00:00:00 John Daub: I'm back! Because it's kind of an internet phenomenon right now. Kanae Daub, you wanna try it? Look, the albino masks!

00:00:39 Kanae Daub: Yeah!

00:00:42 John Daub: Waiting forever. Kanae is actually teaching ballet to her students via Zoom. That's me right there. How you doing everybody? Yeah, there you go. Check it out. Look at this.

00:00:53 Kanae Daub: Wow! There's two in there.

00:00:57 John Daub: Yes, just two. So, me and you. Yeah! Which is one of the problems they said, what do you do with a family of four? I guess you cut them in half. I'm not sure. Yeah, but better than nothing, right?

00:01:09 Kanae Daub: Better than nothing. That's right.

00:01:11 John Daub: Because back in February and March, there weren't any masks available at the supermarket or stores. We were kind of in a panic. We didn't know what to do. We weren't sure if you could just use a scarf, if we were using the masks to protect ourselves. And there's a lot of misconceptions about it. But now that we got these masks and we've been researching it for a couple of months now, it's basically just covering our faces so we don't get droplets and just reduce the risk to other people. If everyone is wearing a mask, then it's kind of a good thing.

00:01:45 Kanae Daub: Let's open this up and just take a look.

00:01:47 John Daub: Go ahead. You can... Kanae's going to open up the Abenomasuku (Abe no mask). Wait, is this called Abenomasuku? Because it comes from Prime Minister Abe who announced this.

00:01:55 Kanae Daub: Yes.

00:01:56 John Daub: It's officially Abenomasuku?

00:01:58 Kanae Daub: No.

00:01:59 John Daub: It's officially Abenomasuku.

00:02:01 Kanae Daub: No. It's official. Yes.

00:02:03 John Daub: This is called Abenomasuku. I think it's just the internet called it that.

00:02:05 Kanae Daub: Yeah, internet called, but it's a nice name.

00:02:11 John Daub: It's a nice name. Minasan, this is a letter to the people. And this basically says because of the coronavirus, please stay inside and these should help to protect you. Yeah, just kind of a nice letter. This was delivered from the post office. Post office has 100,000 workers, 1100 locations, and they've been delivering this. This is 60 million households. What is this Mitsunomitsu up here?

00:02:40 Kanae Daub: Mitsunomitsu. Yeah.

00:02:42 John Daub: So basically stay away from clusters. Don't go to places without opening the window. Get proper ventilation.

00:02:50 Kanae Daub: Yeah, mipei (no ventilation), michu (crowded), missetsu (close-talking).

00:02:54 John Daub: It's called Surimitsu (the three C's). I researched on the internet. It's called C3 in English. I don't know why, but it's called C3 in English. Maybe it's like mipei is no window, so it's just room. So like live house, theater. Yeah. So don't go there. So michu is many people. Yeah, places that are crowded, avoid them. Then missetsu means people talking very closely.

00:03:24 Kanae Daub: Yeah. So you shouldn't do that. Look at those ladies. They shouldn't be gossiping about their neighbors. So it's this street, this kind of street together. It's very, very high risk for you get the coronavirus.

00:03:38 John Daub: Yeah. It's good that this information is coming in the mail. We're going to go over this. Oh, there's more inside. I didn't even notice that. Like how to use it properly. This is interesting. Also to wash your hands. Be careful. The elder, the people that are higher at risk get enough sleep. Take your temperature. Contact if you're having any problems. Contact the helpline. And then what is this? How to wash the masks?

00:04:05 Kanae Daub: Yes. Oh, there's washing instructions. How cool is this?

00:04:10 John Daub: So this is. Kenneth writes in here, C3 stands for confined spaces, crowd and contact. Maybe. We can't use it for dryer. Oh, so don't put it in it. Well, that's not a problem. We don't have a dryer.

00:04:20 Kanae Daub: Yeah.

00:04:21 John Daub: Yeah. You can put 0.7 gram detergent for two liters of water and 0.7 grams of detergent in it. And then this will wash the masks. And then you can reuse these. And that was kind of the point. Put them in dryers. Don't iron them and don't put it in super hot water. Right.

00:04:44 Kanae Daub: Yeah.

00:04:44 John Daub: And there's a link in the description. There's a YouTube video right there. You can. For those of you who have QR code readers, you can take a picture, scan this and see the government issued video on YouTube on how to wash the masks. I'm going to have to check that out.

00:05:00 Kanae Daub: What? Okay. I'm going to have to check this out.

00:05:02 John Daub: This is too good to pass up. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. All right. Go ahead and check it out. Let's put these on. This is all about reviewing the government issued masks. The internet dubs it Abenomasuku, coming from Prime Minister Abe. I think he's doing a really good thing in thinking about protecting people, addressing the worries. But the government, federal government responses are never going to be perfect.

00:05:25 Kanae Daub: Okay.

00:05:26 John Daub: It's cotton.

00:05:26 Kanae Daub: Yeah. Cotton? Yeah.

00:05:30 John Daub: So for example, you have to pay 46.6 billion yen or about $430 million to send out these to 60 million households. Some of them might be abandoned households, but the government is now taking those back or asking people who don't need these masks to give them back and then they'll be distributed to other people who might need more or to hospitals as well that need more masks. I think that's kind of a good thing. They've had a little bit more time to think about this, but go ahead, try your Abenomasuku.

00:05:55 Kanae Daub: That looks really good. It works. What do you what do you what does the internet think? It works. You got a smaller head than Prime Minister Abe.

00:06:08 John Daub: His mask looks really small like an eye patch but yeah I see there's some spaces on the side here so the I think it'll absorb and reduce the droplets but there are some spaces on the side of the face here and also on from the top and it's hard to cover your nose enough yeah it but it looks like a nice mask from the 1960s. This is the style. Yeah when I first came to Japan people weren't wearing paper masks so much. They were wearing masks that were washable like this. I remember saying oh boy I wish I had a cloth mask. It doesn't have a pleat so yeah there's no pleats in it that open up. I'm gonna take people outside. You actually have to teach your class right?

00:06:58 Kanae Daub: Yeah.

00:06:59 John Daub: Do you have anything else you want to tell the people?

00:07:01 Kanae Daub: Use your mask.

00:07:03 John Daub: Use your mask.

00:07:04 Kanae Daub: I use Abenomasuku.

00:07:05 John Daub: You use Abenomasuku. Are we really gonna use these?

00:07:08 Kanae Daub: I don't know maybe I can keep it because I have my homemade mask which Miyu sent to us. I wash it every day so I can keep it. I don't want to use it yet so if I don't use it I can give someone or I don't know.

00:07:28 John Daub: So we should keep it. Keep it as a souvenir or history. This is marking history government issued masks. So I'm gonna take this outside while Kanae does her lessons. We got a mask from Miyu's mother. I don't know if you remember the Ask Miyu episode from a couple of days ago. Miyu is a college student and we asked her some questions about life in Japan and high school. And she and her mom is the one who sent us this mask. Here let me put this on here. Her mom sent me this. Check this mask. Check it out. It's a little bit too big. This covers everything. I have a child-sized face. But it's locked here on this side. It's locked here and it really covers up to my panda looking eyes from lack of sleep. It looks like my underwear. Who wrote that? I'll try to ignore that that just went through the chat screens. All right. We also have a lot of other face masks. This is sent to me by Florence in Singapore. This box of disposable surgical masks. And you can see here I'm gonna take one out. We've been using these washable masks like this to go out. It's not so much to protect ourselves from getting sick. But more about making sure that we just reduce the risk to everybody. These are the paper masks. You can see the folds here which come out. And you can put these around the ear. These are made pretty good. But again like I don't think any of these masks as we learned have that kind of.

00:09:18 John Daub: You can close the door, Kanae.

00:09:19 John Daub: She's starting her lesson. Good luck. Look at that. She threw us outside. I have to crack. I think wait if you close the door does the wi-fi go through glass? Maybe the wi-fi won't go through glass. I don't know. I hope the signal doesn't cut off. So these are the disposable masks we have about 20 of them left. So we've been really conserving them because we're just not going outside. I also have other masks here. These masks I use these for the airplanes. They have moisture packs in them that you can put the moisture packs in on the left and right. And on a long flight these keep you not just safe but they keep you moist and helps with your throat. This is a individually wrapped mask. We found a lot of masks in our closet when we were cleaning the apartment as a result of staying here. We have a lot of time to clean. This is a respirator mask. A NIOSH approved N95 mask. And Kanae's mother gave this to me like five years ago and I found it under the sink. And then these masks as well. We have other kinds of masks. And now we have Abenomasuku. They're not sanitary napkins. Pono how old is my audience huh? The audience is like average age is like 12. Which sounds about right actually cause I'm also sometimes acting like I'm 12. The point is though that these masks these paper masks really were at the time when these the Abenomasuku the government issued mask was announced. Masks were just impossible to get. And there was a lot of fear from the Japanese public on whether or not they could protect themselves. So the government said the first thing we could do and they did this before the stimulus payment which was kind of worrying. They announced that they would hand out these masks. This mask actually I think suits me. This mask suits me. And I want to shout out to Miyu and her family. Thank you so much. Yesterday we ate kaiseki (multi-course Japanese cuisine) bento. And she gave me a super chat and I didn't see it. And Miyu I want to say thank you so much. We really appreciated that and we did see it just afterwards. Before I put this on I want to explain to you something alright. The internet loved they loved to hate this mask. And there are pictures on the internet if you put in Abenomasuku of the prime minister with two masks on his head because they're not big enough. There are people complaining that two per family is not enough. And I think just it was the people. They just said speed is important. And then what has happened was that the masks were distributed in the middle of April. But they were found to be tainted. Some of them had human hair on it. There were stains on some of them. Some of them were moldy. So the government recalled the masks went out and had them remade and they've been repackaged again. Of course it cost. But look when you're in a pandemic and I know we're worried about the pandemic. We're worried about money. We should be. But again like I still think it was a really good gesture from the government. You can disagree with me but I thought it was nice that they tried to get out to the people and address their concerns. Yeah human hair Anthony that was pretty nasty. So these masks what it is essentially is layers of cloth in there. So there's one two. Hold on a second. One two three. Four five layers of cloth that are double folded. So almost like ten layers in here. It's stitched on the sides and these ear things are elastic. It's a pretty strong elastic. Better than the one from my Miyu no mask. But this one just has love in it. Miyu made that with love. This was made in a factory. Not that you know factory workers aren't putting love into their work. Let's try it. All right. I got a smaller figure. I'm gonna show you the face. It smells like a factory. I probably should wash it first. My face is smaller so it's got better coverage. It's locked on the bottom of my chin. There are some small openings but not quite the same as Kanae. And it's actually on my face it's locked in pretty good. I got better coverage than Kanae. But again it's just like it's a very basic square patch. How do you wash it? There's instructions that came with the government issued mask on how to wash it right here. Okay. So you wash I guess you hand wash it. I've been hand washing this with soap and just washing it. It's not a diaper mask. The internet's going crazy with insults on this mask. I see no problem with this mask. It's better than nothing. All right. But since this started the internet has been going wild. With a new approach to it. It's called hold on a second. Where'd my phone go? It's called Abenomasuku Remake. Abe no Mask Remake. And on Instagram I put the hashtag here. And you can see what Japanese users are doing. I've gotta go I'm gonna go raid Kanae's lesson. All right. I can't believe I left my phone. Okay just be quiet everybody. Be quiet. I'm gonna raid a lesson. Be quiet.

00:16:02 John Daub: So I wanted to show you on how the internet is representing these masks here. So on Instagram if you Google Abenomasuku Remake you can see how people are what people are doing with their Abenomasuku or like I shouldn't really call it I don't know if it's if the prime minister feels bad about this so I'm just gonna call them government issued masks. Because I think he's doing the best job that he can do. And you can see people are taking the masks and doing something else with them. Either they're making more masks with them or they're unstitching them and restitching them together to restitching them to make different masks. Because there's a lot of oh that looks like somebody took their underwear and made something out of it. So you can see this lady here she's completely remade the Abenomasuku. Some people are unfolding them and remake them by stitching them bigger. Here's another person who's doing it in Japan. And look at that they created new patterns from it. That's pretty cool. Some new designs from the Abenomasuku that they've taken it and remade them. This is really cool. You can see the size difference of a typical mask and the ones we just received. This is really big on Japanese Instagram. A lot of them are being recolored or redone for style. That looks really cool. That's a nice. Is that marker? You think they took marker? Is that safe? That's a really good remake right there. That looks good too. Look at these. These are really fashionable remakes. There was one that I wanted to show you that looked really good. Here's one of a video where they're drawing on the mask so kids can make their own Abenomasuku Remake. It's pretty sweet. I like it. I like it. I might put polka dots on mine but then if I use red it'll look like chicken pox. That's not good. Pandemic. Yeah. There's also a video on how to wash it. If you are interested you can right now take a picture of this QR code and then you can find the video. It's on YouTube on how to wash it and I'm going to show you this video right now. I'm going to go ahead and do this for you. Hey Toby. Thanks a lot man. So what remake are you doing with yours John? Tony we just got it and we're going to be thinking of a way maybe to make our masks a little bit better or we might just keep it like this because this is history Tony. See this? This is history in Japan. This is announced on TV and they came so I think I don't know if we're just going to put it away and then keep it for the next pandemic. I'm not sure. Akali Trujillo is here. Thank you. Jay Jersey girl. I live in Utah and residents can receive a few reusable masks. You can just fill out your information and how many family members in your house. That's really good. The reason why they debated this for a long time and the reason why that they did it like this and had the post office send it is because they wanted people to stay at home. The masks at the city hall that would have been just chaos. Imagine that you know thousands of people waiting in line for masks. So they had a budget and they put it together and they enlisted the help of 100,000 postal workers at 1100 offices around Japan sending these out to 60 million households and that's the plan and it's been kind of slow but you know the pandemic is still going on and probably still be going on for quite a while. So it's good to have not just homemade masks like this one and it's really well made. I love the inside of it. I guess you could even flip it around if you wanted to to get a different pattern. That's pretty cool. But you can also you know do something with this but paper masks are not the only game in town. All right Kenny G. Chonit writes in here cool. I like this the pear guy is funny. Jaden Westhead's here. Hey John I was wondering if I could ask you and Kanae are you doing especially mentally during these times of isolation thanks again for your streams. Irvonne is here get a Robo Tech or Super Famicom style. That's a good idea. We can redo these masks too but we can make different kinds of styles. I think when you're trapped in self-isolation you have free time you start to create think outside the box. That's probably what we're going to be doing with this mask here. Marty's here. Hey Marty get a hamster. I know when you can make at least 25 little hamster masks out of this. We've been thinking about getting a hamster. We've been thinking about getting a hamster for a long time but we can't go to the store to go get it because all the pet shops are closed so I hope that they're feeding the little baby hamsters. Kanae's got ballet music going on next door. Oh I like this one. The thing is they a lot of people have redone this and redid the stitching so it fits better especially around the nose. So that looks really good what she's done here with this mask and you can see she lays out exactly how she did it. She's done it on Instagram. That's wonderful. This looks like it takes a little bit of time. By the way this is my Instagram. We just got 70,000 followers. Thank you guys. My goal is 100,000. I've got big lofty goals. Let's take a look and see about the washing instructions from the government and I will take some of your questions on the Abenomasuku. For me this is really exciting but because for the longest time I've been wanting to do a review on these masks because I've been in the news forever. Here we go. QR code. Right. Everybody knows that there's a QR code. All you have to do is use your iPhone camera. Point it to a QR code and it automatically will take you to the website. This is the government website and now I'm going to look for the YouTube video on how to wash. It's not intuitive. Here you guys can look at it with me together. So the government issued website is here. Where's the YouTube video to question and answer. How do you wash it? English. Oh look, it's like English translated distribution of all cloth masks. What is the reason for distributing cloth masks to all households? The shortage of masks at retailers continues. We have secured approximately 100 million mask units that are going to consistently and rapidly distribute two units per household to all 60 million households across the country. Japan Times newspaper reported 60 million. What do we do if two cloth masks cannot cover the entire household? We are going to additionally distribute masks to schools, nursing homes and other facilities by the middle of April. We are considering other countermeasures to household supports if these extras are not sufficient. So I believe they made more masks and they'll find a way to get it to people who really need that. What is the benefit of distributing cloth masks? Cloth masks are effective at preventing the spread of viruses into the air, which helps protect others. Wearing masks is an effective way to protect yourself. Wearing masks is effective at preventing people from touching their noses and mouths. This is all the stuff I told you. People were arguing with me. How will the masks be delivered? Japan Post. Which prefectures are first? The prefectures at the highest risk were first, so Tokyo got them quick. Although it took a while because of the recall. Where's the YouTube video? Hey. Hey. It says here that there's a video on how to wash it. Okay. Let me try it here. Now these are made out of cloth. Let me just give it a good look here. Mask. We can find it. So there are a couple of places here. I can't find the government's one. I'll put a link in the description so then you can find it after I find it a little bit more. I didn't know that they had a YouTube video. That's intriguing. I do think that wearing a mask is extremely important and I know that a lot of people in the Western countries when they came to Japan. They were freaked out. Like why is everyone wearing a sick mask? I can't understand. Are they sick? It's kind of scary. Is this a pandemic? But in Japan it's very typical to be wearing a mask in your house, around your neighborhood going to work. If you have someone who's sick or if you are, in the winter or you're suffering from allergies like pollen, this helps to reduce the amount of pollen or hay fever so you don't feel ill for a very long time. This will reduce your hay fever symptoms. But this is also Japan, especially Tokyo is a very crowded city and if people are not wearing masks, the spread of the flu and colds and other things would be so rapid. We're just used to this kind of lifestyle to have to wear masks between November and March. Just everybody has them. I have them in my pocket. I've been using them for years. And yeah, it was freaky at first to have to wear a mask in Japan. I felt like I was, I remember the only person that I've ever seen that wore a mask outside before I came to Japan was Michael Jackson. And he was a very original person, but I don't know, besides the jacket with all the zippers, I never really took to his fashion. I liked his hats a little bit sometimes. And the one glove, I mean, we all had one glove because we usually lose the other one. But when Michael Jackson was wearing the mask, the surgical mask, I never really got into that, but he did lead the way. Jeff Kennedy's here always better to have and not need than to need and not have. Well put Jeff Kennedy. I absolutely, and I think it's good to have masks and backups, even if you put it in your pocket. Again, it's not about it just being if it's clean and you pull it out, it's sterile, but it's not just about that. It's about protecting yourself. It's about making sure that the droplets don't get out. And that's the one thing that I think a lot of people don't do. I want to go into what Jaden Westhead had asked here about how we're doing mentally. I think that's about the same as everybody else. I know that a lot of you that are watching this right now are self-isolating in your houses. I know that the lockdowns are ending in the United States and in some places there's a structure to the way things are going to be. I think that's the way things are going and sometimes there's no structure at all. I would avoid bars. South Korea was a success story and they had a second wave come a small second. We don't know what's going to happen, but just last week they opened up the bars and very quickly it started to spread again. And this was a place like they should have thought twice. So I think despite it being reopened, please don't maybe not rush out there because if you watch those movies like Braveheart and you see those dudes, the people who run in the front, they never really make it. You don't want to be the first one to go out there and yeah, we can do it. Those people never, you've seen the movies. It's very tough. So I don't want anybody, you guys, you don't have to be, so you shouldn't be going out there and running towards the King Edward's army King Richard. I forget which King it was. The YouTube also has a lot of videos that are showing the Abenomasuku remakes. There's a ton of them. Which one was it? Hold on a second. Abenomasuku remake. This one here. And you can see people have been designing their own masks. There's some really good ones on how to do it. And so Kanae and I will probably follow the lead. This one looks pretty good. One second. Okay. An instruction video on how to do it, how to make your own masks. There's so many videos out there that are doing this. We're going to call these Kanae no masks now because Kanae has one as well. Any last questions before we end this? This was supposed to be a shorter live stream, but right now the Japanese government identified these three things, the Surimitsu (the three C's), which are avoid clusters, avoid groups. Okay. So the first one is stay in well ventilated areas. Don't go into places like confined spaces, small bars, small rooms, stay away from people and don't get too close to people, social distancing. And even though we're supposed to reopen and that doesn't mean that life goes back to normal, everybody just stay safe and think about your families and know that you don't want to get this, even though we don't know what's going to happen in the future. Yohkan donation. Yeah, Irvon. That's so nice. After yesterday's kaiseki bento, and by the way, the photos in here, they came and they picked it up at 11 o'clock. They called us on the telephone and said, we'll be there at 11. Then they rang the doorbell. We let him in and then he came, brought the cart and put it in there and then he put it into his truck and drove away. So the service for these bentos, the delivery food in Japan is like room service at a hotel. And I thought that was, we're still talking about that bento. That's why it was such a special day. Chicago Africans here. John, is everyone here pressing like and subscribing? That's a good point. I have another video that I want to do tonight. I've also have a Twitch channel and I might be doing it on Twitch. But I want to do the, now that we're talking about the Abenomasuku and the government issued masks. I'm going to be doing the government issued video game. All right. I wanted to do it the other night, but I've been having problems connecting the audio into the broadcasting software, but I think I got it because I had to buy the plugin that I've been talking about. So I have that now I'm going to be able to do that tonight. Around midnight, I'm going to do a live stream where I'm playing the Japan government issued stay at home game. Where the governor of Tokyo flies around and can party. It's bizarre game. You can play it. I think it's a flash based game. It's kind of cool. You have to know the controls. I was learning that you just levels you can level up and fly around the city. It's pretty weird. Things that the government's doing to try to make this better. Okay. Thanks again for your support. It really helps. Thank you. Thank you. You have a Bob and all the moderators. Once again, I'll be back a little bit later tonight, but I just want to say, once again, thank you to the government of Japan. For these masks. There's two of us in this household and we will put these to good use. I will use these and maybe you'll see me walking around the city and future live streams wearing my government issued masks. John has mentioned pop tarts before. Yeah, I love pop tarts. We can't get them in Japan by the way. Do you think Japanese prime ministers aren't reelected directly? Like government officials in the United States, but the thing is not look, it's not about if. If a government official will be reelected or not. It's about who else is there that's better than the current leader. And we just don't have a, Japan has a lack of leadership as was shown after prime minister Koizumi left. But you know, in Japan, we don't really criticize the government as much that they're the leaders that we have and they have a job to do. And I don't know, I just really don't hear a lot of people that are too political in Japan. I mean, they're active in it and most young people don't even vote here. So you get the leaders that you elect, right? Just in Japan, we don't really criticize the government openly too much. And the news is even when they criticize, it's a very light criticism and even a light criticism is taken very heavily here. So just says just remarking about it is considered to be like really heavy criticism. So just different societies, different ways to. I know no pop tarts, right? I see the internet saying this, just different societies have different ways to approach this and Japan has a Japanese way. And I'll try to address what that means here. Another tough question from Jaden Westhead, if I am able to travel to Japan next spring, do I need to bring masks to wear? Would it be rude for me not to wear a mask when I'm there? Jaden, bring a mask. If you have paper masks that you can bring, definitely bring it. Look, if everybody's wearing a mask and everybody's wearing a mask, everybody feels comfortable, but it's that one person that's not wearing a mask. You're an outlier. And as we know, the expression in Japan is the nail that sticks up gets nailed down. You don't want to be a nail Jaden. So I would say probably bring your own masks or at least you can make your own mask. It's not that hard, really. It's just taking cloth material. Sewing it on the ends and putting string. You can just do string and tie it behind you. I've been using a bandana because it makes me look like a robber. And personally, that's a look that suits me quite well. With a hat and glasses, you totally could be an anonymous person on the news and a sketched drawing of a crime that you did not commit like the one-armed man. Yeah, we don't really talk politics here. But this mask is all politics. So it's kind of hard. I appreciate the questions very much because these are things that people George Lopez writes in for the mayonnaise stockpile. George, I think that you guys want to see more food episodes, huh? I was thinking of doing a midnight snack run as well this weekend. So that could happen. So if you have any questions, you can leave them in the comments below. I'm going to go ahead and get back to it. Let's even get the 500 likes. I really appreciate that because you know, if you do like it, that also helps with the video being suggested to you and that the notifications will go out quicker because YouTube knows that you prioritize the videos that you like. That's another reason why I tell people to like the videos. But leaving comments below. I want to hear your thoughts on these masks. Irvine wants to have that mini midnight snack run. So we'll definitely be doing that this weekend. How about Saturday? That sounds good. Well, I might have to get out the tent though. Come up with an idea that self isolating midnight snack run to the refrigerator again. What is that mystery box hold inside old new frosty? We'll figure that out. So there you go. This is a bit of history. Thanks so much guys for watching and we will see you again probably tomorrow or tonight in a video game live stream. Bye from Tokyo.