here on this map. And then we walked past the vending machine here, through Coredo, which is this beautiful area. And there's a shrine here. And then we walked through here and walked through these alleys to Edo Bridge and now we're back here. On this side, lots of banks.

00:50:16 John Daub: What's really interesting, those who are here and want to see more, the currency museum is pretty interesting because Japan used to use rice instead of coins as currency. Pretty cool, huh? Like, your value was determined by how many koku of rice that you were able to generate every year. So going into the currency museum, seeing the old currency, how they kept money in Asia, it was pretty interesting. So I recommend that museum highly. I don't think it's too expensive. The security to get in there is—because there's a lot of gold in there, security is pretty tough. But it's worth it. Here we are looking down. I believe this is Chuo Avenue. If you go straight, I think takes you to Akihabara. Past Kanda Station. In the distance, you can see the trains going by. That's Kanda Station. Underneath there, it kind of loops around towards Akihabara where there's the main street you walk past with the Sobu Line going over it. That's this road. And if you go this way, underneath Nihonbashi, that's the sign that says Japan's Bridge, you'll go straight to Ginza. So this main street is pretty cool. You can ride your bicycle, go straight from Ginza all the way from Shinbashi, even Shinagawa, I think. All the way from Shinagawa, you can ride up to Akihabara and eventually Asakusa if you take a turn. It's pretty cool.

00:52:00 John Daub: So this is the time of the livestream. Write in where you're from. Always appreciate it. It's neat to see where everyone's watching from. If you have any questions, ask me as well. I'm going to be walking around here for the next couple of minutes. So then you can get an idea yourself of what it's like. Try not to say anything. Just listen to the sounds of Tokyo. Very cool. I'm going to be doing some indoor episodes next week, tomorrow morning. I'll be going out. Maybe a midnight snack ride is on the horizon. Click the like button if you like these walking tours. There's a lot of other neighborhoods I could take you to. I also want to take you to Japan's best karipane bakery. You've got to go in the morning. Not the best time to eat a curry donut in the morning. Kind of spicy, salty. But that's when people buy it. I'll probably be going there next week as well if they're open and will have me.

00:54:08 John Daub: Thanks so much for watching. It's wonderful. Thank you, Hong. Thanks for doing these livestreams. Really appreciate them. My upcoming trip is uncertain. Yeah, I understand about the uncertainty that we're all experiencing and that it's not the best time to be traveling. Some of you have trips that you can't cancel. Just understand that it's not the best time to be traveling. It's a tough time. Everybody is practicing social distancing. If you're in crowded areas, take public transportation. Wear masks. Wash your hands. Touch something. Wash your hands again. Just develop really good habits and this will help you. Because we don't know how long it's going to be like this. But for me, I live here. I'm not going anywhere. And as long as I'm going to be doing this livestreaming channel, I'm going to be bringing you with me. So if you can't make it to Japan, I'll be here for you. And you can just join me for now. There's no one around me. Social distancing. Bye everybody.