00:00:00 John Daub: To Tokyo, it is now March 11th, 2021, 10 years after the Great Tohoku Earthquake, which is what we're calling it now. Back then it was just an earthquake and tsunami that was life-changing to so many people. In this live stream, I wanted to go back and relive, recall, remember that day and the days before and after. Kind of give a historical sense of what was going on 10 years ago. I was here in Japan. This was before my days as a YouTuber. I was a reporter, and I still am, a reporter for NHK World's Tokyo Eye program, as well as Journeys in Japan and a couple of other programs. That was maybe my main income back in 2010, 2011. I was also a video podcaster. iTunes was really big. And I was making a show teaching Japanese English using comedy situations and blue screens. Some of that still might be on iTunes.

00:01:06 John Daub: But that day, I was editing video at my desk in Shinozaki, my old town where I was living before. I think it was like 2 p.m. It was in the afternoon. I remember that. It was a sunny day. And at my desk, you could hear rumbling. It was almost cinematic, like a movie. You knew that there was something coming. At first, I didn't know what it was. But there was kind of a brewing of an earthquake underneath. I'd already been in Japan for quite a long time, like 16 years or something. And I'd been in many, many earthquakes, like Magnitude 5 or 6. Shindo (Japanese seismic intensity scale) 5 was maybe the toughest one that I was in. The first earthquake that I was in was in 1998 when I first came to Japan, outside of Tokyo Disneyland, actually. There was a hotel we stayed at. I think it was the Intercontinental Hotel that was over there at the time. And that was swaying so much, I got underneath the table. That was my first earthquake. It was here in Tokyo.

00:02:18 John Daub: So when the earthquake hit on March 11, 2011, 2 p.m., I felt that rumble underneath. And I knew that there was something big. I knew that there was something different about this. But you can't predict how strong something's going to be. I just released a video called "How Japan's Largest Earthquake Really Felt." And we simulated inside the Tokyo disaster Bosaikan (disaster prevention center) what it was like to be inside that earthquake. So you might want to take a look. There's some footage from the simulator. What it actually felt like. I wanted to make this video so you could get a better understanding of what actually was underneath my feet as I tell this story. It was quite huge. And when I made that video afterwards, I was very emotional. For about 30 minutes afterwards, I couldn't really film much of anything. It just hit home. And I'll talk a little bit more about the video as well.

00:03:27 John Daub: So, wow. Everything started to shake. And it just built up. Unlike the Kobe 1995 earthquake, which was just a violent start to it, this one built up to it. But it built up strong. And I remember just feeling like a deer in headlights. When a deer is crossing the road and they see the headlights of a car coming, they just freeze. And I felt like this. I just froze at my desk for what seemed to be like a year. But it was actually maybe 10 seconds. Then I think I heard something like, get in a doorway. Get in the bathtub. I didn't know what to do, to be honest with you. So I had my hand on the doorknob of my office, wondering if I should leave the house. Should I run out to the street? My feeling was that I was better served being outside. Which isn't always the case. But that's how I just felt. Like I gotta get out of this building.

00:04:33 John Daub: Because outside the window, everything was going like this. And in the six years of living in that apartment, I've never seen anything like this. And we had had earthquakes. I think we had some foreshocks as well. So it was like being on a boat. I'm not joking. I literally could not stand up. I had to sit down after a while. And I'm still holding on to the doorknob in my office. It wasn't a big apartment. I think it was a 2LDK. I just froze. And again, as I said in this video that I just uploaded onto the main channel, your first initial reactions are what saved your life. And that day, I was lucky to be in a newer building that was not in an area that was susceptible to even more shaking. I believe it was a Shindo (Japanese seismic intensity scale) 6 in my area. I was in Edogawa Ward. And we had a stronger earthquake than other parts of the city.

00:05:48 John Daub: This is going to be a little bit longer than usual livestream. I want you just to look at this. He's saying that the Tokyo studio is shaking. This is NHK's broadcast live. The announcer is noticeably shaken in his voice. Somebody in the studio announced, it's moving. It's shaking. The Tokyo-Shibuya studio is shaking. The buildings are falling apart. The mountains are crumbling. The river is crumbling. Things falling from the top are falling. Please protect yourselves. I watch this every 10 years just to... Because that was the worst day in my life in Japan. And when I did that earthquake simulator, every single vibration in the simulator was taken from seismic data from the Great Tohoku Earthquake, March 11, 2011. And they simulated exactly the way. And when I was there, you could feel exactly... It was as though every single rumble was mentally imprinted on my mind. And all those jumps triggered memories from that day.

00:07:54 John Daub: The simulator room, I think is good if you are in Tokyo and you have the opportunity to go and sit in there. Yeah, it's a really tough day. Again, the worst day. I thought it was over. I thought I was going to die. Because you don't understand what it's like. If you've never been in an earthquake, I want you just to picture you've lost complete control. Everything around you is shaking. There's nothing that you can do to stop it. You are not in control anymore. Nature is. And wherever you are at that time, that's all you have to control where you are. And some people are more fortunate than others in an earthquake.

00:08:51 John Daub: Over the years, we've seen some big ones. I remember during the World Series in California in 1989, a big earthquake hit there. And that was the first time that I had really, as a kid, understood what an earthquake was and the damage that it can do and how much it can kill and destroy. I knew that when I first came to Japan, but you don't realize it until you're in it. You can't prepare for it. One of the things Imamura-san, who is the director of the Bosaikan, the disaster center for the Tokyo Fire Department, told me was, look, when you are in an earthquake, you will see locals here. They are just drinking. They are very relaxed and not actually acting naturally. Because as you learned, you cannot predict the strength of an earthquake if it will get stronger. So when you do have an earthquake, you do feel something, stop. Make sure that you're protected. Look around. Make sure that you're not in a place where things could fall on you. Evacuate from that area immediately. Because you don't know if it's going to get stronger and stronger. You just don't know.

00:10:11 John Daub: So when I am used to it now too. But I also have this... I've been through hundreds of earthquakes. Now I know when it's a real strong one. I know when to get worried. But I think we are too used to the earthquakes here in Japan. So your first reaction to get out of the way or get under the table, it's probably the right one to be safe than sorry. Protect your head. There's lots of things that you can do. Going back to that day, the earthquake that day, it went on for over a minute. And I do remember when it was done, almost everything in my apartment that was not bolted down or was not of immense weight close to the ground had toppled over. My TV, all my glasses, all of them, broken. Lost a couple of wine bottles. Pictures on the wall, down. Things in my bathroom. Everything that was standing, toothpicks, toothpaste, whatever, toppled over. I believe some of the water from my toilet actually spilled out just because of the shaking. The sink cracked in my bathroom. There were cracks in my building and some of the cement which they later repaired. Even my hair was messed up. I'm saying that as a joke, but I didn't know what to do.

00:11:43 John Daub: So after that minute, I picked up my TV because it was on the ground and toppled over. I had a 32-inch Sharp flat-screen TV. Put it back up and it still worked. It wasn't broken, thank goodness. And I just tuned into NHK. And you can watch the broadcast. What I was showing you exactly that day was... You hear the sounds. And for everybody who's lived through that day, you hear this bring, bring. Bring, bring. Do you know that sound? It's the emergency alert tone you hear on your smartphone now, but you also hear it on TV and you'll hear it sometimes on speakers all around Japan. Japan has speakers, loud megaphones attached to poles for disaster situations just like this. And when you hear that sound, it just triggers bad memories and makes you react because we've heard it during the big ones. And I heard those sounds on the TV broadcast. And you can see noticeably the TV announcers trying their best to stay cool. They can't. It's still going. It's going on for a long minute. This is a long minute. That's Shinjuku from Shibuya.

00:13:03 John Daub: And now I have the TV on and I'm watching it. I don't know what's going on. I don't have a radio, so TV was the only way. He's explaining all the places that have been impacted. And they're going through other cameras. The staff, this is Sendai, I believe, live camera. The staff is scrambling around to try to get as much news to people as possible. This was the live broadcast. This is the instant JMA, Japan Meteorological Agency, giving data saying that there is a tsunami (harbor wave) warning very high up there in Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima. You can see where the white line is. I've been through tsunami warnings. I didn't actually think one would hit. You get a lot of warnings, but you never have one that hits. I don't know how, I can't recall how much longer it was, but I think it was like 15 or 17 minutes or something. Another aftershock hit. Like I was already emotionally drained. And then another aftershock. This one was smaller, but was still very significant.

00:14:36 John Daub: And I had a hamster at the time, Kiki. I grabbed Kiki out of the cage. I was thinking a lot more clearly, although I wasn't. Maybe I was, I don't know. I grabbed my hamster, put him in my pocket, and I ran down the stairs, six flights, and I went outside to the park, an opening, a clearing. On the street, I couldn't stand up. I'm talking about the road was like standing on a bus. Like, and the bus was moving. That's what it felt like standing on the road. So I had to sit down on the street because I couldn't stand up. It's different in the apartment. But when you're on the ground during an earthquake, a big one, it's a very different feeling. So I was sitting down for about 15 seconds. I just could not get up or I would have been hurt. I got up, there were other people outside. Kids were wearing hats. They have these felt hats, they're padded hats to protect them in Japan from earthquakes or falling objects. And we all made our way to the park. Kiki the hamster in my pocket was very popular. I remember that, more popular than I was. A little jealous. But there were kids out there and we were all talking about the earthquake, what to do, what was happening, what was going on.

00:16:11 John Daub: There were some fires across the river in Chiba, in Ichikawa, I believe. Ichikawa had some fires and there was some smoke and things were not good. There was more chaos. I went back in after 10 minutes. I believe there was another aftershock before I went back in, a third one. I just watched the TV. I started calling as many people as I could. I believe this was the start of 4G LTE or maybe it was still 3G. But I could not get through to any of my friends or anybody that I cared about until about 45 minutes to an hour later I received a message. Just the system became so jammed with people making phone calls. This was like the day of the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5. Smartphones were a new thing. It was hard to get the same amount of information that we get today.

00:17:12 John Daub: So I got back into my apartment, I think it was about an hour later, and then we were all watching the entire country, the entire world, the tsunami rolling in into Iwate, Miyagi, parts of Fukushima, even the city. Down in Ibaraki there were swells where the water was rising. And you couldn't imagine when you're live watching it, and some of you probably have seen the video, you can't imagine what you're feeling like when it's live and you see a lone car driving on a highway. There's a helicopter that cannot communicate with that lone car and you see the tsunami, this black wave just coming inland over fields and saying, get out of there. Just get out of there. Shouting at the TV. You see the tsunami, dark water bringing fire, buildings that had wiped out with fire on it. It was watching this live and having aftershocks going on, worst day in my life. There's no question about it.

00:18:28 John Daub: So three, four hours later, I started getting messages from friends. Facebook was three years old. And we were getting Facebook posts from friends who were stranded. A lot of people could not take the trains back to their houses. A lot of people were, I had friends that were in Kichijoji that had to get back to Chiba. So nothing was open. They just walked. A lot of friends had walked for 12 hours to get home. So I was lucky to be at home, actually. There was a lot of walking. And if you ask residents of Tokyo that day, most of them said that they were somewhere else. I was lucky. I work at home. I was editing video. People were at the office. And getting home was a huge challenge. Getting back to your family, getting back to your children, to your wives, to your husbands. Very, very, the Facebook feed of my friends was very, very bad.

00:19:30 John Daub: And I lived in a city called Iwaki in Fukushima. And I had friends up there also on Facebook. And we did get some posts. And they were not good either. Fukushima, again, very famous for its peaches. Very famous for its sake (Japanese rice wine). Very famous for its nature, its onsen (hot springs). For me, I know all these things because I know Fukushima living there before this event took place. Iwaki was my home. And that's very close to where the meltdown was taking place. Out of the control of the people who were living there. They had no idea what was going on, how to react to it. We knew that there was trouble. We knew that there was an explosion. We knew that there was contamination. And the days and weeks that followed were the scariest in my life. I didn't know whether or not to evacuate. And I did look online and talk to other Americans, expats here. Almost 80% of people here, my American friends did find a way to leave Japan. And most of my foreign friends, except for a handful, stayed in Japan. And I didn't go because the only way, Europeans could get a free flight out of Japan to go home. I think my French friends were like, oh, it's a free flight home. I'm getting out of here. So a couple days later, they were gone. Mostly because of the fear of radiation. Not so much after the aftershocks and all this. We just didn't know if we were going to be safe.

00:21:23 John Daub: On that day, we're not thinking about that. We're just thinking about what is going on. Is everybody okay? The aftermath was awful. Inside of the supermarkets, everything had fallen. Almost everything. Everything was off of the shelves. Staff was cleaning up that afternoon. The supermarkets were a bad situation as well as the convenience stores. Everything was gone. People were binge shopping, getting everything. Very much like the pandemic with the toilet paper, but everything. Water, meat, canned foods. The shelves were empty. Everything was gone. I was able to get some rice. Neighbors shared, which was good. If you had good relationships with your neighbors, you could share. Get some rice. Get some eggs. Get some milk. Just try to tide yourself over. The supply chain was broken for at least five days in Tokyo. For weeks up in Tohoku. Months. But down in Tokyo, there were five really bad days. And the shortages went on for a couple of weeks.

00:22:46 John Daub: So life back here, stopped my job nothing going on I didn't work much I was uploading videos there was no NHK work no TV for magazine programs it was all news all news what was going on with Fukushima all this so I didn't have any work going on everything just stopped life again you didn't have a lot of I didn't have a lot of food but life was hard not just because of that but because of the aftershocks they were coming like every five minutes it felt like every five minutes there was a swaying of your building these are like magnitude 5.0 4.0 like big enough to really make your whole house shake but not anything like well it was like on the day of. After about ten days I was like oh my god I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die after 10 days of the aftershocks I couldn't take it anymore I seriously was starting to go crazy because you felt like you were on a boat but you're not and it's mentally and this is the biggest problem with the earthquake there's a lot of traumatic experiences that harm people mentally from this I was starting to get that way I just you were swaying all the time and you were scared and I didn't have any family so I got on a shinkansen (bullet train) which was up running and I went to Osaka for five days to visit a friend that I had one of my best friends lives down there and stayed with her the first night I had to stay at a capsule hotel by Umeda Station.

00:24:38 John Daub: Osaka was unusual because in the station, a lot of people were sleeping there because they had evacuated from Tohoku or the north, gotten on a train, and they just went to Osaka. They didn't know what else to do either. I believe Nagoya station had people too. People just wanted to go to a place where there was no earthquake. So, there were people sleeping in Osaka station, in Osaka. I was lucky to get a capsule hotel. The capsule hotel was full mostly of people who were just getting away from the earthquake or getting away from the radiation because it was scary. I didn't know. We just did not know. The international media was reporting this as, you know, like the radiation. News story after news story about you could be drinking radiated water. Fukushima, this beautiful place that was my home, turned into a bad word overnight. And they should have called it the TEPCO disaster. They called it the Fukushima disaster. And this is the wrong word. It's the wrong word. That is the place where it happened. They should have just called it the city. They could have called it, you know, the city that it was in or a small town and just left the disaster there. But they picked an entire prefecture. That's one of the biggest in Japan and destroyed it for, it's going to be like that for decades where its reputation is not about peaches and sake and onsen and nature and friendly people. It's about a meltdown and radiation. And I'm to this day really upset about the name Fukushima being dragged down with this. The people had nothing to do with this. They lost their livelihoods. The peaches in Aizu-Wakamatsu. The distance is as far as it is to Tokyo. The peaches in Yamanashi are good. The peaches in Aizu-Wakamatsu are good. And it just happens to be in the same prefecture, Fukushima.

00:27:13 John Daub: We didn't know what we could eat. We didn't know if the vegetables were any good. We didn't know if the explosion had sprayed radiation into the farms of Ibaraki, which is where we get a lot of vegetables into the city of Tokyo. Ibaraki is like our bread basket. It's our fruit basket too. So I went down to Osaka five days. It helped me a lot mentally. Stayed with my friend. We kept watching TV. And then I came back. This is when things start to change. I wanted to do whatever I could to help and volunteer because we were all now at this time. It's now, you know, like two weeks in seeing the stories of people who lost everything. Everything. The ones that did survive were basically in hell. You couldn't get up there to volunteer. You turn to what can you do to help? And it's just a human thing.

00:28:29 John Daub: If I'm here again, all my foreign friends, except for a handful of them stayed behind. We called those. We had, there was a word for the people who left. We called them fly-jin (fly foreigners). There's gaijin (foreigner), which means outsider or foreigner. We called them fly-jin because they flew away. And the friends that stayed became best friends. I couldn't go up there all the time. The roads were, and I didn't go up there as nearly as much as some other really good friends. My one of my best friends at the time was Mike Connolly, shout out to him. Who's the most unselfish person that I've ever met in my entire life. He was using his money, his savings to rent vans and get food up there. I think he'd rented vans and food and gasoline and gone up there. And it's not cheap to do that. This is a very long drive. It's like six, seven hours. It's like six hours at least to get up there to Sendai. I don't think he could get there cause the roads weren't open yet, but his heart was so big. He just had to get out. People, you just could not stay home and see what was going on on TV and not try to do something. You couldn't.

00:30:02 John Daub: So I was raising as much money as I could cause I had a club called the Yakiniku (Japanese BBQ) club and we raised money. It wasn't a lot, but we were able to buy food for food banks. Second Harvest was the main place that we contributed money to. Second Harvest has an office near Akasaka-bashi and Akihabara. And we would walk there and I would, we would hand them the money and just say, do what you can with this pay for your gasoline, pay for the tolls, buy something to give the other volunteers a break. I couldn't get up there until end of June. The roads were a lot clearer then. And it was that was a time when you can start to really help people because there was, if you had rushed up there, there was no place for you to really stay. You're going into a zone that's not set up for anything. There's no plumbing, the conditions. And we talked to Eddie a couple of months ago in a live stream. There was no plumbing. There was no running water. In fact, there was no drinking water. You couldn't get food. The supply chain was broken restaurants that serve people could not get enough in to supply the food again. The government was stepping up with rations, the U.S. government. And I'm so proud of them. The Navy and the military came in and did a really good job and they don't get enough. They deserve a lot more for what they did. They were going into Fukushima in places where there was radiation, not thinking about themselves.

00:32:01 John Daub: And I had some friends down in Yokosuka. They were going up there and helping up in Tohoku. Supplies were eventually getting up there and I think it was in June and July. Where I was working with trying to get sponsors and was working with Aussie beef, Australian beef, and we were able to get steaks brought in from Australia and drive them up. And I remember the first positive thing that wasn't such a sad thing was an event that we put on. And I think Mike, Japan Foreign Volunteers, I believe was the organization. Mike's organization, Japan Foreign Volunteers quickly started recruiting on Facebook groups and we put together a festival and Aussie beef gave us the meat and we were cooking up 500 gram steaks to the people of Ishinomaki, in an area that was just wiped out. And we had grills and people came, we had taiko drums. We had something of a party. It didn't feel like partying. But you needed to have some kind of a break.

00:33:11 John Daub: Ah, so that was a tough day, but it was a good day. We were tired. We'd come all the way up. We'd set up the grills, tents. It was a hot day in the summer. Lots of steaks. We must've cooked hundreds of kilograms of steaks to people. People, some people didn't want to stick around for a festival. They took the steaks. They went back to wherever they were camped or in shelters and ate their steaks. Whatever we could do made us really happy. And I spent the night in a school in Ishinomaki that was a place where just a bed. And you could tell that the locals there were used to working with volunteers they'd never met before. There was a genuine friendliness to everything. There were coordinators and they were just volunteered coordinators. So somebody's got to do it. They stepped up. The volunteerism up there was amazing in the months after. People had not a lot of experience. My friend Dean Newcomb went up there as well. It's just, it's not just mud. I believe was his organization and he was focused on digging the mud out of the houses of people who were impacted by the tsunami.

00:34:32 John Daub: That was the aftermath of the earthquake was awful. When I did get to Ishinomaki and Kesennuma after, there's nothing there. Like there were places where it was just flattened and it's just debris. They cleared the highways and you can see all of the debris on the left and the right of the highways just toppled, just like mountains of stuff to clear away. But they could get the roads cleared to get supplies into the people who are living there. It was a disaster zone. I did see the boats that were moored. The cars that were in cars were washed into rice paddies and you can't move the cars. You can't move the vehicles because the property laws in Japan prohibit you from doing that without the owner's consent, even though it's landed into there. So there were personal objects until the law was changed where they could not remove a car or they could not remove a boat or they couldn't move things until the proper channels have been contacted. It was amazing to see. We'd seen it on TV. When you see with your own eyes, it is so much different because you can smell it, you can taste it, and you can see it and you feel it in the faces of the people that you go up there to help. It was hard.

00:36:18 John Daub: I will tell you a story and I'll try not to get emotional. I was thinking about this last night before I went to bed, which is late actually, because I had to upload this video. Mike and I we'd finished in the morning we were helping people remove tatami (traditional straw mats) mats out of their house. A lot of people had left to go to other family members' houses and had come back to Ishinomaki to their homes to start to dig out of it. So we were helping people with muddy tatami mats. There were already volunteers there. Whatever they could, we could do to help them to remove the wood out, to help just rip stuff out so that they can put in new wood. The tsunami brought in toxic mud and water filled with gasoline, chemicals. And that brought everything into the house. And it was dangerous. Some of it was very toxic. You had to wear masks. You had to wear gloves and boots because you didn't want to touch the mud. We'd finished volunteering and we're on a lunch break. So we walked into town. There wasn't anything open. There was a cafe. We got a sandwich, very basic. Coffee, Nescafe. It was actually really good.

00:38:40 John Daub: And walking up the street. And there was a guy who was moving a refrigerator. He was moving it back into his house. And he was by himself. So we saw this. So we started to, the three of us helped, the two of us helped him. Three of us moved the refrigerator back in. But you could see he wasn't okay. He was alone. And we didn't want to leave either. So he offered us tea to stay and talk. We went upstairs. He had a second floor and we sat up there. And it wasn't impacted. I think that's where he was. He told us his story. And I'm going to share that with you. So he was, and I really do hope I can see him again. When the earthquake hit, his kids were outside. And when the tsunami warnings came in, his wife went out to look for the kids. And they had agreed that he would stay behind in the house in case they came back. So that they would not go back out to look for their parents. They would stay in the house. So the tsunami warning came in. They were a little bit at elevation, but not quite high enough. The tsunami hit. His wife and kids didn't return. And they never returned. And he was just waiting for the longest time for them to come back. And they didn't. And you could see he needed to say this. He needed to tell people. And we were the recipients of this. And the best thing that we could do at the time to help him was to just listen. So that's what we did.

00:41:28 John Daub: He talked about his children. He talked about his wife. In Japanese. And we told him to be strong. We said that we'd try to come back in and check in on him. He said it was okay. He said he had family nearby. He was staying with them. He didn't know what he was going to do. He was going to stay at that location. Because it brought a lot of pain to him. You could see. I'm sure he's not there anymore. Those stories were everywhere. In that town. Not everybody made it. And those that did live with it. They live with it to this day. And many of them, the reconstruction, the rebuilding is not complete. There's more that can be done. Maybe more volunteering. I don't know. There was an orphanage that somebody told me about of kids that just didn't have parents anymore. Because they were lost. They were safe in their school.

00:42:46 John Daub: And 2011 was not a great year in general. The Cherry Blossom Festival. We're getting ready now to celebrate the hanami (cherry blossom viewing) or sakura (cherry blossoms). Probably the events might be canceled here this year too. They were canceled last year. And they were canceled in 2011. Just because there was nothing to celebrate. The whole country. The cherry blossom viewing, which was two weeks later, was just stopped. Nobody went out drinking, partying, having fun, nothing. It was canceled. You can't cancel nature. The blossoms still came out. But the blossoms had a different meaning. A different purpose. That was a bad year. The fireworks were all mostly canceled. There were no festivals. They were really subdued the next year. It was special. Because Tohoku was, you know, back. We were going to overcome this. And 2012 was so much better than 2011 based on that. Just, we're gonna get through this kind of a vibe.

00:43:55 John Daub: 2011 was bad. But it didn't start off bad. Actually. I found some of these photos. In February of 2011 I was in the Tokyo Marathon. Just a week and a ten days before, I believe. It was a beautiful day. I'd ran my best time in the Tokyo Marathon. Three hours and fourteen minutes. There's proof. That's me. I was dancing. I still had energy. I'd trained really hard. I'd still had energy at the finish line. I was able to dance. And get in people's way. Make a big commotion. So it was good. It was a great year. Until it happened. It was a great year. My work was increasing. I was doing more TV stuff. Life changed. We're now ten years in. We're in a lot better situation.

00:45:27 John Daub: Ten years on. I think there's a lot more that needs to be done. We may have lost focus because of the Olympics. I'll be honest with you. I think we were, when we were focused on Tokyo. Maybe we should have been more focused. Cause we were also focused on getting a bid for the 2016 Olympics. Remember? Maybe we should have been more focused on this. I don't know how that if it was a bad impact or good impact. But I just know that the attention shifted a little bit more to Tokyo than I was comfortable with. And wish the attention had stayed on Miyagi. Iwate. Fukushima. Parts of Ibaraki. Chiba. People hurting. Small businesses. Locals. Grandmothers that lost their house. Now they're living in trailers. Still. Some of the people might be. I haven't. A couple of years ago they were. Eddie told me that the situation is a lot better. His hotel and the live stream is from a couple of months ago is still available. His hotel is now abandoned. But that was headquarters back then in Kesennuma for volunteers. For people coming through. Eddie speaks great English because of all the international volunteers that went through there.

00:46:58 John Daub: But 10 years on. There's still a lot more that needs to be done. And that's why talking about this 10 years on is important to me. In Japan to talk about it. And what still needs to be done. And we have the Olympics coming this year. And I'm hoping that NBC focuses a lot on Tohoku. We do have some events. The softball events are actually based in Fukushima, I believe. Some of the Olympic events are there. To me that's a good thing. And that puts focus on an area that very much needs it. And if you can do me a favor. When you think of that word Fukushima. Click restart. And think of it as the places of peaches. Onsen. Sake. Friendly people.

00:48:04 John Daub: I don't know what it's going to be like in 10 years from now. But a lot of new stuff. Kesennuma had a pretty exciting vibe. They had Pokémon manholes up there. Manhole covers. New businesses. A lot of younger people have come in. Started entrepreneurial enterprises. They're trying their best to attract people to come here. It's on everyone's radar now. Other YouTubers are focusing on it. I know Abroad in Japan. Chris Broad is from his Japanese hometown. His Sendai area. Right now, Sharla's living up in Morioka. There's a lot of other YouTubers that are there doing good things. Putting light on Tohoku. On the areas that were really impacted. And that's a good thing. Because we cannot forget. Same with Kobe. You know. You see the earthquake memorial down in Kobe. And you remember I was a couple of years when I came to Japan when that happened. And the impact was still being felt a couple of years later. In 1995 is when that happened. And I remember that was when I came. So we're still feeling that impact. And I believe there was still an aftershock not that long ago. That was a pretty strong quake that they said was an aftershock from 25 years ago. So we still have occasional aftershocks from that one quake. The next big one can happen.

00:49:33 John Daub: And I wanted to make this episode. I don't know if any of you have seen it yet. But I wanted to make this episode and release it today for this purpose. It's called "Japan's Largest Earthquake Really Felt." Because if you do come to Japan, it will help you prepare mentally for the next earthquake. Like I do think it will help you watching that video. Just so you can see and feel. Because nobody has their camera running when an earthquake hits. And you can't see their face. You can't see how they react. Nobody describes to you when it's happening. Earthquake simulators give you an opportunity to do that. If you're in Japan, definitely go check that out. And definitely watch that video. And get an understanding. If you're thinking of moving to Japan, you have to take in consideration. Yeah. It's a safe place. But it's not a safe place. In the sense that mother nature is pretty cruel to Japan. We've got typhoons. We've got earthquakes. We've got landslides. We have volcano eruptions. We've got like every single possible natural disaster situation here. Which is probably why Japan is so safe. Maybe that's one reason. We respect life very much.

00:50:57 John Daub: After you live through a situation where you thought you were going to die. You try to make every day count. You try to live every day better. You remember that day. You have now a point in your own personal history to go back to. To say things were that bad. I could have died. You remember it. And it sets up the course of your whole life going forward. This is what this channel Only in Japan. Again. I say this in the video. But it comes from this. Just a deep love for that area. For people. For Japan. Japan has been very good to me. 23 years. What could I do? And that's what I could do. I was doing it for NHK. But I thought I could do it better. A little bit. Maybe. My way. So that's why it's important for me to keep doing Only in Japan. Despite the recent challenges with the channel. It's for me. It's rooted in a very, very deep personal feeling. Personal desire to help. That's why I spend a little bit more time with the videos. That's why I want it to be as factually correct as possible. It's the journalism part of it.

00:52:15 John Daub: In the next 10 years. I don't know. But I do know that there's a lot of people who love Tohoku. A lot of people who live up there. A lot of people that have voices now. And there's a lot of people that are going to continue to bang the drum and say get up Tohoku. Keep your eyes on. Make sure that the people are doing okay. They may not reach out for help. In Japan. When somebody's sake glass is empty. You have to notice it. And fill it. They won't ask for a refill. Some people won't ask for help. You just have to know. Don't ask. Just help them. Just listen. Just stop. And listen. And for that day with me and my friend Mike. Where we heard the story of the man who lost everything. The value in listening is sometimes invaluable.

00:53:03 John Daub: This pandemic has also brought in some very traumatic situations. And especially for younger people. And it's very hard. A lot of depression. It felt kind of the same way back in 2011. Where we're in a way sort of reliving that. We're at home. We can't really go out. There's an earthquake back then. And radiation. Now it's fear of the pandemic. It's okay in Japan. By the way. Listen to people. Sometimes you just have to look. And you have to notice. And you just have to listen. You don't have to ask do you need help? You just say what's wrong? Tell me about it. Listen. Don't talk. That can be huge to help people get through something. And that's what I learned from that. Although I talk over Peter all the time. And I do talk a lot. I listen a lot too. Just so you know.

00:54:30 John Daub: I'll take some of your questions for a little bit. And then the BBC contacted me and wanted to talk to me a little bit about the anniversary. So I want to. I think it was like 7:20 Greenwich Mean Time or something. Thank you for sharing your experience from a direct. Here's hoping scientific breakthrough means we can predict earthquakes better. That would be really good. And Katrina Johnson. Thank you for joining us. Thank you Katrina. Very much. Fed is 17. Thanks for sharing, John. I had a chance to visit Rikuzentakata. Yeah. This was so. This is up in Iwate Prefecture and was very hard hit. A few years ago. It's devastating to see how much of it is gone. Inspiring to see how they're rebuilding. But you're right. More could be done. More needs to be done. And right now just shining a light on Tohoku on this area is a good thing.

00:55:24 John Daub: On April 3rd I'm working with Japan Rail a JR East we've got a special shinkansen (bullet train) they give it as a special ceremonial shinkansen to start off a new pass. JR East Pass is now open to foreign residents living in Japan and I know my friend Ruth Jarman from German International has been working really hard too with JR East trying to find ways to get I don't know more focus on Tohoku so this pass again it was just foreign tourists but now foreign residents people like me can now use a pass to get up to Tohoku and help from a promotion take pictures up there take our vacations up there. It's a great thing JR East is doing a wonderful thing and I'm really excited about it so it's a wonderful thing by offering this pass it's five days unlimited for two hundred dollars which is like a fraction of the cost just one trip up to Aomori costs like 80 of that so I'm going to be utilizing this pass a lot over the next year filming a lot more Tohoku and I hope this opens it up a lot more and I'm so thankful to JR for opening up this JR pass there's a tweet that I have pinned to the top I think that if you are in Japan living here join me on that train there's a hundred people can join me on this train the whole train is ceremonial all right it's awesome you can join me on the train it's 15,000 yen at even more discounted price you get a five-day pass a welcome mask a Suica (IC transit card) card a little some swag and there's a ceremony on the platforms of Sendai Fukushima Morioka and Shin-Aomori and Tokyo Station and I'll be live streaming the ceremony on Tokyo Station again this is all for Tohoku to try to get people up there and for me it's very important to do that to get people get their businesses running that for me it's about trying to get people to focus and go up there so this is awesome.

00:57:38 John Daub: So if it's not the tweet's not pinned there there's a press release on Japan Today about this and there's a I'll put a link in the description if you're interested we we have over a hundred people signed up but only about 70 people have paid you know I'm sorry about 30 people have paid because this the payment system is a little bit unusual but we'll get there. Wow I really appreciate the WX Turbo and Warren Vaughn Toronto inspirational story coming out of 311 let's not forget about our national hero Yuzuru Hanyu who lives in Canada now remember the brave indeed it's these kinds of situations very much so like 2001 9-11 came down the City of New York in America pulled together like I'd never seen it before Japan was very much the same way and the volunteers the foreign expats that lived here I salute you all you stayed here you were not a fly-jin you didn't leave I can't blame anybody who left because we just didn't know about the radiation and what was going on but for those who stayed and put themselves in harm's way just to help other people to use their own and savings and money to give to grandmothers and grandfathers who had lost family members and to give them food and I I'm inspired so much by my friends here you have no idea and this is the reason why I stay in Japan.

00:59:17 John Daub: That's all I have to say I'm gonna get ready for maybe an interview I'm not sure what's going on but uh it was about 2 p.m when the earthquake hit and we're getting close to that right now in fact um I think it's there yeah um yeah that's actually BBC now they want to talk to me so uh thanks so much for watching this live stream let's keep our memories and focus on Tohoku going forward in 2021 um much love if you have any questions you can leave in the comments below and check out the new video that I just uploaded on the main channel um what it felt like because I think it's important for you to know on this day what we felt that day so check out that live stream thanks everybody thank you Devard Ross and by the way let me know your address I sent you a message about that you'd written sweet but not the number I'll communicate through a live stream I sent you a message uh well I'll communicate Jimbo 386 thank you bye everybody have a nice day.