00:00:00 John Daub: Yo, a few days ago we hit 200 days until the 2020 Olympic Games here in Tokyo—or the 2021 Olympic Games. The public seems against holding them here, but it's still so hard to see into the future. I'm at the Olympic Village right now in Tokyo's Harumi area on Tokyo Bay, the Tokyo Bayside, and I thought I'd go over some of the information and hear from you, your thoughts about this. These Olympics will look different. The roar of 60,000 people in the stadium probably won't be happening. Good morning. How you doing, everybody? We are in the middle of a third wave of the pandemic here in Tokyo.

00:00:32 John Daub: The 2020 or 2021 Olympics is going to look a lot different than what we thought. I wanted to come here to the Olympic Village, show you—the Olympics should be finished by now, and yet these buildings are just done and they're waiting. I can imagine people who are going to be renting these out or buying this property just waiting now. And we're going to walk. I did this last time, but I thought I'd come back because this seems to be a place where there's no people and maybe the safest place in Tokyo right now. It's the Olympic Village. So let's have a quick walk around this area.

00:01:13 John Daub: The first thing on the agenda is the third wave right now has hit Tokyo pretty hard. We just had a state of emergency called by Governor Koike—Yuriko Koike. She's doing an amazing job of being as transparent as possible, giving us information, kind of filling in where the prime minister maybe left off yesterday in his announcement. And it's going to be pretty hard right now to see the Olympics taking place in just under 200 days from now. But there's a lot of factors to consider. And if you're an Olympic athlete watching these updates, getting vaccinated is probably going to be the first step. There's a lot of talk about this vaccination right now. I'm going to show you the buildings over here as I walk around a little bit.

00:02:01 John Daub: The vaccine is something that's going to be pretty much the pivotal ingredient in order to hold these Olympics. Dick Pound, who is the longest serving member of the IOC, said that in Canada they have about 300 or 400 athletes. To take 300 or 400 and prioritize them out of several million in order to have Canada represent the Olympics is probably a good thing. Nobody's around here. That's something that a lot of citizens in each country is going to have to determine. I think it's going to be the health care workers, everybody on the front line is going to get vaccinated first. I think everybody who's high at risk, including the elderly, probably get vaccinated first. And the Olympic athletes may be somewhere in the middle priority before all of us humans. But I do think that holding the Olympic Games is really important—not just for the IOC and all the businesses that are going to lose a lot of money and the future of the world economy, but also for hope, just to give us something to look forward to.

00:03:11 John Daub: I can tell you this in Japan. We just got news yesterday that the Moderna vaccine will not be available until maybe May. If you can believe that, and then after May, we might have the Moderna one. But the Pfizer vaccine has been in trial since last year. So hopefully by the end of February, we will have the Pfizer vaccine to start vaccinating people here in Japan. But if the Moderna vaccine and the other vaccines are not approved until May, it calls into question whether or not the people here in Japan are going to be vaccinated enough to give us peace of mind having all of these people coming in from international countries. It's something that I know as a resident here in Japan, citizens are quite worried about. It's going to be on the shoulders of Prime Minister Suga trying somehow to fast-track those vaccines because May does not cut it for the Moderna vaccine. 50 million doses were bought of that and I think 250 million doses of the Pfizer one.

00:04:26 John Daub: Japan has a different procedure and more safety precautions. This is like news that's breaking now and I wish we had more information or more access to this kind of information where the government is with the vaccine and how this all going to be working. Singapore is getting three different vaccines. This is news that can change over time. It's not set in stone. It's up to the government to find a way to get around this. They haven't even started the preliminary trials for the Moderna vaccine, even though this has been around for a while. It could be a case of Japan Inc. being prioritized to make sure that Japanese companies can somehow make money off of this and national pride is something that every single country has, right? If you want the Olympics to take place, you're going to have to prioritize that Moderna vaccine and try to get as many doses into Japan as possible. If the US and the UK and a bunch of countries have found that this vaccine is viable, I don't see how much more testing Japan needs to do. But Japan tends to lean towards the safe side. Everything takes a little bit longer in Japan.

00:06:03 John Daub: I wish you could go in this building here. This looks really cool. And I know they have an Olympic Plaza that's all made of wood from 63 different municipalities, but I can't go in here. One of the factors right now that a lot of people—there's some people coming, so I'm gonna put my mask back on—is the training and qualifying for the competitors. If you're an Olympic athlete, you're going to want your country to be in a situation where you can train properly in order to be competitive in these Olympics. I love this building that I'm panning over right now. Right now there's a lot of countries that are not in a good stage. Everybody's in different stages of this pandemic. It just looks so lonely with these buildings completely unoccupied, doesn't it? I don't know if the Olympic Village will ever—what's it going to look like next year?

00:07:09 John Daub: Not a lot of countries can do the qualifying competitions to see who qualifies to go to the Olympics, let alone train for it. Olympic athletes need months to train before they can be competitive and win gold medals for their country, right? There's the Tokyo City—other going inside there. I want to go inside there too. Will they let me in? That'd be pretty cool. Maybe they're coming to stop me from filming. No, I think they're just government officials. Oh, you see he's surveying the area. That's really cool. The safety of this village is also very key to it.

00:08:04 John Daub: The training and the qualifiers will probably have a decision. According to ex-Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, who is in charge of the Tokyo Olympic Games, sometime in March through May the final deadline for decision would be May, but it may come sooner. So something between March and May. There'll be a final deadline and the deadline to postpone the Olympics would be May. So that comes from the Japan Olympic organizer. The official budget of the Tokyo Olympics was increased last month in December to 1.54 billion dollars US—an increase of 280 million because of the delay. The delay has cost the country of Japan quite a lot of money. Several government audits the last few years suggest the real numbers about 25 billion. The Olympics are not cheap. All but 6.7 billion is public money. Our tax dollars at work.

00:09:15 John Daub: I can see why the majority of people—according to a poll by NHK—a majority of people do not want this Olympics. 25 billion dollars. The majority of citizens and residents in Japan do not want the Olympics to take place. But there are long-term arguments. They see the situation as a snapshot of right now and not a snapshot of the years going forward because there's huge implications for holding them and not holding them. We have the training and qualifying for the competitors and we don't even know if every country will be here. If you can't have the qualifications, you won't be able to make your way to the Olympics—who's going to be competing for each country? We just don't even know that yet. The safety of the Olympic Village and public transportation has been coming here for quite a while and the safety of the Olympic athletes is also something that's paramount. Everybody has to be vaccinated.

00:11:10 John Daub: This is pretty interesting. I guess it was in October, International Gymnastics tournament was held here, which according to the article was regarded as a litmus test for the Olympic Games 2021. During this International Gymnastics tournament, they had conducted daily PCR testing on the athletes, strict controls reinforced on the athletes' accommodations and their movements to and from the venues. As a result, not a single athlete was found to test positive for COVID-19. They were able to hold an International Gymnastics tournament here in Japan two months ago. Nobody got COVID during the entire tournament, which is pretty incredible. But it was odd that the athletes found the restrictions on their freedom and movement to be demeaning and stressful. Not all the athletes really enjoyed the experience.

00:12:09 John Daub: I've met Olympic athletes. I used to work with the daughter of one when I was teaching English. She replaced me at one of the schools and I talked to her father who was an Olympic athlete gold medalist. Was it the Atlanta Olympics or Barcelona? I can't remember, but what I got was people from all the countries seem to hook up with each other. There's a lot of hooking up going on in the Olympics. It looks like the order of banning intercourse will be imposed on residents of the Olympic Village. No meetings at night or in the early morning and that's not going to be possible. Apparently for this Olympics. Sex between the athletes in normal times is not discouraged. There had been plans to distribute 160,000 free condoms in restrooms. Now the athletes will be given smartphones incorporating a GPS application that will monitor their movements making it difficult for them to slip into those rooms. If you're an Olympic athlete, you are going to have a hard time slipping into people's rooms and doing the deed. This might be one of the best places to be because it's got a beautiful view of the ocean or Tokyo Bay on the other side.

00:15:22 John Daub: There's no definitive decision on this until at least March. The city of Tokyo still has to run these buses. Zero people on that bus. This is the safest place in the city of Tokyo. No news on this unless there's some sort of really bad strain of the virus that they just simply cannot handle. We're not going to hear about that until March at the earliest. Tourism to Japan—it's zero. Last year in August, I think they had like 1,000 people in total. There's always somebody who comes in for tourism somehow. They have about 15,000 athletes and media that are going to be coming and they have to find a way to vaccinate these 15,000 people and make sure that they arrive here safely and PCR test them upon arrival.

00:17:42 John Daub: It does take approximately a month and a half for the Pfizer vaccine to actually have an impact on fighting the coronavirus. You need to have a booster and then wait a couple of weeks after that. There's almost a month between the two shots and then a couple of weeks after that before it starts to take effect. Across the harbor, you can see there's a lot of buses. That's the Toyosu fish market. The summer athletes will have a nice smell of fish wafting over across the bay. Actually, it's not that bad because everything is indoors and sealed up. They had a really bad cluster of coronavirus and it was shut down for a little bit—hundreds of people apparently getting infected inside of there.

00:19:04 John Daub: The 1964 Olympics was the first time that a mass of international people came to Japan like this on airplanes and it freaked out the Japanese public. They thought they were all celebrities—all the Olympic athletes that came off of the airplane walking off at the tarmac like heroes because there were no foreign faces coming here from Africa, from Europe, from Australia, from all over the world. It was a really surreal experience. Japan is a lot more experienced now. With the Olympic athletes coming in, a lot of that feeling will still exist. They will have some kind of VIP welcome here in Japan based on the welcome that they got in 1964.

00:20:37 John Daub: 1964 was a time where the government and the country of Japan was really starting to accelerate and modernizing for the big economic miracle in the 70s and 80s and the bubble. The torch relay, by the way, will begin on March 25th. This is another challenge for Tokyo 2020 or 2021. Why don't you tell me—should I call it Tokyo 2020 or Tokyo 2021? Maybe leave it in the comments below. The Olympic torch relay will be taking place starting on March 25th. 10,000 runners were expected to take part over four months. The prime sponsors are Coca-Cola and Toyota. When sponsors are involved, I'm sure that they're going to be taking precautions. But I was shocked at the Ekiden relay race from Tokyo to Hakone and back to Tokyo that happened at the new year. This big sporting event still took place and those crowds were on top of each other. No social distancing. I bet you this is going to be like one of these really bad cluster situations. A number of people did not have masks on either. Japan had been a little bit complacent.

00:22:14 John Daub: They hadn't prepped their hospitals for this winter surge that we're experiencing and the state of emergency is the last thing. Governor Koike has been doing a really good job of giving information in English as well because she's trilingual. She also speaks Arabic, which is incredible. She's been very transparent, more so than the federal Japanese government. Besides the restaurants closing—because the biggest problem that Japan faced and the reason why a lot of experts say the surge has increased so rapidly—Japan has a culture of going out to eat. People like to go out to eat a lot here. There's tons of different kinds of foods. Going out to eat with coworkers is a big deal. That's how you get a lot of the work done outside of the office. When they go into eat at the restaurants, they take off their masks and they start drinking beer. After that, they start getting louder. It's as though the pandemic is suspended when you go out to eat in Japan. People just forget themselves.

00:24:00 John Daub: They lowered the time of the restaurants from 10 p.m. to 8 p.m. The reason for this was that in those two hours, a lot of the people were getting seriously drunk and becoming more forgetful. People typically get off of work at 8 o'clock. If the restaurants have to close at 8, none of this is going to be taking place, but you cannot stop the restaurants from making a living out of it. There are no penalties to it. They just get publicly shamed. That's the policy right now. This channel just hit 250,000 subscribers. This is a channel that was an experiment that has become an amazing success, and that's all because of you watching. Thank you so much. I'll keep bringing you to places like this.

00:25:38 John Daub: Typically in a live stream, you don't have to watch the entire live stream. This is a live stream. People are joining in all the time, so I tend to go a little bit longer. There's also a courtyard or an Olympic Plaza that is so beautiful. I've seen the pictures of it. Kanae's birthday is today as well, and I'm going to go and get her a cake in Ginza before everybody finishes work and it might get crowded. Just go really quickly by the cake and get out. But I want to hear from you before we end this. The comments from Prime Minister Mori who is in charge of the Olympic Committee saying that there's no decision that will be made until March to May and May is the deadline to make that decision.

00:27:07 John Daub: We're always looking for new members for our Discord server: discord.gg/onlyinjapan. If you do join us, give us a boost. It takes 30 boosts in order to have a lot of benefits and our server has a lot of benefits. We even have some kind of weird Pokemon game that Nosh started. Discord is a continuation of the Only in Japan streams in a community format, which is pretty cool. You could actually talk to people, start a phone call in there with others. There's security—several dozen security people making sure that bad stuff could happen in here. This is the Olympic Village. Kanae likes nama cream or just plain white whipped cream. I'm like, no, I want butter icing with chocolate cake or something. She's like, no, I want just whipped cream cake or something light. Those cakes usually have a lot of fruit in it so they're a little bit healthier.

00:29:51 John Daub: It looks so empty, kind of like Silent Hill. It is really really eerie. There's not—oh there's one guy over there, I guess he's taking pictures. Another human. This would be the loneliest place in Tokyo right now. This looks like a shopping mall or something for the athletes. This is the main street going back towards Harumi and Kachidoki. I hope this isn't what the Olympic Village looks like after the Olympics. They're supposed to have people coming in and moving in here. Any last questions before we end this video? What do you guys think about the Olympics? Do you want this to take place? Do you think it's dumb to be holding the Olympics here? Do you think it's something that you'll watch if it's on?

00:31:33 John Daub: No Olympics, a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money and that can be absolutely a reason why the Olympics have to go on. IOC loses a lot of its income because of the advertisements that run on TV for NBC—I think it was like 73% of the IOC's income comes from advertisements during the Olympics. For me as just a spectator, as someone living in the city of Tokyo, this is a big deal for the city. I kind of hope that they do have it. I'm in the minority. Tokyo is supposed to be the best Olympic opening. I don't think that the stadium is going to be packed with 60,000 people though. I'm really curious to know how they're going to do the Olympic opening ceremony. I think they'll have a lot of people coming. The Olympic opening ceremony will be like a big event. We'll be able to come to some of the big events and see some of the bigger events.

00:33:18 John Daub: I have a bicycle. I can ride to the Olympic Stadium in about 35 minutes so I can get around the city pretty fast where I'm living right now. I'm pretty central in Chuo Ward, which is the center of Tokyo. These buildings are brand new mansions—they're massive apartments that have been springing up here. The downside to living in this area: almost no public transportation except for buses, which is why there might be a lot more buses here. They can't sell these apartments if there's no public transportation. This is in Harumi, which is in Tokyo, the Olympic Village with the sun setting. The closest subway station is called Kachidoki and it is a good 30-minute walk from here.

00:35:02 John Daub: If the Olympics are not held, you will not see an event and I think it's going to be one of the most interesting events ever in the Olympics. They have another really interesting sport happening in Paris next. Was it parkour? I'm so excited for Paris. This is the end of the island. I came this way because I just wanted to see into the courtyard. It looks very much like a university campus. I was just shocked when I read the article that Olympic athletes will be discouraged from messing around with each other. Pretty weird. I wouldn't mind having one of these apartments again, just there's no public transportation. Everything is a pretty easy bicycle ride though. It's pretty dark here in Tokyo by 5 p.m. so in the next 30 minutes the sun will be gone.

00:37:16 John Daub: The bright side is that it's gonna get only brighter from here. December 21st is the darkest night, so if that's true then it's only gonna get brighter although it's still pretty depressingly dark. They do have a bus station over there. Years ago there wasn't anything here, it was empty. 2016 had a really strong bid for the Olympics but Rio ended up winning. I wish it was Tokyo. The stadium was proposed for the 2016 Olympics to be right here. It would be such an open place to have the stadium right there with the fireworks—the entire city can see. They ended up tearing down the 1964 stadium and building the new stadium on the same spot. I don't even know why they needed to build a new stadium. That stadium was more than adequate and this could have been considered the recycle Olympics, which would have been pretty exciting especially in the times that we live in. But instead we had to have 25 billion dollars of spending, which is an investment in the future of Tokyo.

00:39:45 John Daub: Japan's first high-speed train opened in 1964 with the Olympics. California is building the first high-speed train between LA and San Francisco and it'd be amazing if it opens in the 2028 Olympics in LA. The Shinkansen was debuted ahead of the 1964 Olympics, so was a lot of stuff. A lot of things were introduced in the 1964 Olympics and then not too long after that in the 1970 World Expo in Osaka was huge. We saw so many innovations that blew people away. The World Expo is coming again right after the Olympics in Tokyo in 2025 and I'm pretty excited about the Osaka Expo as I am about the Olympics because I'm a big tech geek and I love seeing all the innovations. I can't imagine what the middle of this decade is going to bring. We've just started it a few days ago. This decade actually starts in 2021.

00:41:59 John Daub: I've also been hearing about new cameras, new technology that's coming out, robotics, 3D printing, all sorts of materials and things like this. It's going to be a pretty exciting event. We are 250,000 strong on the Only in Japan Go channel now. It's pretty cool. I think this is going to be a shopping mall. I'll probably do an episode tomorrow celebrating 250,000 subscribers. But tonight is Kanae's birthday party, so I better get going. The sun is setting here. If there aren't any more questions about the Olympics, there's the Rainbow Bridge in the distance. I want to say goodbye. Thanks so much, everybody, for supporting.

00:43:13 John Daub: It's a really challenging time, especially here in Japan with the state of emergency. We don't know how the measures might get stricter over the next couple of days. There's four prefectures—Tokyo and three others. Tokyo is considered a prefecture, although it's a metropolitan area. Japan is 47 prefectures. Probably Fukuoka, Aichi, Hokkaido and a few others might be listed into the state of emergency in the coming days. Wherever you are in the world, please do stay safe. And I'll see you in another live stream, maybe tonight for Kanae's birthday. The thing with having a mobile live streaming channel is I go live anytime, bring you with me and share the experience. See everybody. Stay safe.