00:05 John Daub: Greetings everybody, welcome to the city of Tokyo and you can see right in the center of your screen what used to be the Olympic rings now replaced by the three agitos, which are the symbol for the Paralympics. This is pretty cool. I saw this morning that the city of Tokyo had replaced the Olympic rings. They took them out a few days ago and replaced it with this this morning. I'm going to take you around the skyline and show you. How you doing everybody? It is super sunny. The humidity is not too bad but the sun is rocking the city of Tokyo. The surface temperatures are pretty high.

00:43 John Daub: Where is NBC? Last time they were up there where Lester Holt was doing the NBC evening show. I saw the evening news from right there. He's not there today. I think they've all gone back to America. This is the secret spot. I can't go any further than this into the Hilton where they have a better view. But just check it out. It is so beautiful. Not only just the typical view of the city of Tokyo from here, but those agitos.

01:28 John Daub: Don't let those giant agitos distract you from the fact that John still hasn't eaten a Domino's 1kg Ultra Cheese Nicholas. That's true. I know it does feel like the Three Amigos. I like the fact that they call them the three agitos. They're representative of the three colors that are the most represented in the national flags around the world. That's how they chose that. Now this structure is anchored down there. It's going to be there until September 5th. And they light them up at night, I believe. Just like the Olympic rings, which were white, which was disappointing.

02:15 John Daub: It's not run by the IOC. It's run by the IPC, the International Paralympic Committee. It's funded differently and they don't have the same type of assets as the Olympics have. And there's the Fuji TV building. Thus, they're known as the second largest sporting event in the world.

02:44 John Daub: But this year, I'm calling it kind of a tragedy in a way because as the cases of infections spike over 25,000 a day in Japan, which is just incredible considering where we were at the height last year. Nobody wants to celebrate somebody winning a gold medal now. And I feel as though that's a real tragedy because athletes have trained so long and so hard to do this. They're all coming into Tokyo right now. 25,000 was where it's at and it keeps increasing. Mainly because not just the Olympics, but because of summer vacation. A lot of people just don't want to stay inside and they're going out in groups. I saw it during the Olympics too, where people were hosting watch parties outside. They tried to do it safely, but it's very hard to have 50 people together in a circle drinking in a park, for example.

04:02 John Daub: I've been getting a lot of criticism because the content is not the same as it used to be. Somebody said, John, look at your numbers, they're shrinking. Maybe you should go to a restaurant and livestream there. Hey, you know what? I have tried to do that. It's a state of emergency. The Delta thing is real. If you look at the situation in Tokyo, you don't want to even put a restaurant owner for content at risk. And I don't want content that I make to have masks in it 10 years down the road. I kind of want to forget about this period a little bit. In two, three years, I don't want to see a video where people are wearing masks and socially distancing and stuff. I want to see people embracing. That's my dilemma with my main channel now. To have content just to keep it going or to hit the brakes a little bit and wait. I don't know.

04:50 John Daub: But I do have an episode coming. I thought last night, but I want to get some shots of the agitos, which was coming today. And add that in to the end of the main channel episode. Because I think it's fitting to show a little bit of the Paralympics in anything that I do to get people to watch. And if it gets people stoked, then it becomes a more newsworthy story if the agitos are in there, too.

05:18 John Daub: Brock Dunne is in the house. To help keep you hydrated and maybe a snack to take home for Kanae and Leo, I'm going to go take you to a vending machine in a minute. This is the only angle. Again, there's the Hilton Hotel where all of the international media, a great deal of international media and a lot of NBC was staying up in here, especially the NBC, the main national part of it. Some of the affiliates are staying in other locations, sometimes here a little bit. It is a pricey hotel. I'm sure it was not cheap. But they have, from up here, the best views. And every day, probably in a lot of your international news broadcasts, you saw this view of the city of Tokyo. You can see it up there from the second floor of Aqua City. There's a really good view of the harbor. And again, if you come to the city of Tokyo, it doesn't matter if the Olympics are here, you're going to want to come for the night view. To see Tokyo Tower and the Rainbow Bridge illuminated, the lights dazzling off of Tokyo Bay, it's just a beautiful view.

06:57 John Daub: So, Kanae and I had our first date here in like 2010, 2011 here at Odaiba. And we have pictures of our first date in front of the Statue of Liberty. See over there? We were much younger. And I have a picture of her eating a Krispy Kreme donut. So she said, oh, what was our first date meal? I asked her yesterday. And I said, I think it was a Krispy Kreme donut. And she goes, no way. I said, yeah way. Because back then, Krispy Kreme had just sort of come into the market and they opened up a shop here and it was sort of trendy. Nowadays, I wouldn't buy her a Krispy Kreme donut. It's a date. It's not good. But at the time, it was pretty good. Special donut. No cream in there. Just the normal one.

08:05 John Daub: For those who don't know, the Paralympics is different from the Special Olympics. I want to do another live stream to introduce this to you in a studio setting. I'm going to be doing Twitch. There's some people around here. I'm going to be doing more with Twitch this weekend. So I'll be back Sunday. I want to try to do something every Sunday on Twitch and do more of a studio theme. I want to introduce you some of the events to the Paralympics. It's different than the Special Olympics. I've been getting a lot of questions from people. What exactly are the Paralympics? They started at the Olympics in the same year as the Olympics is in 1960. The 1960s at Rome, there were about 400 athletes from about 23 countries. It wasn't so big, but it was the first one. And they held that in Rome. And since then, it's gotten bigger and bigger. And I just wish it would be as well funded or if not more funded than the Olympics themselves because there's a lot of things that need to go into it.

09:31 John Daub: I was privy to courtside seats at wheelchair rugby about three years ago with my friend Nick, who's Canadian. Nick introduced me to wheelchair rugby. And I've always been a fan for the last three years. And I've always asked him, like, if there's another chance to see wheelchair rugby, let me know. It is violent. Rugby in itself is pretty rough. But when you put the wheelchairs in there, man, they were rugby athletes, wheelchair rugby athletes, bloodied. And they want to win, man. They were at it. It was the best competition that I've seen people really fighting to get the ball and score. I don't know the rules of rugby. I'm just saying. It's called pigskin. Is it rugby ball? I don't know that. But I do know that it was hardcore. And there's a couple of other events. Wheelchair fencing is really awesome.

11:09 John Daub: Another event which is so badass is sitting volleyball. And I was watching some of the previews of it. It looks way harder than normal volleyball. Like these are things I'm so stoked about seeing with the Paralympics. It's just that again, like this is the tragedy of it. Nobody wants to see anybody win the gold medal or have excitement in Japan when there is a tragedy here or the country's hurting. They shut stuff down here hardcore. After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. They shut down all cherry blossom events as a result because they didn't want to have any kind of celebrations during it. Very little, if any. And that was we all felt it. And we suffered together through this hard time in 2011. And that brought up a lot of attention, rightfully so on Tohoku.

12:55 John Daub: But I think this is the sort of situation when we have so many people and just yesterday a woman in Chiba who was giving birth she couldn't get into a hospital because of so many sick people taking up the beds they can't have beds open for non-COVID. It's sort of a situation the news is highlighting and they're trying to remedy this as fast as possible. I don't know what takes them so long but we don't want that ever to happen again. I was sharing this on the Discord server earlier it's been dominating the news here that this happened where a woman lost her baby because of the pandemic she just couldn't get into the hospital and she delivered prematurely and there was no space for her in Chiba to deliver the baby and no specialists there to be able to help either. And this is the thing that's hitting home right now to Japanese who've been going out and enjoying themselves is their actions here have consequences.

14:02 John Daub: We're kind of underprepared here in Japan anyways. There's not a lot of positive stuff to talk about except for right now the agitos are here and the Paralympics are coming and I'm pretty stoked about it. But I'm going to take you up the escalator here to get a better look also to try to get in the shade and cool down. We'll get a view of the agitos in the harbor they came just a few hours ago that's so awesome. Wow what a view.

14:48 John Daub: The situation has been bad for like a decade with the medical system. The health insurance is pretty good here but getting access to hospitals and things like this if you get really sick here in Japan I don't know if this is the best place to be in those kinds of situations because there's a lack of specialists a lack of doctors a lack of nurses. And it's been a very hard time for international medical professionals to come here who want to help to get they can't pass the test. A lot of people especially from the Philippines want to come here for the medical profession a lot of jobs in nursing the pay is really good they can't pass the test because it's too hard with all of the complicated kanji and there's no English version of it. So Japan continues to go on with not enough medical professionals to take care of the people that are sick and we're seeing that we're seeing that in the news play out now. When the system cracks it's not a problem of beds it's just my gosh we need some more help here we need more people to start study medicine and become really good doctors.

16:07 John Daub: I might encourage Leo to be a doctor but he'll be able to pick his own way if he becomes a synchronized swimmer I will support that too because I think that that's pretty awesome. And I went to Ohio State University and we had a lot of really good synchronized swimmers there. Speaking of crows look at this burger if I was a crow I would be knocking down this door for Hawaiian burger which looks more Hawaiian than the Hawaiian pancakes at McDonald's which are basically McGriddles McGriddle buns with berry jam. Berry is not really famous in Hawaii they should have used like macadamia nuts and pineapple jam right I don't know but these burgers are pretty good and I like these over Shake Shack actually. Kuaina is my go-to I like their fries I love their fries. These would be more closer to Hawaiian pancakes stack of whipped cream brulee with nuts in that whipped cream that would be more Hawaiian. And we're going to walk past a restaurant called Eggs 'n Things which is Hawaiian they're from Hawaii so boom.

17:16 John Daub: I'm gonna end the live stream there back at the agitos and keep going around it is quite bright I can't see the monitor um so I'm gonna walk over and see if I can get into the shade it's a beautiful day here in Tokyo not a lot of people. Each time the train stops here every couple of minutes I say every five or six minutes um about 15 people come off of the train and you can see there's a little bit of a cluster here but it dissipates pretty quickly. All right let's walk down here towards there's the Statue of Liberty our first date a long time ago and one of my favorite shopping malls. It's not like I wasn't here I was just here a few weeks ago for the Olympics.

18:26 John Daub: I want to do this next Monday on Only in Japan Go Starbucks has released an item that has gone super viral here among the netizens it is a shoe cream like cream puffs but there's some sort of brulee nut taste and they're sold out everywhere after like one hour so you can't find them at like at nine a.m they're like gone. I think SoraNews broke the story uh today you have to go to their little dessert counter.

19:04 John Daub: I'm afraid to go in there. All right, I guess we can just, let's take a quick look. They got him. They got him here. All right, I gotta try this, okay. I don't know, there's a line. Joy, they got him. Oh, there's a line. It's gonna take like 10 minutes to get there.

21:32 John Daub: I might have two yen. Oh, iced coffee. That sounds so good. Let's make this official. I'm gonna go in there.

23:30 John Daub: Oh, there's a free size up. Oh, that's a good thing. I didn't know about that. Oh, matcha taste. All right. Thank you. What do you think? It's good. Thank you. Ice coffee? Ice coffee. Oh, thank you. Wow, ice coffee came in not an ice coffee cup. That's ice coffee. Interesting. Oh, that's nasty. They're like, they're paper straws. I don't wanna touch the door. All right, we did it. That was the last one. That took forever. That's why I don't like to wait in line on live streams because it takes forever. Is that interesting for you?

26:00 John Daub: Oh, mama. Oh, they gave me a coupon for a free 100 yen coffee. They keep me caffeinated, I stay happy. All right, check this out. I got a tripod. I'm gonna set this up for you so then you can stand on your own three feet, okay? Tripod try meaning three you got that oh okay beautiful with HDR it looks almost good. This is the netizens are going crazy for this all right this looks great. I don't know why Japan is crazy for these these are shu cream puffs these are super popular in Japan you'll find them at all of the supermarkets any time of the day. They're super popular they look strange.

27:48 John Daub: Johnny writes in here Jerry by the way congratulations according to dyno bot night bot you are the most regular viewer of Only in Japan Go can we get a big congratulations to Johnny he's the most regular viewer right now. I'm not sure if I'm gonna be able to get a big one but I'm gonna get a big one with the most comments it's awesome get trophy I'm gonna name one of these cream puffs Johnny from our friend in yeah from our friend in Finland according to the night bot or dyno bot or something. I had to take over this account and check out the data and Johnny's name is on the top it's like wow I know Johnny he's pretty cool.

28:41 John Daub: Check this out what I get take this to the Sun I toast it up here in the sun cool look at this sugar a cream puff all right, itadakimasu. Take it down looks like a Munchkin. These are so good now I understand it's a sweet cake shu cream it's not a puff like the cream it just a puff there's a cream puff too but there's cake around it so it's really delicious. It's like a bite of really creamy, delicious, sweet cake. I like this. This is genius. Now I know why this is super viral right now on Japanese netizens. They're sold out all over the entire country. I didn't think I would see them, but there they were. This is a normal taste. This is so good. All right, I'm gonna save the rest of them for Kanae because I'm not that hungry. I wanted to try them. All right, Kanae, I'm bringing these four home for you.

30:55 John Daub: Ryan writes in, nice legs. I try. You can see the mosquito marks on my legs. I went to the Olympic store yesterday. Daniel, who is a supporter in Australia, signed up for the daimyo package, the last one. And I ran out of cream puffs, so I had to go to the Olympic store to get some more, some miraitowa ningyoyaki with custard in the head.

32:24 John Daub: You know, this pandemic, 18 months of, I canceled my gym last year in March. Haven't been in the gym since last year of March. I can't run as much, because my knees hurt. It's not been a great year, great 18 months. You can see over here from this distance, also the triathlon event. And if you don't already know, I missed a lot of the Olympic sports, but Olympics YouTube page has them all on there. And I found three events that really, really warmed my heart with the Olympic spirit.

33:24 John Daub: The heat is so hot, it's like fried my brain. My greatest Olympic moment that I saw was when Jesse Owens was in the long jump and one of the silver medalist who is also a German athlete, last name is Long, I believe. He patted him on the back, came up to him after this amazing, I believe it was a world record jump, came there, patted him on the back, shook his hand and he put his arm around Jesse Owens. And if you understand the time, 1936, it brings tears. If you understand the prism that this event was held in, in the times, 1930s, the gesture is so huge. And these little things mean so much.

34:43 John Daub: It was when the high jumpers this year, there is an event, I highly recommend you go to see this. One of them is from Qatar. He won the gold medal and the other one is from Italy. They both had the same height. And the judge came over for a jump off. The Qatar athlete says, so wait, can we both have the gold medal? And the Italian high jumper had been through an amazing trial. He had a cast that he brought with him to the Olympics to show that he had overcome so much. He would have won the silver medal. And then the Qatar athlete said, let's both have the gold medals. That's an option. And the judge said, sure, we'll look into that. And then they both started to hug. And the reaction from the Italian athlete in this time where everything seems so crappy. I was in tears watching that clip on YouTube. It was the best moment of the Olympics I think when the two shared the gold medal. And seeing the look on the Italian athlete's eyes that he would also win the gold medal after all of this stuff that he'd been through. And the fact that the Qatar athlete shared that stage with him, that's what the Olympics is all about to me.

36:38 John Daub: That's why I love the Olympics. That's why I like the Paralympics. And that's why I support, I really want to show positive stuff on this channel as well. Go check that out. The high jumping finals of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Best moment, I think. One of the best. From up here, you can see the triathlon, which is also a really intense event. I'm going to take you back down to the agitos from the other side from the Hilton Hotel. And we'll end it.

37:37 John Daub: Here you can see inside of the Aqua City shopping mall a little bit. Again, there's no events. It's very quiet here. I came by bicycle. The Paralympic symbol in front of us. And I'm going to take you there to end this live stream right now. This is the Aqua City shopping mall. Connected to it is where the Joyopolis is another pretty cool arcade. That's a place called Decks. And inside of their Joyopolis has been part of Odaiba for, I don't know, like 20 years since I've been in Japan. It's been there. It's pretty cool.

39:09 John Daub: Impressively, the iPhone is not overheating. So I'm going to get some shots after the live stream ends to insert into the main channel episode, which I'm going to upload as soon as I possibly can. It's all edited. The narration is finished. I got to add that in tonight. It's a lot of work to do these main channel episodes, but always comes out to something that I'm proud to watch ten years down the line. I'm going to be happy with the work that I do, and that's sort of the criteria for a main channel episode.

39:43 John Daub: The Olympics and the Paralympics have bordered off the beach, and it's such a disappointment. I can't go to where I want to go, so I'm limited to where I can go. And after the Olympics are done, I'm kind of tempted to stay at this Hilton Hotel with Kanae for a night just to kind of take in that view that we've been not allowed to take in and do a live stream from the balcony and pretend like I'm Lester Holt. See if I can get the same room as Lester. And try to do a Lester Holt NBC nightly news from the same balcony. That would be pretty cool. It's so cheesy and completely unnecessary, and that's why it's awesome. I'm going to do an Only in Japan nightly news live from Tokyo, Japan from the same balcony. I'm going to light it the same way. I'm going to wear the same suit and do my Lester Holt impression. You can't not like Lester Holt.

41:22 John Daub: I'll get in touch. I'll have to ask to see if anybody at NBC will tell me the exact room number. I don't know because of confidentiality if Hilton will tell me. But that would be a lot of fun and ridiculous and something that I think we would all kind of appreciate out of silliness, which is 2021. You have to have the right mindset to survive something like this.

42:01 John Daub: The Olympic cauldron is still in the same spot, but the flame is out, I believe, and they relighted on the 24th, when the Paralympic Games start, which is just in about a month. I'm sure it will be in about four days from now. And I'm taking you live to the Paralympic agitos, the three agitos, which reminds me, Martin Short, Chevy Chase and Steve Martin doing the Three Amigos. These are friendly games, but they're very competitive. Again, if anyone who's ever seen wheelchair rugby, just blood involved. Seriously. There's two bloody athletes. When I watched it. And I was shouting and the athletes were into it. It's like wrestling, but real blood. I know I'm American. I don't know anything about rugby, but I do know that it's just really cool sport.

43:21 John Daub: I'm having a lot of fun. I hope you don't mind. This month has been one of the toughest during the pandemic just based on content. The situation in Tokyo has never been worse through the entire we had more people in the last two days than the entire year of 2020 come down with COVID. So it is very scary. I'm fully vaccinated which offers some protection. But again, it's a Delta variant that's raging right now. And I seriously from the bottom of my heart hope that this doesn't affect the spirit of the Paralympics and the athletes can win the gold medal and we in Japan can celebrate them. But it's not a time to celebrate here in the country. Which makes the fact that they're holding them at the worst time possible a tragedy for the athletes for the city for everybody who has to watch these and if they could only delay this until spring of 2022 the world would come and celebrate these Paralympians.

44:46 John Daub: I'm gonna be launching the Nagano fireworks festival Only in Japan fireworks festival is back, baby. We have set a date November 3rd is the event date we're gonna start the Kickstarter fundraising for this. Last year we raised sixty thousand dollars to help out the Japan Fireworks Association and two fireworks makers in Omagari Akita and Katakai in Niigata and we funded quite an impressive show I thought for our community. And this year we're gonna try to do it again, and we have a couple new rewards, but also have a new design for the poster. I talked with Dakota who is the designer of last year's poster and he's gonna come up with a new design. We have a Discord server where we're talking right now about any rewards and how to make this Kickstarter even better this year. This year they did not have any fireworks festivals any big ones at all and the fireworks makers are suffering once again. And when they said would you like to do this again this year? I said yes, but we have to find a place that really needs it. I really want the money to go to someone who is hurting more than others. Nagano was a place that had a massive flooding in 2019 during Hagibis, which is a typhoon that hit. I came back from the Seven Stars the Discovery Channel shoot with Peter and Tabby Eats and we took the shinkansen back during the typhoon. And that hit Nagano so badly you get images of the shinkansen underwater. And a lot of people lost their houses and their livelihoods. And it seemed to be a very good place to hold these fireworks festivals for 2021 kind of celebrate maybe that we're getting back on our feet here.

47:24 John Daub: So I've been switching my time back and forth between that and other things that are going on behind the scenes for the last few months. I have been quite busy although the content on the main channel hasn't been on the channel like I would have hoped. That's coming with this Olympic episode. Next week. I'm gonna try to do the Space Boat because they're hurting and there's not a lot of people riding the Space Boat on the weekdays. So I'm gonna give them a call and see if they'll let me live stream from Asakusa to wherever they go. And if they allow me to livestream there and there's not a lot of people, then I'm going to try to do that because I love the Space Boat. And Peter introduced me to an idea that I might make into a main channel episode. So stay tuned on that as well. I got a lot of things that I can film here in Tokyo that I'll do for the main channel. And I'm just going to stay local. Everything has been cancelled. I wanted to go up to Tohoku, but that's been moved to another time. A lot of the location shoots down in Kochi. There's another one down in the Kansai region, which I had set up after the state of emergency, but that was extended, so that was cancelled. So it's been really frustrating for me to film main channel episodes because I try to go for home runs. And when you go for home runs, you can swing and miss, and it hurts.

49:25 John Daub: The last thing I want to tell you before I leave is on Sunday, not everything cancelled. Japan Rail said that it was still okay, and we are on for a live stream at Tokyo Station. We have specially reserved the Japan Rail Cafe on Sunday morning. We have it just for us. Me and my friend Cody, who is also fully vaccinated, is going to be coming and talking about ramen and our trip up to Tokyo Station. I am going to say something about because I have a main channel episode on noodles coming out in the next few weeks, and that's going to be, he's going to be in it. I've been on this episode for a year now because it's partially in collaboration with Japan Rail, but the timing isn't right because of the state emergency and the masks and stuff that. So we're going to have that coming out, but regardless of that, Cody is going to join me in the live stream on Sunday morning, which is Saturday night in the United States, and we're going to talk about ramen up in Tohoku and I have some clips from that episode I'm going to show you.

50:33 John Daub: It's going to be awesome because I'm taking you to Tokyo station and I don't have a lot of opportunities to film in public places like that indoors just because of the state of emergency and I really want to be very careful. Other YouTubers are bringing you content from locations that are public and indoors and stuff I'm doing my very best not to do that and it's hurting the channel. I'm just trying to stay afloat until things get better. I'm going to end up doing some more delivery food episodes and maybe go back to the routine of 2020 just to try to make it through August but it's really hard right now. So for the people who are commenting about the number of views going down and this and that I understand completely there's not much I can really do about it just try to stay positive and keep it going and bring you the stories that I can bring you. And when things return to normal you'll get out there and get on my pony which is now a horse that can go like a thousand horsepower and I'll just jet around this country and bring you all those stories that I've been building up over the last year. The Paralympics are starting and as a lover of these games the Paralympians deserve a respect for coming out here in this tough situation and most Tokyoites are probably not in the mood but this reporter is and I will try my very best to bring you some positive stories to show you a little bit around I'll show you what I can show you the situation is really rough.

52:40 John Daub: If you have any questions leave it in the chat. Chan writes in here ponies don't have trunks um they I'll bring a cart with a caboose on it okay Chan don't worry I'll attach a cart to the back of my pony you I'll have you covered pun intended. All right everybody take care stay safe. I did something um is hello hi 821 here can you identify yourself oh Joy can do it too but it's better if hello hi 821 does it oh he's here okay uh so hello hi 821 put in exclamation point karate kid one word. Did it work ah there it is boom that's awesome. Strike first strike hard no mercy could be a pretty cool one I wanna do some fun stuff here take care everybody I'll see you in the next live stream. If you're in Japan, it's only in Japan. If you think of any catchphrases I can say as a sign-off thing, let me know because I want to do it for the Nightly News podcast from up here when Kanae and I stay in Lester Holt's room. Have a good day, everybody. Later, gator.