00:00:00 John Daub: Greetings everybody. Hello, welcome to Tokyo. This is another Japan travel update from the city. I've been doing this now since the end of January when the outbreak looked like it was coming towards here. A lot of people lost, cancelled their trips as a result of it, and I'm going to keep these updates going because if you do like them, click the thumbs up button. Liking it means that you like it, which means I'll keep doing them. So I have the news right here. I've been watching it every day since, and currently in Tokyo and in Japan, the entire country, we have 15,354 people that have tested positive for COVID-19 as of May 7th.

00:00:35 John Daub: The state of emergency was set to expire on May 6th, was extended by Prime Minister Abe a few days ago to May 31st. So we're still under a soft state of emergency. Japan does not have the legal means to enforce people who quote-unquote break the social rules like not wearing a mask or going outside. There's nothing really to prevent them, but we just have a different approach in Japan. Is it working? I don't know. Maybe, but the numbers are starting to go down a little bit. I'll show you that right here.

00:01:18 John Daub: A lot of the information that I get is from TV news. I watch TBS Hiroobi as well as some of the other news reports throughout most of the day. In the background, Kanae Daub and I are watching. In this update, tell you some of the things that are on the mind of people here in Japan according to the TV news, as well as some of the things that have been discussed on our Discord server. If you want to go check that out, you can take a look in the moderators will probably put it up there, but it's discord.gg slash only in Japan. We have a pretty good community there. All right, take a look at this. This is Kyoto News.

00:01:56 John Daub: So you can see, once again, how Hokkaido was at the forefront of this in February, and then Tokyo just started to take over around March 23rd. And over the last month, it's really increased here, COVID-19 in Tokyo. But it's starting to sort of flatten out a little bit, although the rates are not good enough that Kanae Daub and I feel comfortable. So hopefully over the next two weeks, we'll be able to see the situation in Tokyo, the line starting to go down more. It's been pretty consistent, though. Testing has started to increase in the city. And I'll get to that a little bit later in this update.

00:02:46 John Daub: JNTO, the Japan National Tourism Organization, is a site that I get a lot of information on about the situation in Japan. They have a website. If you just search JNTO coronavirus, you'll find the link in Google. And they have a list of the countries currently restricted from entry into Japan. And they continuously update this. This is a good place if you're thinking about coming to Japan in the fall, a good place to bookmark so you can see what the situation is all in one place. Basically, right now, everybody is restricted from coming to Japan. That has not changed since the last week. Visa-exempt country suspensions are also listed.

00:03:26 John Daub: That means that if you do have a visa, to come here to work, a job was supposed to start this month or next month or sometime over the next couple of months, you might want to call the Japanese embassy in your country just to make sure and confirm if your visa is still valid. All I know is at this time, a lot of the visas have been suspended. I don't know exactly what that means either because the laws and the decisions are changing almost, I wouldn't say daily, but they're changing every 10 days. It's taking about 10 days to 2 weeks, it seems. So what is happening 10 days ago is not happening 10 days from now. It's moving quite quickly and it's very fluid.

00:04:12 John Daub: A lot of people have written me their concerns about coming to Japan because they have work and other things. You definitely want to check in with the embassy on this because the list on JNTO lists countries including the United Kingdom, which cannot travel here at all. You'll be refused upon entry if you do somehow get on the airplane and you'll be on the next flight back which is who knows when. Flights are very limited. Postal service is this is important for expats that are living here in Tokyo and Japan.

00:04:41 John Daub: If you are planning to send packages abroad just note that to the United States and Canada the EMS which is express delivery package that usually takes three to four days to get to New York is now taking three to six months. I repeat three to six days to now three to six months. The reason why there aren't a lot of flights that are taking off the flights that carried mail no longer are carrying mail too so just because there's a flight leaving on an ANA flight to Chicago doesn't mean it's carrying mail anymore. It might be carrying other things for other people depending on the contracts that the airlines have but DHL the German delivery service seems to be running just fine as well as the UK mail the post in the United Kingdom not Ireland though just it's not both of the islands but packages are still going there and I'm surprised that it takes three to four days to get to people in Germany when I sent packages and the United States people still have not received postcards that I sent at the beginning of last month they're starting to trickle in now which is five six weeks after I sent them.

00:06:01 John Daub: So if you are waiting for a package and you've ordered something from Japan, just be patient. It is on the way. There's just no way to get it. What the Japan Post did tell me is that Surface Mail, and this is a first, Surface Mail is actually faster than Air Mail right now. That's crazy, right? So I'll be sending to my Patreon supporters in the Daimyo level their Daimyo packages, which are packages of goodies that I share with supporters by Surface Mail. And they said it'll take anywhere between one to two months, three at the worst possibility, but this time they're long shelf life items. The mail situation kind of gives a story in its own. There's just not a lot of flights. Mail has slowed to a crawl depending on the country. Mail to Australia is also completely shut down from Japan. There's no way to get packages there. They're just refused and returned if you try to send something to Australia.

00:07:00 John Daub: JNTO website has a list of attractions that have been suspended. And the status of them are mostly now turned to TBA to be announced. These attractions include Tokyo Disneyland, DisneySea, the Ghibli Museum, the Tokyo Skytree. In Osaka, Universal Studios Japan is also closed with no clear opening date. Fuji-Q Highland in Yamanashi Prefecture has now been closed. It was partially opened at the beginning of April for a little bit. At the end of May, they were doing temperature checks and alcohol washes of people's hands. But now the situation is because of Tokyo and Saitama and the Kanto area had such a high density of people with COVID-19, they have closed.

00:07:48 John Daub: What's not clear is Huis Ten Bosch in Nagasaki seems partially open. And that's an amusement park down in Kyushu. I know the situation down in Kyushu is a little bit different. Fukuoka Prefecture is one of the seven prefectures with a high case of infection. There are seven prefectures of Japan's 47 that have higher cases than everywhere else. They're the ones with the highest urban density, the population density. Fukuoka is the one down in Kyushu that has the highest. The other prefectures are starting to see a decrease in the rate of COVID-19 infections. Tokyo is the outlier where it's still somewhat increasing. And we'll go over what that means in a couple of minutes.

00:08:29 John Daub: But once again, if you're looking at an indicator of when we can travel back to Japan, and I know a lot of you canceled your trips as a result, many of you using these updates as sort of, if you were on the fringe, these updates helped you to make a decision. And I really appreciate that you put that kind of trust in me. The JNTO website is a place that gives you an indicator of where this is going to be going. When you start seeing attractions opening up and making that TBA to a date, then you're going to know that we're probably getting closer to reopening the country, reopening to tourism. First to domestic tourism and then to international tourism. We're not sure when that's going to be.

00:09:12 John Daub: The government masks. This is interesting. A lot of people have been asking me about the, it's nicknamed Abe no Mask after Prime Minister Abe and his Abenomics, the way he had his style of economics to stimulate the economy. Abe no Mask was something that he introduced, Prime Minister Abe introduced to help alleviate the worry of citizens that we just couldn't get masks to protect ourselves. And this, as we all know, masks, wearing masks, which people argued with me back in February and said masks do nothing. And now everybody is wearing masks. People could not find them in the stores. So the government decided to send two masks per family, which makes sort of half sense, because families could have up to four or five members and extended families often live in the same household in Japan. So there could be seven people in a house.

00:10:05 John Daub: Two masks were sent out to some of the wards in Tokyo, but we did not receive ours in Chuo Ward. I don't know if some of you other who are watching received your government masks, but ours didn't come. And after some research, it's not talked too much about. The masks were found to be contaminated, some with human hair, some with stains on them. And they were brought back. And because they were made so quickly to try to get out to the people, basically they've been recalled and they'll be distributed later on. We're not clear on when. Regardless, Kanae Daub and I have masks. We had some sent to us. Everybody's making their own masks.

00:10:43 John Daub: And if you walk around the city of Tokyo and you take a look, some people still have paper masks, but the majority of people now have homemade masks that they've made out of cloth. The reason why is they want to prevent the droplets from spreading. And even reducing that can cut out the distance in which it is infected. Are people using masks in Tokyo too much, putting too much dependence on them? Probably. Social distancing is getting better. This was a problem in the last update, where people were coming up to me in the supermarket, like up to my shoulder. People were really close to me at traffic lights or walking right by me. Now, gradually, due to TV news reporting on this, we're seeing social distancing improve in the center of Tokyo. Outside, like in the prefectures, it's not a big deal in the countryside. But here it is sort of a big deal because of the population density we have. That's improving.

00:11:39 John Daub: What's available in the supermarkets and not available in the supermarkets in Japan? Nearly everything is available. We don't have any shortages. I'll tell you what we have shortages of. Alcohol. There's not enough cleaning alcohol for sanitation. We have not seen that sold. And when it is, it's sold out very quickly. And the prices are much higher. Basically, they're higher not because of gouging. They're higher because the price of ethanol and alcohol has just skyrocketed due to demand. So I believe ethanol alcohol is now more expensive than gasoline.

00:12:21 John Daub: The other thing that we have very little of right now is game consoles. These are in short supply and tempers are rising in Japan because the supply of Nintendo Switches is astronomically low. Meaning I can't get my hands on one to do live streams of Animal Crossing. This is disturbing not just my wife. It's disturbing me. And we have felt bouts of anger and disappointment and depression. So Nintendo, please ship us one immediately. Sony PlayStation 4, please give us one too. We can't even get that. And we're talking about like the old number fours. Not even the pro version. Not even the one terabyte. We can't even get the 500 gigabyte one. It's impossible.

00:13:05 John Daub: We're going to have to hit the older retro games that are available. And in fact, the Famicom that we bought and did a live stream on is sold out too. We were lucky to get one of those. Big Camera did have a Nintendo Switch lottery. They had a shipment. Now, Nintendo, because of demand, shipped a lot of the Nintendo consoles that were bound for Japan and switched that over to the United States. Demand was maybe even higher there. So hopefully the next shipment comes to Japan. But Big Camera, which is one of the big electronics stores in Japan, had a lottery for Switches. I applied for it. I lost. Kanae Daub did not want the console. She did not see the value of it. Now she does because I was crying. And next lottery, we will both apply because only one entry means we had only one chance when we should have had two.

00:14:10 John Daub: This is all from the news. In the news, I'm just a little serious. I try to get in as much as I can in the first 15 minutes. I'm going to also go over schools now. And the news. The new PCR testing guidelines changed in Japan. Thank goodness. I'm going to go over that in a second. And one of the headlines was that air travel demand unlikely to return to pre-pandemic levels quickly, which we kind of all knew.

00:14:48 John Daub: Schools in Japan have been something that people have been asking a lot of questions about, especially in the United States. We know that in the U.S., school is out until next year, meaning kids won't be going back until September. At the worry of parents who are thinking, what do we do? How do we entertain the kids? In Japan, it's no different. Parents here are scared to death about having to have the kids at home in their little houses because in Tokyo, apartments are extremely cramped. Can you imagine? Everybody in one room? No. It's compounded, the amount of unemployment. I wonder how many fights people are going through now. But the fact of the matter is Japanese schools are going back.

00:15:36 John Daub: And a lot of the prefectures have not seen increases. Iwate Prefecture and Tohoku has not seen any infections, which just seems ridiculously impossible. But that's what it's reported, and we have nothing to dispute that. Zero infections in Iwate Prefecture. Tottori and Shimane Prefecture and the Sea of Japan have just a few. Mostly travelers that have come back from Tokyo were isolated and it didn't spread. Yonago City is the biggest city in Tottori Prefecture, and they don't have many, maybe like a few infections at all.

00:16:09 John Daub: And because we were told by the local governments, do not go out of your prefecture, especially the people in the seven affected prefectures, which are Saitama, Tokyo, Chiba, Kanagawa, Osaka, Hyogo which is Kobe, Fukuoka. And Hokkaido. Those are the ones still worrying. So schools have been, what they've decided to do here in Japan is very interesting. The schools, when they do reopen, the desks used to be 85 centimeters apart. Now they are going to be two meters apart. And there's only about 12 desks in each classroom, which means that not all the students can go.

00:17:31 John Daub: How do you resolve this? What the TV news was saying is that they're going to stagger the times that kids go to school throughout the day, meaning freshmen in high school might be going in the morning. And then in the afternoon, the sophomores will go, and then the juniors and then the seniors in the evening. And then they'll rotate that. And the ones that cannot go, maybe they hold some people back. We'll have to do online lessons. So people are going into school for half of the week and doing online lessons for half of the week. What is for certain is that there is no remedy to this yet. So online lessons is not something that Japan is actively doing everywhere nationwide yet. But we're starting to see news reports that they are getting there, which is good.

00:18:20 John Daub: The school year in Japan, by the way, starts in April. And in the United States, it starts in September. So if you're trying to, it's hard to compare the two countries because they're six months apart, you know, beginning of April, beginning of September. It doesn't quite match with that. We're in like 40 days now. We started on at the end of March. We've gone through April and now a week into May. And I'm getting antsy. Like I want to go out and film. But I can't. That's why I'm so thankful for the support, everybody. Do give me a thumbs up if you like these updates. Much, much appreciated.

00:19:14 John Daub: Kanae Daub is the star in these stay-at-home episodes. And I listen to her. So if she needs an extra 15 minutes for makeup and hair to do these, I'm all for it. Back to the schools. One girl was quoted. And her name is Kanao Sakamoto. Eight years old. I think this is from Tottori Prefecture. I was at home and bored. So I'm happy to be back. She's in third grade. I can't wait to eat lunch and see my friends. I love that. So the Kyodo News in English had that quote. And I was reading it and I was like really touched because I'm trying to imagine an eight-year-old girl happy to go back to school. I think even kids in the United States might really want to be going back to school. You really don't want to see mom and dad every day, do you, kids? School is good. School is cool.

00:20:31 John Daub: New PCR testing guidelines. The new guidelines to be set by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare soon. Would no longer limit testing to people who have developed a fever of 37.5 degrees Celsius or higher for at least four days. My friend, Shinichi, wrote this. He's from Tabi Eats, had a fever for over four days and he could not get testing. You don't have to be... Just have a fever but you have to be examined by a doctor and be determined that you qualify for a test. Why Japan was not testing is still not really 100% clear. One of them was that they just didn't have enough testing. The other one was they didn't believe that testing was accurate enough until you had a fever for a certain amount of days.

00:21:18 John Daub: Whatever the excuse was, Japan has a Japanese way to approach this. And America has an American way. And there's no one way that's better than the other. And criticizing it never really helped anything. So this is just the way it is. And I kind of accept the fact that if I do get sick, I probably will not get tested. Which is probably the same in most countries. It's really hard to get the PCR testing. Although it is getting better. And that is the most important thing. Look at the positives, not on the negative, people. Everybody is feeling in the dark side, okay? It is