00:03 John Daub: Welcome to Omagari. Approaching now is the Akita Shinkansen. You can see it in the distance. In this live stream, Kanae and I are going to take you on the Akita Shinkansen and show you some of the beautiful countryside of Akita. It is so nice out there with all those golden rice paddies. A lot of it has already been harvested, called inekari (rice harvest). Oh, here it comes. Here, Kanae, take the stick.

00:46 John Daub: It's coming. All right, go ahead, Kanae. Bound for Tokyo. Actually, we're right here in the front. The Akita Shinkansen has very limited space up top here, but there are luggage racks. However, it's best to use them at the origin. All right. I'm kind of sad to say goodbye to Omagari.

01:54 John Daub: Got just a few seconds. Do you think I can make it to that vending machine over there? Do you think I can make that? No? No. I'm going to try it. In just a couple of minutes, the train is going to start to roll and you're going to see an amazing view of the countryside. You don't have to travel very long in order to see out the window something incredible. From Tokyo, it does take an extremely long time getting ready to leave. Bye bye. Fresh air. You can already see the mountains of Daisen City here. Stunning.

02:47 John Daub: Bob Joe's here. I'll let you know. I'm sure I'm going to have a ton of emails when the documentary is finished. Eugene Holbert. Thank you. It's nice to see you again. In Madhata. We're going to get a lunch bento when the lunch lady comes around with that. Thank you so much. It's like an ND filter. I'm going to stay here in between the cars here so we can be polite to some of the other passengers. And then Kanae has some stuff that she bought at the gift shop that I think I might show you. Look at that. They have fireworks on that sign over there. Goodbye Omagari. Last night was incredible.

03:31 John Daub: All right. Very soon you're going to see open fields. It doesn't take long before this town becomes like a rice paddy. Amazing two nights we had here. Last night culminating with our Only in Japan fireworks festival crowdfunded by you—a lot. 800 backers. Let's go to the other side. This is the other side. I guess it's going to take about two, three minutes. But the trip for the Akita Shinkansen takes you to Morioka. And then you get on really high speed lines. But until then, the average speed I think was like 180 kilometers per hour. About a little over half of the normal Shinkansen. But it's just really nice to have this Shinkansen anyways coming up this direction.

04:52 John Daub: All right. We're already starting to see some harvested rice fields. Rice paddies. I don't know if it's a paddy because if it's been drained, I think turns into a field. Already it's starting to get wide open. There you go. Wow. It's about three hours and 40 minutes, I think I want to say to get to Tokyo from here. Mainly because of the traffic. Because this part is not super fast. There's a lot of tunnels. But wow, between the tunnels, you'll go over some bridges. There's a deep ravine and a river flowing underneath it. And some of the views from the left and the right side are incredible. They must have done a lot of engineering. It took a long time to build this one. Just so much wide open spaces.

06:03 John Daub: If you're going to fly a drone, you're going to want to do it here. It's like you can see some beautiful drone shots I took yesterday. Yesterday morning when the fireworks trucks were making their way from the factory heading out towards the launching area. Hey, Ervin Ervan. Back to watching PBG Live. He's on vacation in Yamanashi. And big shout out to him for watching and also being a part of it. It was really great. Hey, Matt Engstrom. Peter is live. I kind of told him my schedule, but it's okay. It's all good. Did you see that marker? That was very interesting. Shows a little bit of the history, probably a couple hundred years old. Wide open country. You wouldn't call this prairie, would you? That's more like fields of grass, prairie grass, I guess.

07:19 John Daub: There's a rice factory. Hey, you're blocking the view. It's funny because this Shinkansen also is like a local Shinkansen. It means it stops at every stop. I guess they have to make a lot of money. Make money one way or another. There's not a lot of population here. Not a lot of people. This is the other side. Not much to see yet.

08:03 John Daub: What did you buy for your father? Oh, that's the fireworks umeshu (plum wine). Umeshu. Put that off. We'll see. Yeah, let's show it really quickly. Hey, Julio Garcia. Thanks so much. I'm glad that you were there with us joining that experience. And we were all really moved by that. That's awesome. That's a bottle of umeshu for Kanae's papa. I'm going to want some of that too, you know. Boom.

09:08 John Daub: Almost all of the rice paddies have been harvested. We call that inekari in Japanese. Inekari is the harvest. And taue (rice planting) is when you plant the rice in June. But up here, I think it starts a little bit later because the weather gets warmer. And the rainy season starts a little bit later too. So it might be later in June. Not sure what we're doing stopping here. We should have bought some rice too. But I've got so much luggage. It would be really hard to do that. It's a rice factory.

09:45 John Daub: While we're waiting here, I can show you a little bit of the Shinkansen. They're very serious at their job. Oh, right. We were waiting for the Shinkansen to pass. Did you see it? We were waiting for it to pass. There's only one line, I think. So the JR staff really take their job seriously. You can see it in the posters. They do have a multipurpose toilet. Yeah. It's always so clean. Japanese trains, you can actually use the public restrooms. It doesn't require an emergency. It has a baby changing port here. And there's still telephones in here. If you go through tunnels, you can still make connections in an emergency. The sinks are pretty clean. They stopped the hand dryer because of the coronavirus. And I like the fact that they have a men's urinal. So you can get in and out really quickly. There's not a lot of space in there. You can see right there. And you can peek in. See who's in there.

10:59 John Daub: Oh, we're on the move. Oh, that one's not been harvested. Wow. How many of you want to be on this train right now joining us? This is so incredible. I wish that tourism was open. I know the pandemic, of course, is not making it difficult to travel anywhere. And we shouldn't be traveling anywhere. But we kind of had to. I love the way it's just purple green in the background there. I don't know how well you see those colors.

12:03 John Daub: I'll be giving an update on the travel for October in a few days from now. I think I'm going to do another travel update once a month just so you can hear about all of the restrictions. And those business travelers that can travel to Japan really have a lot of boxes to check before they can get into the country. Spike 021. Have a celebratory sake or some shots of sake. Oh, yeah. More than one on me for hosting. Thank you so much, Spike 021. Trust me, when I get back home, I'm going to take a small break. I don't have a lot of time to do that. But I'm going to take a small break and really kind of soak it up what just happened last night. I'm still kind of in shock. And got to get back to work on other projects. For those that might not know, I'm also doing three videos for Japan Rail to help promote Japan Rail. I'm going to promote a new pass that's out. And these kinds of streams might become more prevalent in the future. Especially in the next two months as I make those episodes. I'll be traveling a lot.

13:33 John Daub: Look at that 7-Eleven. It's such a countryside 7-Eleven. Huge parking lot. We don't even have parking lots for 7-Elevens in Japan in Tokyo. Very, very small. Like three cars. Let's go to the other side. All right, the other side is more suburban. I guess you'd call this suburban.

13:56 John Daub: Just a side note on the livestream last night. Four companies did copyright claims off of the music. And I cannot take out the commercials. I'm not making any money off of the livestream from yesterday. But I'm trying to fight them to get... Because I did have permission to bring them the fireworks. But I cannot get rid of the commercials. There's like 12 commercials. I think there's more. And they're getting all the revenue from that. So I have to find a way to block out that music. And just take back control. And then block out all those commercials. Because I'd rather it be non-monetized at all if they're going to be hijacking it. Nothing's worse than to see 20 commercials in a livestream. It's just not worth it. So I have two of four I've been able to resolve. So there's two more. And I think by the end of today, I'll have that all resolved. Pain in the neck. When they play copyrighted music, they'll be able to play their music at events. And I told the organizers, you don't need to play Gypsy Kings. You don't need to play J-pop. Stick with the classics and royalty free. It's social media friendly. What everybody wants.

15:21 John Daub: Oh, that's not been harvested. That field there. Rice paddy. Shaku-John. That's awesome. Ear to the run. Well done. Well done with that. And Spike-021. I'm thinking of opening up one of those bottles of umeshu, having a couple of shots on the train with Kanae. She doesn't drink, so I'll have hers. Beautiful, pristine stream right there. River. Probably clean enough where you could swim and drink in it. Oh that's been unharvested, that golden color. It's striking. The best time up here is in September, right before they harvest. It's so golden. It's stunning. That gold, yellow gold color of the rice before harvest is absolutely beautiful and to see so much of it.

16:21 John Daub: You know Japan used to use rice as currency. They called it koku. Ichi-koku was a bushel of rice. So samurai were paid in bushels of rice but it was just theoretical rice. It wasn't actually bushels of rice but koku was the unit of money before yen. They might have had something before that. Ichi-koku, ni-koku, san-koku. Something like that. Alright let's go to the other side. This is not inspiring. Here's the platform. Oh this one is famous for two things. You can see it on the signs across the way. One, cherry blossoms. Are those ume blossoms or cherry blossoms? And then another thing, unagi (eel). That looks like unagi. Or is it unagi? It's either unagi or a hiking trail. Karintō (ginger candy)? No it's a trail. It looks like unagi from a distance. I'm just hungry.

17:41 John Daub: We're at the station here is Kakunodate. Oh yeah this is a beautiful place. Last time I came by here I said to Kanae I want to stop here. Another reason to come to Akita. The doggies and the station master in a glass enclosure. Slice of life out here. It's a beautiful little town this is and they've really done a great job remodeling the station to make it look like Edo period. We'll be back. I'm actually coming back here for the JR project. So I'll be back in the Senboku area of Akita to film about something. I can't tell you yet. It's top secret.

18:49 John Daub: If you like these Shinkansen runs it's time to give me a thumbs up. I know that you like them because we always get a thousand likes on these videos and that's an indicator to do more. This is a live stream. This is a live stream where you decide. It's kind of cool to have that power. All right on the side you see the Akita Shinkansen really isn't too big. It's got one two three four five six seven cars but in Morioka it connects with the Tohoku Shinkansen from Aomori and then creates a massive blue and I'm sorry green red Shinkansen that goes to Tokyo. So it connects up in Morioka. So we're headed to Morioka and then on to that main Tohoku line. It'll be really beautiful. Look at the trees. Oh man I want to live out here. I'm going to live out here. I wish I could. I wish I had a log cabin or something. The little countryside shrine right there. See that? I wish I had a log cabin just right in the middle of the cornfields. I'm from the U.S. Everything's a cornfield in the middle of the rice paddy here. John's log cabin. I can do my editing in there. Nobody will bother me. Yeah. And then you guys can come and visit my summer home. But requires you traveling quite a ways from the nearest international airport. I wouldn't expect too many visitors up here. But that'd be a reason for you to travel right? It's not a bad idea. The rice paddy guest house.

20:50 John Daub: Yeah you know Peso? That dream drive car that Greg Lamb from Life Where I'm From and I rented and we took out to Fukushima. I'm thinking about buying one of those. And then when I'm not using it renting them out to people who are visiting Japan it makes a little bit of sense because I was thinking of buying a car anyways but he's going to pay for the parking and everything. So it's kind of a win win. And when I'm not using it somebody can rent it out and then I'd be able to get some of the money back. Kind of a profit sharing off of the vehicle. So I'm still thinking about that. Greg's thinking about it as well a little bit. He's down in Okinawa and Peter's in Yamanashi and I'm in Akita. So we're all kind of traveling right now on the Shinkansen back to Tokyo for those joining us. This is the Akita Shinkansen. The red one. It's like the E7 series. And we're going through amazing countryside. So we're going to be traveling. We're going to be going to the countryside after the harvest which happened maybe about it started about two weeks ago and the farmers moved really quickly. Let's look on the other side. It's more closer to the mountain so it's not quite as wide. But sure is open.

22:06 John Daub: I hope the signal is hanging in there strong. Eileen, great show last night John. Thank you from Australia. Andrew Fortwayne is back. I will film some cornfields in Indiana and send it to you. Our friend Peter writes in here fireworks festival was epic. Visited Tokyo and Kyoto for Christmas and once and in Tokyo twice for Halloween. Had to cancel this year. I know Peter. I'm just so glad that we could still have that fireworks festival last night since everything was canceled as well. Not only is it a bummer for travelers coming to Japan living here in Japan so many things are canceled and closed for so long. Of course, just like around the world and other places. It's been kind of a bummer.

22:58 John Daub: Oh man, I wish I was driving that car. Can I and I can stop off for lunch at a little cafe or something? Shinkansen, you're not beating the car. Come on. Let's wave at him. You shouldn't be looking at us anyways. Don't look at the Shinkansen. We're beating you now. Hey, dude, you better pump up the gas. I would be going faster. He's gaining on us. Silver car. There he is. I think he's going to beat us back to Tokyo silver car. We're about neck and neck right now. Silver car. Oh, he's beating us now. Oh, silver car. Where do you go? Oh there he is. Okay, we're in the lead. Shinkansen now. Hope you enjoyed is beating Silver Car. We may never know the eventual winner. Black Car is now in front of the Silver Car. There he is, and we've lost him, and then we found him. All right, we are still neck and neck. Silver Car, and we're back together. Oh, we are neck and neck, Silver Car. What kind of car is that? Can you tell from the hubcaps? And it's the Shinkansen for the win. You can beat the Shinkansen, huh? I don't think so.

24:43 John Daub: I didn't know we were realized we were going to be this close to the road. Oh, is that Peter? Is he live streaming on a motorbike? Every time we see a motorcycle rider, Kanae goes, that's Peter. That's Peter. No, it's not. You have to wonder, though. I think we put the rearview window. Oh, they'll get on the vegetable stand. We put that Silver Car in the rearview window. There's no way he's going to catch up. He's going to have to pass all these trucks on this single lane road.

25:38 John Daub: So this is the part now. We're going to be going through some tunnels soon, and we cut across Akita through the center of the prefecture, going towards Morioka, Tazawako, this area. It's really, really scenic. You can see here the mountains. It's beautiful. I'm surprised we have a signal at all, but it looks like we're going to be going Minecraft, so this will be the end of the live stream. Oh, did you see the piggies? I just saw little piggies down there. They're all, that's really nice. They're all like free-range pigs. They're all living in a sloppy, muddy place. Looks like they're having fun. If I was a pig, I wouldn't mind. It looks like you're losing the signal right now. Thanks so much for watching. It's been a really good trip, and I hope that you have a really good Sunday. I'll be back live streaming probably again tomorrow. I got a couple of things I want to show you in the city of Tokyo before I make my way outside again, but it looks like we're about to cross into the tunnels, so bye-bye from Akita.