00:00:02 John Daub: Greetings everybody! Welcome to the wonderful city of Tokyo. In this episode, I'll pick up where I left off yesterday. Just talking about the baby. Alright, I'm finally on the riverside here. How you doing everybody? There's a lot to celebrate in the Only in Japan community. Yesterday was one of the most extraordinary days in the history of my life. But I think yesterday is going to go down in the history books for a lot of other reasons. It's one of the earliest days in the history of the cherry blossoms that the season started yesterday, which was like 12 days earlier than normal. And I'm right in front of the reason I wanted to come here—I'm right in front of a sakura (cherry blossom) tree. Check this out!

00:00:52 John Daub: I really wish that a lot of you could make it here to cherry blossom season, but that's the Somei Yoshino (Yoshino) variety of cherry blossoms. That's it! Check it out! They're blooming now in Tokyo, or at least they're starting to. There's about four or five of them on this tree, but you can see the buds. We're so close. That's such a beautiful thing. And the baby yesterday was born on the same day as the cherry blossoms being announced as the season started. There's just so many things that were amazing that happened. The season started. You see it? Where the light's hitting it? Those are going to bloom in about 36 hours. Ah, it's so beautiful.

00:01:45 John Daub: I'm here on the riverside of the Sumida River here in Tokyo to talk about the baby and everything that happened over the last 36 hours now. Oh my gosh, it's moving so quickly. Time is. These are all cherry blossom trees that we were walking underneath. I'm going to settle in over there in the corner. And if you're lucky, you might even see a picture. Yeah, you're going to. I'll show you a picture, okay? Kanae is in the hospital. She's on the mend. The delivery was actually pretty quick comparatively, because we've had friends that had 48-hour labors, like two days of labor. It was really harsh. But I have to be honest with you, I was scared because I've seen too many movies. Things can go not so well in pregnancy. But I was just very, very lucky that everything did go really well.

00:03:12 John Daub: Check it out. Look at this view. We have a perfect day. Just like everything has just come together, hasn't it? Let me sit in the sun here. Get some vitamin D. We can sit down and talk a little bit. One of the things that we're now thinking about is the name. And I asked you all if you would be able to provide me with a name to try to help me out here. Thank you so much for the congratulations. I can actually keep a secret for more than nine months. I'm going to share some of the stuff that I learned as well. I didn't get to bed until like 4 o'clock. I was packing and cleaning and trying to make sure that everything is safe and nice for when Kanae comes back.

00:05:21 John Daub: I want to talk about the baby. This is the best community we have on the entire internet, I think. On YouTube for sure. Peter writes in here, congrats. If you haven't decided on a name yet, I've always liked Yugen, as in wabi-sabi (rustic simplicity), yugen (profound grace). Foreign name. If not as first name, maybe as a middle name. Peter, they actually don't have middle names in Japan. And I'm learning this. It kind of makes things complicated to compromise with my wife. But I'm going to let her have the reins. I'm going to give her my input and let her make the decision. I think that she earned it by what I saw the other night. She really did a great job. And yeah, whatever she wants to name the kid, I'm okay with almost. Just some vetoes. I'm partial to the name Wolfgang right now. It means path of the wolf. It's a German name. Very strong name. Wolfgang Mozart too. No one messes with Wolfgang. I'll tell you that.

00:08:20 John Daub: So how did we keep it a secret for so long? That was not easy. Every parent is different, and I respect every parent's decision how to handle such a thing because it's a personal thing. It's a family decision. And I talked with Kanae and we just didn't want to pressure the baby. I have a lot of respect for YouTubers like Texan in Tokyo. They just decided that they wanted to keep their lives more private. And I completely understand that too. They were really great YouTubers. And we always wish that they come back. How do we as a family react? How do we as a family be YouTubers? Because that's my profession. I don't see myself as a YouTuber, but as a creator. Because I don't do just YouTube. But this channel is very much like a blog. It's live and I share with you. And I didn't want to do it the same way as everybody else.

00:15:01 John Daub: I love the fact that, for example, Kimono Mom and her daughter are so close together in the videos. I just don't know if that's the way we want to go. Because Kanae doesn't have the same kind of desire to be a YouTuber yet. But I wanted to give her the option. I didn't want to say, oh this is the way, or we can get the kid's tuition. That's not the reason why I did YouTube in the first place at all. Any success is just a blessing and it's really a good thing. I want to give my family the chance to decide. They don't have to do what I do. I think that's one of the biggest mistakes that some people might make is pressuring to do things your way. Sometimes you have to listen and sometimes you have to slow down. There's really no rush because for me, YouTube has always been a marathon. It's not a sprint. I'm not in a hurry to get anywhere.

00:16:01 John Daub: The kid is young and I don't want to put a camera on him so much at this young age. I want him to grow up not with a digital camera and having pictures taken of him so much. Although it's very hard to not do that. That played a big part in not showing you the baby. Yesterday was pretty amazing. March 14th was the magical day, which was yesterday. A baby was born in the middle of the night. Which is kind of neat because it's very quiet at the hospital at that time. So we don't have a name yet. And I did ask some names. Pi Day too. There were so many things. Number one, the baby was born. That's going to be the number one thing. Number two, the new channel hit 100,000 subscribers which is a huge milestone for the community. Number three, 3.14 is Pi Day.

00:19:21 John Daub: I'm going to suggest this all to Kanae. She's going to make the final decision. I was going through samurai names and Kanae rejected them all. She said they're too old fashioned. Who would not want to name their child the former Shogun Ieyasu? Imagine him going to school. They'll say, Akihiro, Keita, Kei, Kai, Ieyasu. All the kids would stop and turn and look and respect that kid just based on name. Am I wrong? Haruki is a good name. Kenji sounds like Benji the dog though. I like Benji but I don't know. But then I wanted to name the baby Kiki if it was a girl because I really like my hamster Kiki. I wish that the baby could give me a sign. I'm always looking at signs. Not actual signs but maybe something from the situation that might give me a hint. Pi day is a big one. Kanpai (cheers), which is Kanai plus Pi.

00:21:02 John Daub: The reasoning for me not having a name right away is because I didn't want the baby to have to live up to some legacy. And I wanted to get to know him naturally. Because babies have not been influenced by anything. This is a beautiful thing. In fact, I told my friend Paolo just yesterday, I'm not happy with the baby being in the room with the other babies. There's like a big room and all the other babies are cry babies. They're just crying. And our baby didn't cry much at all. It's a good baby. I don't want that baby to be corrupted by the other babies. The other babies are a bunch of cry babies. People are influenced by other people. He's going to be a cry baby. And if he is, it's going to be because of the other babies. So I think it's time to get out of that hospital.

00:25:43 John Daub: I want to see his personality. I've noticed that he looks a little bit like Kanae's dad. I'm going to go back and take a look at some of your suggestions. No anime characters. Because you like an anime doesn't mean I'm going to name it after an anime character. It's not real life, people. The baby is a Pisces. Really? I thought it was an Aquarius. No, that's what I am. I'm an Aquarius. Right now I'm the luckiest man in the entire world. We did a good job of hiding it because we didn't want it to impact the streams. And we didn't want it to impact—here's something for parents to understand. Kanae and I have been at this for a while. And you don't know what's going to happen with the baby. You don't know what's going to happen through this process. And when you do say something publicly it puts a lot of pressure on the family. And things can go wrong too. And we didn't want to jinx it.

00:31:11 John Daub: I'll show you a picture really quickly. They're going to be not great pictures. There he is. See that? He kind of looks like me. He's got my big eyes. He's kind of already smiling. She's pretty tired but still actually could do it. You see the kid went straight. He's going to be a prodigy. Went straight for the milk. Amazing. Proud. He has an extraordinary amount of hair. I was very impressed. More than me and Kanae. It's a good thing. Leo is up there because it's a name that can go both Japanese and English. Every time I go to visit, I learn a little bit more. Just after 12 hours when I went back home, I went back to see the baby. He changed a lot. I didn't know that babies have cone heads when they come out. I was a little bit shocked. But it went down and went back to being a normal head. I just didn't know that.

00:36:01 John Daub: We're trying to get the baby out of the hospital really quickly. If the baby goes to the maternity hospital it gets to stay with Kanae I believe. We might do that because the ward that we live in, Chūōku (central ward of Tokyo), they have a pretty good plan for kids. There's not a lot of babies being born so there's some incentives. To stay in a maternity hospital was something we thought about doing. Kanae might do that. We thought about a week. Also the baby is a little bit underweight. We thought about a week but I think I'll leave it up to Kanae. If she wants to spend just three days she can do that and then come home. Because the baby was born a little early I'm trying really hard to finish as much work as I can. Editing videos. There's a 100,000 subscriber video. It has been delayed a little bit because of all the stuff going on around.

00:40:02 John Daub: We hid it from you for nine months successfully. The thumbnail of the picture is from the day before Kanae went to the hospital. We took one more picture. The day she gave birth, we were supposed to go to Odaiba to take pictures with her in pregnancy. That's the last picture we could take. It's crazy. We hid it from you from nine months successfully. Even during the quarantine when we're doing stay at home episodes, if you go back and watch the episodes, tell me at what point you could tell. I'm kind of curious to hear your feedback. A lot of people could tell in that Costco video about three days ago. Because the camera is like this you couldn't see from the waist down or from the top down so it was pretty easy to hide. Many people say Kanae was glowing. She wore thicker clothes and baggier clothes to hide it. She did a pretty good job. She's quite thin so it's hard to tell. But she had quite a bump there.

00:48:00 John Daub: Names should have a meaning. And I just think it's good to think about it. And every day he's getting, every hour he's getting, he's changing. I'm getting to know him. And that's really cool. So probably in the next day or two I will announce the name. Not in a live stream. I don't have to do baby live streams every time. Although it is tempting as a father now. This is the best spot in Tokyo. There's a point here, right? This is the best spot where the river just converges. And you can just get this wide view. And you don't get that a lot in the city of Tokyo. Open space like this. This is the best spot. If you do come to Japan, come here. It's awesome.

00:51:01 John Daub: Is your kid going to go the dual citizenship route as well? I think so. Paolo's videos have been really good for me to watch to get to know a little bit more about the process. He's gone through the whole process. Awesome resource. Yeah, great videos. Hard worker he is. We hid it from you for nine months. I'm not sorry. We want to make the call a little bit later on whether or not he wants to be a public figure or not. I want to get to know him. And I think by observing, you can really get to know a lot of things about your child. I don't want him to live up, I don't want him to be, to do what I do. I want him to find his own path. Which is why I actually like the name Wolfgang. It just sounds, Wolfgang was Mozart's name. But it also means path of the wolf, not a gang of wolves. Path of the wolf.

00:56:38 John Daub: Kanae's taken the reins with this. She's very progressive thinking. Where does the kid go to school? Can I be honest with you? I feel bad because I don't want to go back to school. And I feel bad for him because he has to go to school. I liked school a little bit. But it's hard. I don't think I could go back and do it again. I got bullied a lot in school. That's because I look like the Karate Kid. I did get in fights. I got in like four or five pretty massive fights. I never lost. First fight that was of any serious consequence was a kid named Andy. I'd just seen Rocky IV. He started it. I finished it. I took him down hard, man. And I'm pretty sure I did some damage. My first fight was a guy named Jeff. And I'm pretty sure I knocked out a tooth. I got in trouble. But I believe there may have been a slight amount of pride in the fact that I knocked out a tooth. Peace. Love and peace.

01:03:03 John Daub: Yesterday was the greatest day in my life. Not just because of that. But again, to us as a channel. We reached 100,000 subscribers. Which is awesome. And then we reached 100,000 subscribers on the same day as the baby is born. Which means it gave me the feeling—I was kind of worried about restarting. I have to be honest with you. I'm not sure if you have any guarantee in having to restart a channel after you've been at the top. 14 months before, I was literally receiving an award at YouTube Fan Fest. Holding up because I'm the channel creator of Only in Japan. I don't care who the channel owner is. I'm the creator. I'm holding up a creator award from a million subscribers. And that was 14 months ago. And my life was just turned upside down. And yesterday was the day where I knew everything was going to be okay.

01:06:46 John Daub: I'm going to go take you to show the sakura blossoms. These are the cherry blossom trees. Do you see them? And I'm going to show you a couple of blossoms. It officially started yesterday. There are more than five blossoms on the index tree at Yasukuni Shrine, signaling the start of the Tokyo 2021 Sakura Festival. Of course, they're going to be held a lot differently than before because of the COVID. But there are three of them. One is called Somei Yoshino. And we've been all waiting for this. And what a beautiful day it is. As we end the live stream on a high note. We end where we started. Do you see them right there? Somei Yoshino cherry blossoms are now at least these here are the first out there. And the baby was born on the same day as cherry blossom season. And you see them blooming here. And we see a new baby. And there's so many symbols saying that life is going to be awesome.

01:09:15 John Daub: Just a few things. A few days ago I was really, really depressed because of the anniversary of the Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami. And having lived through that. And going up there and volunteering and hearing all those stories. It was an awful day. And then yesterday we had the day like we had. Like all these amazing things just happening at one time. Life is like that. And if you're thinking that it's really hard right now, trust me. It gets better. Everything goes up and everything goes down. And then you're like, I'm so happy. All I have to say is this date. March 14th, 2021. That's all I have to say. And I'm reminded of it now whenever I see our son. It's a beautiful thing. Thanks everybody so much. Bye from Tokyo everybody.