00:00:00 John Daub: Greetings everybody, welcome to Tokyo Station. Today we're going to be talking about assassinations. In this station, two prime ministers were assassinated. One of them was in 1921, the other one was in 1930. Within the span of nine years, which is an extremely troubling story. And joining me on this live stream is a man who's over here, who has a history and a background to tell these kinds of stories. There's the marker for Prime Minister Hara, who was assassinated on this very spot in 1921. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Peter von Gomm. Well, where's your mic?

00:00:45 Peter von Gomm: It's in my hand. You came over too soon.

00:00:48 John Daub: I didn't come over too soon! You did! You were going to wander around a bit over there, you said. So it's my fault. Hey guys. You're on the spot of an assassination.

00:00:58 Peter von Gomm: Yeah. So don't tempt me.

00:01:00 John Daub: Alright. He's got a microphone. Can you hear me? Testing, testing. One, two... No, don't go. Just go around. I'll go right into it. It's a high quality production. Can you hold this for a second, please? Got it? This is Prime Minister Hara. Takahira. Takahira, a man of the people. He did not deserve this.

00:01:25 Peter von Gomm: Yeah, he was a commoner. He was... He refused to be branded or to be given a title of nobility.

00:01:32 John Daub: Nobility. Exactly. Title of nobility. And he was proud of that. So he lived as a commoner. He lived in a small house near Shiba Koen (Shiba Park). And... But he sadly met a very tragic death here in Tokyo Station.

00:01:48 Peter von Gomm: Indeed. And I guess the political climate of the day had a lot to play in that.

00:01:52 John Daub: Right. Exactly. Politics is always a reason for assassination. This plaque right here marks the very spot where we stand, where he was stabbed just once by a switchman from the railway.

00:02:05 Peter von Gomm: Yes. Here. Obviously, he had to have had some inside information that they were going to be traveling to Kyoto on a train that day. So in the morning, he was waiting here and Hara was being guided through by the station master. And... This guy just went up and kind of pushed the station master out of the way and stabbed him in the chest. And he collapsed and died shortly thereafter.

00:02:32 John Daub: Right. And this plaque, which is in the south entrance to the Marunouchi (Marunouchi) side of the station, which is beautiful. It's built in that old 1914 style. It's been, of course, renovated. It was bombed in 1945 by B-29s during World War II. Rebuilt. Two stories and then renovated back to its glory. It's a beautiful station. Actually, I stand corrected. I stand corrected. I believe it was 7:30 in the evening. He was going to... There was a sleeper car, actually. All right. It says evening. That was very interesting.

00:03:15 Peter von Gomm: Yeah. It was 7:30 in the evening. And he was going to take a sleeper to Kyoto. Sleeper train to Kyoto. We have another photo of him with a top hat on.

00:03:27 John Daub: Right. So I want to put this in perspective in the time that he was in. Look at these. Look at this clothing. Look at how decorated that is. He doesn't look happy about it either as a man of the people.

00:03:38 Peter von Gomm: Well, this is kind of a typical pose of portrait photos back in the day. Nobody smiled.

00:03:43 John Daub: That's true. You can't even smile in your driver's license photos here. Yeah. Got in trouble for that. All right. Look at those dandies. Did you say that because of the Mr. Peanut's mascot? They kind of look like that. They look like them. This is the top hat days. Look at these top hats. So look, he doesn't have a very big entourage. There's four gentlemen with him. Actually, there's a couple back here. But nothing like you would see today with Secret Service, with any dignitaries or politicians in any country. They usually have an enormous group of Secret Service protectors. And just in case anybody is wondering, no, they did not have ninja and samurai back then. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, things changed. The samurai were over and the military, the government took over from the emperor. So this is the time where they were getting into the Western culture, the Western civilization. In fact, this is due to the Sakurada-mon incident, which happened, I guess I covered this in another live stream about a year ago. That's just about a 10-minute walk near Hibiya Park. Linda, hi. Hey, I saw Ervin was here earlier. Hi, guys. They actually used, the samurai used a Colt 45 replica made from Commodore Perry's gun to shoot a bullet. It was made here in Japan, the Colt 45. Right. To shoot a bullet into the palanquin of one of the high lords' carriage. And he got out and was beheaded because of the Colt 45. This is back in the 19th century. Before the war. Before the Meiji Restoration. So the Western influence was here in Japan then. Of course, in the 1920s, it was very, it was much more influenced by what was going on in the West.

00:05:50 Peter von Gomm: Well, interestingly, you mentioned about the whole samurai thing. Well, Hara's lineage was of samurai. So as he was growing up and when he became a politician, he insisted on maintaining this commoner representation of the people.

00:06:06 John Daub: Right. And so, although he, yeah, it's just amazing seeing that. Yeah. I wish I had some more photographs of him. Where's the one with his first picture and all the awards? But he was stabbed here and he died on the spot. And maybe this is the marker for it right here. I know Tokyo Station does a really good job. They put these markers on it. And this is an anomaly on the floor of Tokyo Station. I'm thinking that this is the exact spot where it happened. Right there. If you look around on the floor, there's really nothing else around like it. And the spot for the next prime minister that we're about to cover has a very similar marker. So very interesting. So you could, if you do come to Tokyo Station, maybe just spend a minute here to pay your respects to Prime Minister Hara, who was a, you know, he's a man of us. He was one of the people.

00:07:00 Peter von Gomm: Right. Right. Yeah, there he is right there. I'm sure he had a lot of really good things that he wanted to complete too. But next man up.

00:07:09 John Daub: Right. Well, the guy who actually murdered him, his name was Nakaoka. And initially he was sentenced to death, to get the death penalty. But then that was overturned to life in prison. And then he got out 13 years later.

00:07:25 Peter von Gomm: What? Yeah. He was released. So who knows what sort of political edge took that to happen. But yeah. Any other information? Any other informative tidbits that you might have here? Do you have your station ticket already?

00:07:42 John Daub: I do. Let me see what it looks like. I'm going to get one too. So to go into the train station, if you just want to look at the trains and not ride anywhere, there is an affordable ticket that you can get. It's a platform ticket. There it is. This is the Tokyo Station platform ticket. It's 140 yen. It allows you to go inside just for the platform. So let me get mine right here. It's right here. I think you could change it to English here. Hold on. Guidance will be displayed in English. All right. So you got a platform ticket. Let's go inside and see the next spot.

00:08:30 Peter von Gomm: Yeah. So Hara, Prime Minister Hara was at the south exit ticket gate, modern-day south exit. That's where we are.

00:08:38 John Daub: Right. And he was heading down to Kyoto for the Seiyukai (Seiyukai) Convention. And that's when this guy, young man, jumped in, lunged at him, and plunged the knife into his chest.

00:08:50 Peter von Gomm: Yeah. So the criminal stated that he was dissatisfied with the forcible measures of the Seiyukai Cabinet, which Prime Minister Hara had graduated from. And he committed a violence. And yeah, a sad day in history for Japan. Also, interestingly, Hara was fluent in French. Am I getting that right?

00:09:15 John Daub: Yeah. He was fluent in French, and he was Christian.

00:09:19 Peter von Gomm: Right. He was the first Christian prime minister in Japan.

00:09:23 John Daub: Right. I remember reading about that. Very interesting. He was a very unique person. I think he was, I think that was one of the charms and one of the things that got him into power, a uniter.

00:09:35 Peter von Gomm: Right. Somebody who wasn't of any particular side. Right. And perhaps, you know, acting as a bridge to the west. And that may have been another reason for this guy's angst towards him, wanting to, you know, to keep it imperialistic or...

00:09:52 John Daub: Right. Right? Well, it's a sad story. But again, there's the marker there. Let's go to the next one. So we got our platform tickets. Let's enter. It's about a...

00:10:05 Peter von Gomm: By the way, sorry to interrupt, John. But did you show them the Gran Cha (GranSta)?

00:10:10 John Daub: Okay, I'll pan up. This is such a beautiful station. Thank you, Linda. We will get a hot drink. And Ervin writes in here, that's not a Neumann.

00:10:25 Peter von Gomm: Neumann. Neumann. Neumann. Do you mean the microphone?

00:10:28 John Daub: Yeah. Okay. What do you think he's talking about? It's beautiful. It's an incredibly beautiful station. And... It's like a lemon cake. It was renovated. When was it... It was renovated back to its original architectural details. I think it was a while ago. But I know like about five or six years ago, they completed the renovations that made it so much more beautiful. It was a little rough back then. But it's absolutely... And I heard that there was some sort of... What do you call that? that it would take the energy of people walking across this platform, store it in a battery, and then use that. I read that story, but I don't see any markers about that. Here in this rotunda here?

00:11:20 Peter von Gomm: Yeah. Or it could have been the north entrance, but it was here on Marunouchi. Let's go inside now.

00:11:28 John Daub: So we're contributing to the power of the station. Could be. That's amazing. It's hard to tell. So we're inside of Tokyo Station now. Now, we're going into the next spot to examine where Prime Minister Hamaguchi, just nine years later, had an assassination attempt on his life. So welcome to Tokyo Station. It seems that Prime Minister Hara didn't get as far as Prime Minister Hamaguchi did into the middle of Tokyo Station, did he?

00:12:00 Peter von Gomm: Yeah, he made his way into the station a bit further before he met some trouble. He certainly did. But this time it wasn't a stabbing, was it?

00:12:10 John Daub: No. He was shot. And guns, as we all know, are very, very rare in Japan. But this... There's the Yamanote line. Now, Peter von Gomm, as you can see in the description of this video, is very infamous, notorious for his descriptions of heinous crimes.

00:12:35 Peter von Gomm: Heinous true crime, that's right. So I have the true crime podcast, Homicide Inc. It's a weekly podcast. Compelling true crimes. And if you're interested in true crime, by all means, please check it out.

00:12:50 John Daub: All right. I'm not... I can't remember if the marker was in the north or the south side.

00:12:55 Peter von Gomm: It's near the south. Okay. Should we go... I guess we'll cut across here.

00:13:00 John Daub: All right. We're underneath the Shinkansen platforms right now. Oh, look. Fucking bananas. I always wanted to try these. Maybe later. Right now we're on a quest. Now, Tokyo Station, the staff here have done a really good job of marking... the spots of where these assassinations took place. Prime Minister Hamaguchi's spot is also marked in a very similar fashion to Prime Minister Hara. If you like these informative live streams, stories that you can learn from, click that like button because we really appreciate it and encourages us to do some more. Unedited, unfiltered. Smells like coffee. Gosh, all these snacks are so good. Oh, those look good. Look at that. I know. No! Kashiwa mochi (rice cake wrapped in oak leaf). I wanna do 24 hours just living in Tokyo Station. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

00:14:00 Peter von Gomm: Yeah. All right, there it is over here. I remember because this is one of the post boxes that I put some of the postcards in. And if you're interested, I do have a few left.

00:14:15 John Daub: Oh, nice. This is January 2020's, January 2022's postcards. I have a Demon Slayer stamp on it. And if you order one, I will try to send it from this mailbox inside of right here. Where was that fireworks? Nagano, this is the one where we launched. Was that like the grand finale, the final explosion?

00:14:35 Peter von Gomm: Yeah, but I kind of Photoshopped it where I put all of the explosion into one photo, which is pretty cool. That's amazing. So this is a statue of friendship, three ladies inside of Tokyo Station by a Hiroshima sculptor. This is very famous statue here. And then on the floor of it, you can see this very unique tile. Do you see that?

00:15:00 John Daub: Okay. Is that it? You're looking for the marker?

00:15:05 Peter von Gomm: Yeah. That's not the marker. That's not the marker? Hang on. I know it's around here. Here it is, over here.

00:15:15 John Daub: Oh, there he's got it. Peter's got it. Oh, yeah, that's it. Interesting. This is Hamaguchi-san, Osachi. Osachi Hamaguchi-san, yeah. So he was prime minister. Nine years after Hara was assassinated, well, this prime minister was here in Tokyo Station. He also was attacked. And he didn't die outright. In fact, he continued on for his cabinet. He was reelected.

00:15:45 Peter von Gomm: Yeah. Yeah. And despite his injury, he continued on and just... he felt that he really needed to stay in and keep things under control. Show us the next picture here.

00:16:00 John Daub: Yeah. Here's an actual shot of him being shot. This is the day of the event. Yeah. Happened right here at this spot. So 1930 they had more cameras around. So this is Prime Minister Hamaguchi after he'd been shot right there.

00:16:20 Peter von Gomm: Right. Here is his, people are aiding him. This comes from a website from Michigan State University too. I just want to give that credit out there. It's a really good shot. Again the captions are in English too. Ah yes, so to speak. But Prime Minister Hamaguchi being helped by his staff to a hospital.

00:16:45 John Daub: Right. It reminds me of the pictures of Reagan when he was shot by, right? Do you remember that day? Do you remember where you were?

00:16:55 Peter von Gomm: I do. I do. Because all the faces of the adults were very serious and it just dominated the news. I remember I was in a typing class of typewriters.

00:17:05 John Daub: Yeah. Really? I'm that old. It was a typewriters class and we were banging away on the typewriters. And the teacher came in and told us. Yeah. Reagan had been shot.

00:17:20 Peter von Gomm: Right. So let's go over a little bit of the background of this. So Hamaguchi, he was a, I don't know, I guess he did things a little bit differently. And this is right before Japan started to militarize for World War II. Hamaguchi was against that. His policies were more about opening a trade. Getting Japan's wealth through trade. And attaching the Japanese yen to the gold standard. I guess a lot of the military saw that as selling out to the West. So he made a lot of enemies. This is 1930, right?

00:18:00 John Daub: Right. It was after his assassination, 1931, when he died. Things really started to change for Japan, right? And I believe this was one of those pivotal historical events where maybe Japan would have been different if Hara hadn't been assassinated.

00:18:20 Peter von Gomm: Right? Right. Right. It's hard to tell for sure. Well, ironically, he was for decreasing military might of Japan. And ironically, on that day, when he was here in Tokyo Station, he was getting on a train to have bullet train.

00:18:40 John Daub: Oh, stop it. I'm totally serious. It was a bullet train. They didn't have bullet trains in 1930.

00:18:45 Peter von Gomm: Well, it wasn't like today's bullet trains, but it's an express train. It's Tsubame (Tsubame), I believe they called it. Similar. Very first bullet train. If you will. And I know you will. But he was heading to Okayama down in Hiroshima to attend a military drill, where they're displaying the military goods and just to show support. But he was also wanting to defund the military and move more towards trade and exports.

00:19:20 John Daub: Yeah. And I think the problem with his policies, 1930, think about history. This is when the Great Depression was starting. The stock market in the United States had collapsed. We ended up with bad economies for years all around the world, and Japan was no exception. So his policies were just wrongly timed, weren't they? He started this, then the world economy collapsed. There was nowhere else to go. And then...

00:19:55 Peter von Gomm: Yeah. And the right-wing military, of course, seized on this, and that's where things went. So the Great Depression played a big impact on this, and his assassination probably a direct result of his wanting to be, I guess, a normal leader in 21st century standards. Well, let's just read a little bit here. So Hamaguchi's primary concern was the Japanese economy, which had been in an ever-increasing recession since the end of World War I. Yeah. And had been greatly weakened by the devastation caused by the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake.

00:20:35 John Daub: Right. Hamaguchi promoted retrenchment, deflation, and the rationalization of industry. And 1929, as you mentioned, the Great Depression was starting soon after he took office, put further pressure on the Japanese economy.

00:20:55 Peter von Gomm: Right. So... There's a plaque on the wall right here, too, that says Hamaguchi on it inside the station. Yeah. And it says, pretty much saying the same thing, Showa 5. So it's a new era. November 14th, in the morning at 8:58, just before he was boarding a train heading for Okayama.

00:21:25 John Daub: Right. Yeah, he was shot. Yeah. For political reasons here by someone on the far right. I guess this is also after the, what was it, the London, there was a treaty that he had signed that created a great amount of controversy within the right wing.

00:21:45 Peter von Gomm: The London Naval Treaty. The London Naval Treaty, yeah.

00:21:50 John Daub: Right. Well, what was I going to say about that? He... Oh, shoot. I lost my train of thought there. Yeah, there's a lot of... A lot of them on the right were anti-treaty, didn't want to make any kind of concessions. They felt like that was too much of a compromise. But Hamaguchi was a change agent, right? He was somebody who wanted to bring Japan's economy up to par.

00:22:20 Peter von Gomm: Right. Because he felt that Japan could compete through trade with all these other countries. He was confident in the products and the manufacturing of Japan. Right. Especially things like silk, which from the Tomioka Silk Mill (Tomioka Silk Mill), this is the history going back, Japan had the best of the best of that and so many other raw ingredients, materials. The military didn't see it that way. And after Hamaguchi was assassinated, then you could see the great divide where the Japanese military started to go into a... Other countries and start to take the resources from them to bring it in. And it was just a really big pivot for, guess, the followers of Emperor Hirohito. And then... I don't know. It's a really deep story. I think it's definitely worth checking out on the internet. There's a lot of historical points that maybe we got a little bit wrong because history is 20/20. I don't know. Just... But I'm a... Well, I'm a... I really love the history behind it and this just brings it alive, doesn't it?

00:23:40 John Daub: Right. Yeah, it's really... It's fascinating. Well, and just kind of in closing about this, the right wing, the youth that shot him, he was kind of aggravated by the fact that the prime minister was wanting to defund the military and this guy... And giving more power to the emperor. Whereas this guy was like, no, we got to keep the power in the military. They have the final say. They're the ones who are in control of the decision making in Japan. And the prime minister was not agreeing with that. And that was one of the reasons this guy gave for having assassinated the prime minister. You know, politics in Japan is really complicated. I don't think we really can comprehend it as Westerners. And I don't think a lot of Japanese can either. It's usually people that are older that end up voting and making the decisions. The prime minister in Japan is not elected by the people.

00:24:50 Peter von Gomm: No. The people elect the local representatives. And they vote.

00:24:55 John Daub: Well, right. Well, in a way, the person who elects the prime minister, the group that elects the prime minister is the party that wins the power. And then they elect within themselves that one person who ends up becoming the prime minister. In more recent years, it was what, Prime Minister Abe.

00:25:15 Peter von Gomm: Right. And now we have Prime Minister Kishida and Prime Minister...

00:25:20 John Daub: But they tend to recycle the same people. They're the same guys over and over, multiple times sometimes. I always wondered if they had a popular election, if that would be better. Instead of voting for a political party, you were voting for a specific leader, a person. And would that make a difference? Because the Japanese people do not directly elect these prime ministers, these leaders. Would that make a difference? There was an interesting Netflix drama called The Journalist, which really put in light the power of the prime minister. It's a fictional story.

00:26:00 Peter von Gomm: It's a fictional story, but it does take the elements from Prime Minister Abe and a scandal that happened within his administration. Whether or not he was a successful prime minister, history will tell, but there were a lot of scandals. And every prime minister, I'm sure, has it because they feel like they need to give back to their localities. For example, Prime Minister Abe was from Yamaguchi Prefecture, so he tried to give favors back to the people who got him elected in the first place. When he gets to power, I remember Dasai, which is the sake company that I toured their brewery, that's in Yamaguchi Prefecture. And I remember he had so many pictures with Prime Minister Abe, he was trying to get sake to open up to the world, to be able to increase production without having an increase in taxation. And he was able, I believe, to do that, which is a good thing, I think. So there's a lot of good things that happened as a result of it. Niigata, when a prime minister was elected from there, he built the Niigata Shinkansen there. Niigata does not have a very high population. It was very controversial. Many people said it was a waste of money. But yet we still have this really wonderful Shinkansen that goes towards the Sea of Japan. It's not a profitable Shinkansen line. But he can go back and visit his family very quickly. And the people of Niigata will always love him and build statues of him. I can't remember the prime minister. I believe it was before Hashimoto. Hashimoto was the prime minister when I came to Japan. But who was the prime minister when you came?

00:28:00 John Daub: I don't know. Very quickly, Obuchi became prime minister. They switched so quickly. You must have been Hashimoto too, or Obuchi. Mori. Wasn't it Mori?

00:28:15 Peter von Gomm: Okay, then after Obuchi came Mori. But you were one year after me, right?

00:28:20 John Daub: Two years after. Alright, so Obuchi was in office, then he passed away. And then Mori came in. So it could have been Mori. I came here, Hashimoto, who left office pretty quickly, and then Obuchi came in. So it was always like a revolving door of leaders. It still is. It's quite interesting. So just to put a ribbon into this here. So here he is once again. Let's show a little bit of Hamaguchi-san and show some respect for a man who could have altered the course of Japan's history had he not been assassinated. I'd like to think both these guys are really good men that were assassinated by powers that were evil.

00:29:20 Peter von Gomm: Right. But history has two sides to it. Not always kind, is it? So Prime Minister Hara on the right side and then Prime Minister Hamaguchi, both of whom effectively lost their lives. Hamaguchi a little bit later on from the wound that he suffered as a result of the gunfire. About nine months afterwards. About nine months after he had been reelected.

00:29:50 John Daub: Yeah. Even though his policies were unpopular because of the Great Depression. Trying to move to the gold standard proved to be disastrous though and was the final stroke in the power of the military to prove their point and take power for sure. There's a lot of history on this. What are your thoughts on why this happened in Tokyo Station? Was it because they knew? Did they both know that the Prime Minister was going to be moving on to a... That's a good question. ...in a travel to another city? Why Tokyo Station?

00:30:40 Peter von Gomm: I don't know. I'm guessing obviously it's the main hub in Tokyo at the time for travel. You know, it might have been one place where it was the easiest because it's very easy to predict schedules when you know the travel schedule. Right. The station has so many exits to escape if you were to commit a crime of this scale. There's like 20 or 30 exits. I don't know how many there were back then. Maybe even more where you could get away with it. Of course the assassin... Neither of them got away. What happened to the guy who shot Hamaguchi? Do we know? He was arrested, of course. I don't think... Let's see. We do have a case file.

00:31:40 John Daub: Yeah. See WRX Turbo's in the house. David Kiyosaki. The moderators are doing a great job. Thank you, moderators. This is the live chat. You can take a look at the... Take a look here. ...playback on some of your opinions. I'll take some questions here for anybody who's interested. Peter and I are here to take... To help you out with some of this. I love the digging out of the stories around the city of Tokyo and Japan for that matter. There's so many that have not been told or get forgotten. And I don't know how many millions of people have been walked past this marker. And just walked over.

00:32:40 Peter von Gomm: Yeah. How many millions of people walked over that and didn't even know that was a spot where Prime Minister Hamaguchi was shot. I bet you it happens all the time. Let's wait until somebody does that.

00:32:55 John Daub: Yeah. I wasn't able to dig up much information about the aftermath of this guy, Tomio. The guy who shot him. Sagoya Tomio (Sagoya Tomo-o) was the guy who shot him. From the right-wing party, yeah.

00:33:20 Peter von Gomm: Yeah. Sorry. But they were walking down the platform to get on the train. To go do a military inspection in Okayama. And this guy had a gun and shot him in the stomach. But yeah, there wasn't much other information about it.

00:33:40 John Daub: Yeah, there's not a lot of information. The pictures tell the story. Yeah. Yeah, it was a big dividing factor in the history of modern Japan. Pre-World War Showa era.

00:34:00 Peter von Gomm: Right. Yeah. I'm sure the Showa-era museum in Kudanshita must have something on this too. I haven't been in there. Maybe that's where we go next.

00:34:15 John Daub: Maybe. Yeah. Tokyo's got a lot of stories. Some of it going back to the Edo period where the 47 ronin avenged the death of their master. Yeah, just a few hundred meters from here in the Imperial Palace. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Right. And if you want, I highly recommend, guys, I highly recommend that you take a look at a live stream from Hakone about two weeks ago, about a week ago, I went into a 400-year-old tea house.

00:34:55 Peter von Gomm: Oh, that was awesome. Did you see it? Yeah. A 400-year-old tea house. And the owners of the tea house have been telling the same story for... Generations.

00:35:15 John Daub: Yeah. Since one of the 47 ronin who was on his path to go to seek the revenge. And the 14th generation owner still tells the same story. Thing really was incredible to us.

00:35:30 Peter von Gomm: Yeah. It was incredible. And you could feel that history, the connection, the human connection from one to the other for generations is to me that blows me away because in the United States, we don't have that kind of history. We're a melting pot where we've changed families and names and all this other stuff. Up in Japan it hasn't it stayed pretty consistent for throughout its history but there's stories like that I'm gonna keep trying to dig out and you as well with your Homicide Inc podcast of heinous crimes homicide.

00:36:20 John Daub: Okay yeah actually the 47 Ronin is one of the stories I'm going to be doing pretty soon okay and that you doing that report there in Hakone reminded me it's on my list to do so yeah it's a fascinating story and one of the 47 Ronin actually there was 46 didn't one of them never actually escaped he didn't commit seppuku I think it was pardoned though wasn't it afterwards yeah okay but he actually had left to inform some people that this that they were they were getting the revenge and so he managed to not commit seppuku Well, somebody had to stay alive to tell the story.

00:37:20 Peter von Gomm: Right, right. Right? Perhaps that was the guy who stopped off at the tea house. I don't think so. But I'll leave it up to you to watch that podcast, the episode that I made on it about a week ago. It's fascinating, the depth that he tells the story with music and stuff. They've really made that part of it. The hoofs of the horses.

00:37:55 John Daub: Yeah, he's got the hoofs. The sound of the horses' feet clomping. I ran out of time. I wanted to hear more from them, but I had to run away to get back. But if you do stop in Hakone, that is so worth just for the story. Because you're getting it directly from the mouth of the owner who was there. Brad Fletcher writes in here, don't forget the song that they sang right as you left. And it wasn't rude to leave because they are used to people coming and going. It's like a roadhouse where people just drink and they run and get their drink and go. Just don't forget to pay the bill. All of us watching had a coach. I remember that collective sigh when you walked out mid-song. I know! They were pulling you away. They were like, we've got to catch that bus. And then he came out afterwards to give me a good luck charm for my trip ahead. Again, sticking with the traditions of the tea house for travelers to cross through there on the old Tokaido Highway (Tokaido Highway). Gosh, you could feel the history just walking in that house. How long would it take to get there right now, John?

00:39:20 Peter von Gomm: Let's go. I rode my bicycle there in 2005 in a little Dakar. I remember the documentary I made. Wow. That took a day and a half though. And it's quite steep to get up there. Let's get on the train.

00:39:45 John Daub: Yeah. All right. This is a very interesting. Let's go out via the Yaesu exit. If you have some questions, Peter and I are here to answer them. Well, John is.

00:40:05 Peter von Gomm: And I'm going to buy Peter lunch for him cooperating. I'm on security detail here. You just put your finger in your ear, right? That's kind of nasty. I hope you wash your hands.

00:40:25 John Daub: I wash my ears. Oh, that's good. That's a good point. Well, what is this? Gin no Suzu (Silver Bell) waiting area. There might be some history with that. Look, it is a bell that it was a walnut. Well, I took the train here today, John. So if we want to get some hot sake, doesn't that sound kind of good today?

00:40:55 Peter von Gomm: Oh, yeah, we do it live in the era of Omicron right now. And we are trying our very best to be careful. The stations are not very crowded. We both are residents of Tokyo. So take a look at these John. These cookies. No. Well, well. That's food art. Isn't that beautiful?

00:41:25 John Daub: Yeah. These are green tea roses with cookie and chocolate, I believe. Right. Is that matcha or pistachio?

00:41:35 Peter von Gomm: Yeah. Pistachio is the flavor of the season right now. It's pistachio just because it's green. Don't assume it's matcha. It could be spinach, which is weird. It's like a kick in the mouth and you're waiting for something sweet. Oh, check out these. It's got the shinkansen. Wow. Check this out. They have all of the shinkansen bento boxes. This is here. That is awesomeness. Michael Sasano. Hi, John and Peter. Happy to see you live streaming again. Hot sake sounds perfect. They got the Akita Shinkansen, the Tohoku Shinkansen. They even have the E5.

00:42:20 John Daub: Doesn't really know. I got him a play rail and he just destroys it like Godzilla. And that's even the linear motor car, the Chuo Shinkansen they have. That's cute. That might be the train that Hamaguchi was going to be taking. Prime Minister Hamaguchi to Okayama. That's the 1920s. Dark one that looks like the Darth Vader transformer version. It's got a Hello Kitty one. That's the Sanyo Shinkansen down in Osaka. You have having memories of your Kitty Bento, right?

00:43:00 Peter von Gomm: Oh, yeah. I can't highly recommend that. It's like a parking lot