00:08 John Daub: How you doing everybody? So I'm here just to do an emergency live stream because I've read the news that has come across the wire. There's a link in the description so you can see that. I'm actually right now in Nagano at a Japanese ryokan. I traveled here yesterday driving four and a half hours from Tokyo to film an episode here. Never mind about that. We have a big piece of news. Japan is finally going to be reopening the borders. More importantly than that, a government official recently acknowledged, I think it might be the first time in a very long time that a government official acknowledged that there were 150,000 students waiting to enter the country with visas.

00:51 John Daub: I think there was just so much pressure coming from abroad and from a lot of you who have been waiting to get into Japan for so long that the government finally opened the borders. I think it's a very important thing to do. I initiated this kind of late and for the next five minutes or so I want to kind of talk about what is happening, what's going to be going on, and this beautiful room that I'm in. I'm actually leaving in about 10 minutes so I don't have a lot of time here. Slept in a beautiful futon. Look how comfortable that is. It is as comfortable as it looks.

01:19 John Daub: All right, let me sit down here. Hope that the Wi-Fi signal is a little bit better. We have a massive amount of snow here which is absolutely beautiful. Hopefully it does snow a little bit more because it adds a lot more drama to the episode. All right, so the plans are not official, and we don't actually know what's going to be happening until Thursday when Prime Minister Kishida announces how they're going to be rolling this out and the specific details. But you can assume that it's going to be students and business travelers, especially business travelers before the students, because this is sort of what makes the country work.

02:03 John Daub: What we've been seeing over the last couple of months, more students are losing interest in Japan. They're actually going to neighboring countries like Taiwan, like Korea, like even Hong Kong. Some of them are even going to Australia and other places. I don't even know what the situation is, but just a lot of Westerners are getting very frustrated with, not just Westerners, people nearby here in these countries like Korea and Taiwan are very frustrated too because a lot of them had visas to come here. Now, from March, it's going to be opening, I guess, gradually.

02:48 John Daub: But one of the pieces of information that was really interesting in this news article was that they're dropping the quarantine, which was 14 days. Then it was cut down to 10 days. Then it was raised back up to 14 days because of Omicron. And now they're lowering it back to seven days. And then they're going to get rid of it completely in March for people that have been vaccinated three times and test negative for a PCR test on entry, which makes sense. I'm not sure where the government had all the money to pay for hotels for thousands of travelers coming into Japan, returnees, mostly Japanese citizens, and people like me, residents who already had visas and lives here, were allowed to return. But it wasn't always like that.

03:31 John Daub: The road from 2020 to now... And they did start to ease the border a couple of months ago. And they were going in that direction, but Omicron threw a wrench in it. So before everybody rejoices and you start making your travel plans, I want you to consider, though, that this can also change again. We don't know if a new variant is going to be coming. We don't know what the situation is going to be like in two months. And this has been the case from 2020 all the way now to 2022. So before you book your trips and you start planning for summer and fall, please wait for the details on this.

04:09 John Daub: And if you do want to book your ticket to get ahead of everybody else, make sure you get insurance because you might have to cancel those tickets and make sure they are refundable because you could lose a lot. But a lot of you have already lost a lot. Now, I don't think that Japan is going to lose a lot of... People are going to lose a lot of interest in Japan because of this. And probably about two or three weeks after they reopen, it's almost all forgotten. And people go back to the mindset that they had before that this is an amazing country to travel around and see some amazing places.

04:40 John Daub: Mr. Jimmy writes in here, "I'm not holding my breath on booking a trip." All right. Don't hold your breath anymore. Go ahead. And either you can if you give up on it or you decide to come, I'm pretty sure that this summer is going to be hopping for Japan. And there will be procedures in place. Now, before I go, before I leave, I'm going to go to breakfast and then get back to this location shoot that I had to film at 9 a.m., which is an hour away, a little bit over an hour away.

05:09 John Daub: The reason why Japan had the travel ban was mostly political. I talk with a lot of people here in Japan about this. Most of the voters are older. Most of them don't have anything to gain by having foreign visitors coming into Japan. Most people don't even care. But there is a significant part of the economy that does. And when international businesses start to pull out of Japan because they can't get parts, because there aren't enough flights coming into Japan, creates a huge disaster. Then the government starts to listen.

05:50 John Daub: But I think they listened more to the voters who were like, look, if you start bringing in piles of people into Japan, we're going to be scared and scared voters will not vote for that party. And the politicians and leaders will think we want to appease those voters before anybody else. Because it wasn't certainly based on science. 14-day quarantine made no sense in Omicron because it had a two, three day incubation period, I guess you can call it. And it's over by the time a week is done for a lot of people. So it didn't make scientific sense to continue the way they were going.

06:24 John Daub: And in fact, this Omicron is already raging throughout Japan right now. In fact, it's maybe a tougher place right now than the United States because the U.S. State Department issued a travel warning to Japan based on the Omicron situation here. So I guess it doesn't really make any sense to keep the borders closed and try to protect a situation that is already out of control. No, it absolutely does not. It's going to take a couple more weeks before the borders do open again procedures. It's not just because of the desire and just giving up on this protectionism way of life.

07:06 John Daub: It just takes a long time for Japanese procedures to initiate because even this third shot booster vaccine rollout takes forever to get the papers rolling and everything needs to be signed and hankoed. And despite this being the Reiwa era, it still takes a ridiculous amount of time. Nothing is really digital in Japan. It's still all paper based. You can see that in the way I got my booster shot already. It requires at least half a dozen forms to fill out, which is a great reduction compared to what it used to be a long time ago. Like when I say a long time ago, I'm like two years ago. So I'm just glad I didn't have to fax in my application.

07:53 John Daub: So essentially the entry ban, we can see that it's going to be over. And it is a time to rejoice. People have been asking me, when is Japan going to be opening up? And this is a solid date of an opening, but it's not a full opening. I don't think tourism will start up at least until the end of April, May earliest. Just because it takes that long for things to get started. Maybe they want to get it started. It takes this long to get the ball rolling. So once a decision is made, it probably takes two months before it actually is initiated.

08:38 John Daub: If you have any comments, please leave them down in the comments. I don't mind criticism. Go ahead, criticize me all you want. But I think that it's important for people, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people that are planning the trips to come here, trying to plan the future to live here, need to know what's going on from inside here in Japan. There's lots of news sources. I put a link in the description to the one I'm going to share with you. One hundred and fifty thousand people with visas have been waiting to enter Japan. A government official acknowledged this.

09:12 John Daub: I believe it when I see it. That's and this is the problem, because a lot of people are somewhat apprehensive and rightfully so after months and months, if not years of waiting and waiting and waiting. We'll believe it when we see it. The details are coming on Thursday, according to the news article. And then once you get the details, then we'll see more about the direction. But once again, it's a political decision. And if you have been voicing your opinion on Twitter, on social media, telling business leaders just recently, business leaders from Western countries just said that it's just too draconian. This is too rough.

09:57 John Daub: And I think that's what we're going to have to do. It's hurting our businesses. And some places have actually pulled out of Japan. Then it's not about the voters. It's about the economy. And that is the voters. It's the economy, stupid. So we'll see it when we believe it. But the details coming Thursday, I hope that it is. The details in the blueprints include international tourism. I'm not sure. I don't know if he's going to be talking about that. But tourism has opened up for neighboring countries already.

10:26 John Daub: So I think it's going to be really rough for Japan not to have a blueprint that includes opening it up to international tourism, even if they have quotas in the beginning, whatever they need to have some sort of blueprint so people can also plan their trips, because I hope my hope is that you did not give up on Japan and you're still interested in it because there's still a lot of adventure and a lot of things to see and do here in this amazing country, and I hope that it's still on your itinerary. And if it's not, I can understand.

10:59 John Daub: John, would you go to Kyoto to do coverage on how tourism has affected the city and local businesses? I'm not really a big fan of Kyoto. I'm not a Kyoto person, but, you know, I'll go there. I'll do it. I don't know, we'll see what's going on down there. I'm a fan of the countryside. I'm not a fan of, you know, Kyoto hasn't... I think they went bankrupt. Somebody said, Tony P, thank you. Except that they can't get pandemic under control in Japan. Opening up will only spread it more.

11:32 John Daub: I don't think so. I don't think it's going to spread it more. I think it is what it is. It's going up and it's going down. And in the United States, the numbers are going down in England. Everything, all the numbers are going down by March. Optimistically, I believe that opening it up to other countries is going to be based on the situation that are coming into Japan. For example, if the United States has it under control, they're probably going to open up tourism to Japan because Japan is a very safe and conservative approach to it. It's just the way it is. So it's already endemic. Yeah, it is what it is.

12:11 John Daub: Just in case rates in here. I wouldn't call it endemic yet. We just don't know. But it looks like it is going in that direction. Numbers go up and down. JK adventures, regardless of restrictions. That's exactly right. This virus has no passport. Doesn't matter. And the policies were weird. So people could come in. Citizens and residents could come in, but they couldn't. My breakfast is here.

12:32 John Daub: [inaudible] This is a good breakfast. All right. I got to go, guys. Leave a comment down below. But just keep in mind that the details are coming on Thursday and I'll do another live stream in a couple of days. I'm headed to the monkey park. If you are a member or an insider, I'm going to be doing a special live stream for you in a couple of hours. It's just ninety-nine cents. See you then.