00:00:09 John Daub: Alright, there's the sign. Kamisato. One kilometer. Oh, not quite there yet. Alright, so we've got about 30 seconds to go before we can pull to the left into a service area, which is pretty exciting. This is Saitama. And I'm on the way to Nagano, which is a 370 kilometer, what is that, like 280 miles or something. Basically almost four hours of driving and I'm going to be taking a break here at Kamisato.

00:00:39 John Daub: I guess I could signal right now. Going at a cruising speed of 80 kilometers per hour. I think below the speed limit here. Alright, here we go. Alright, let's see here. Cars to the left. And here it is! Oh, it hasn't changed at all! I haven't been here for ages! There's a Starbucks right straight ahead. And let's park in the front row. Arigato. And I will show you this beautiful service area. Now there's a big difference between a service area and a service area.

00:01:32 John Daub: I'm actually in a parking area. Here's a couple of spots here. Right here, I can pull right in front of it. Oh, this is a great spot. How you doing everybody? Welcome to Kamisato. This is a service area in Saitama Prefecture on the road towards Nagano. Today I'm going to be crossing through Nagano City, my final destination, the mountains, to film for one day and then come back tomorrow. Kamisato kind of breaks up the trip. I've stopped here usually when I'm driving in this direction.

00:02:20 John Daub: One, because they do have a Starbucks, which is pretty good coffee. And they have more restaurants than some of the other service areas. Now, on Japanese highways, there's service areas and there's parking areas. I grew up not that far from the New Jersey Turnpike. And on the New Jersey Turnpike and New York Thruway, they were called rest stops. And here in Japan, they're called parking areas and service areas. Now, a parking area is basically a place that you can go in there and you park your car there.

00:02:51 John Daub: Usually there's vending machines, a toilet, maybe a convenience store, but usually there's nobody there. It's just for parking. Service areas are services where you can get restaurants, gasoline, coffee, gift shop. Usually there's some yatai (food stalls), some stands where you can get some street food. And it's a lot bigger. If you really want to take a break from the road, parking area is if you want to rest your eyes, service areas, if you want to hang out for a while.

00:03:21 John Daub: Some of the service areas are pretty intense, though. There's some service areas that look like ancient Edo, like they have their own feeling to them. Some of the newer ones. This is an older one. It doesn't make it any worse. But it's not as interesting as some of the ones that I'm going to be taking you into over the course of the next year or so. Let me just take you inside here. And I will discuss it a little bit more. This is Kamisato. I got to take you from the perch here.

00:03:51 John Daub: Here we go. Three, two, one. All right. I'm going to actually rotate you because you're going onto a gimbal. So that means you're going to go for a little bit of a spin here. Hey, Ann Dugan's here. Thank you, Ann. Okay, careful. You're gonna go for a spin here. Okay, welcome back. You're safe. Hey, Joe Michaels here. Konnichiwa. How you doing? And Patty Highland. Nice to see you, Patty. Thank you. I'm actually going to get a coffee and put that to good use.

00:04:28 John Daub: All right, let's go inside here. I have the keys. I'll show you the car that I'm driving as well. Make sure the parking brake is on. This is on the road towards Niigata. Check that out. Hey, Bob Joe's here too. Nice to see you. All right. This is the Toyota RAV4 [?]. It's a sweet ride. Not a bad car. All right, let me take you around here. The Kamisato service area.

00:05:17 John Daub: What you see here is basically a place where you could park. The trucks are in the back. Usually there's pretty good cell phone reception because there's a cell phone tower over there. Buses will park over here. There's a gasoline stand or a gas station right there. Eneos maybe. A Shell. Okay, there you go. There's loads of vending machines and I'm going to take you there last. But let's go just quickly inside. Usually there's a post office too, at least a post box. And you got that right in front of us here. Saitama, Kamisato. Michael's pretty excited about the Saitama. So is Aiken. How you doing, Aiken? Nice to see you. Nice to see you again.

00:05:48 John Daub: All right, let's go. Whoa, look at that food. It says very delicate pork steaks. Now each parking service area usually has some kind of specialty to it. All right, now you can see there's a restaurant here and there's partitions here that I guess, you know, because we live in the pandemic age. There's also a gift shop. Whoa, check this out. A cheese cookie. Wow, there's a lot of gifts here.

00:07:00 John Daub: Let's see what they got at the restaurants. This is udon shop here. Check it out. So they have here udon with all these really delicious looking toppings here. You just get it from the vending machine. Everything is about $7. That one's $5, but that's just plain with dipping sauce. Let's go to the next one here. Oh, wow. Rosukatsu curry. Oh, nice.

00:07:39 John Daub: Look at this. This is a cheese pork don. That looks so good. There's a miso pork don. Oh, man. It's about $9, but it looks so worth it. And another shop here. This is ramen. So they have ramen is about $7 as well. You get a red ramen. Check that out for about $9.

00:08:17 John Daub: If you forget your sunglasses, usually you can get them here at the service area as well. I forgot my sunglasses, but it's cloudy luckily. Whoa is that Nezuko? These look good. It's good with uh some a cup of tea. Oh these look amazing look at these made from sweet potato oh this is so I gotta get these for the dime meal one of these days here four that's pretty pricey that's like 12 bucks for four that's heavy that's pretty heavy hey Purple Cat Audio oh there's a bakery here too.

00:09:28 John Daub: I have some like melon pan muffins interesting now the service areas they usually have really good and clean toilets here which is amazing um this is a multi-purpose restroom it looks like it's empty here you can take a look here there's a place if you have a child i guess you can lay down if you need it for people who have uh disabilities if you've come here with somebody uh to help you out that's also a good place to have a good meal very useful oh here's a little a little note here on the i'm not gonna do a toilet stream.

00:10:35 John Daub: All right history Kamisato service area uh this is Kodama County of Saitama Prefecture located in the far north of Saitama Prefecture Kamisato town faces Gunma Prefecture as it flanked by the Kanna and Karasu rivers the town is noted for its ancient history that stretches back to the early Jomon period like eight thousand BC what when people started to settle in the area. In the Middle Ages, it was known as the domain of the Teshi-Gawara, Nagahama and Abo clans. Interesting.

00:11:05 John Daub: Usually the New York service areas that I stop at on the thruway have history going back to the colonial periods of like 200-300 years ago. Here they go back to 8000 BC. Geez. Alright, these vending machines got quite a bit of options here. Oh, they got corn soup. They have onion soup too. I think that might be new. Alright. Usually, I just go for the Starbucks, to be honest with you. Maybe you'll get something at the bakery. Oh, there's those cheese cookie thingies. Like there's always local confections or something that's just so interesting, so delicious.

00:12:06 John Daub: Purple Cat Audio writes in here, just need overnight accams. And you can live there for a week. Probably. You know, I have actually camped out at service areas and I was hitchhiking. I would just have my cardboard sign and I would be on the side here because if a ride you can't, you can only get on the service areas if you come by car. So I would ask people instead of taking me, dropping me off, off of the highway, leave me on the interchange where I can pick another ride going in that direction.

00:12:48 John Daub: It's a little bit easier to hitchhike from a service area. Then it is to hitchhike from back on the low road, stay on the high road. And I have camped at service areas, so you can't actually have accommodations here. And they're usually open 24 hours. Service areas are better than parking areas. I have camped at parking areas too, and it's not quite as exciting. It doesn't matter. Anyways, a lot of these restaurants don't really open until 10 a.m. I'll put a link in the description so you can take a look a little bit about the information for Kamisato.

00:13:12 John Daub: But if you're driving towards Niigata or Nagano, this is maybe a good place to go. I'm not sure if you can see it, but I'm sure it's a good place to stop. Sean, I could do with something to nibble on here in the trunk. If you're in this trunk, I'd be able to see you because it's not really a trunk. It's sort of just a hatchback. All right, let's go to that Starbucks. Yeah, it says like 10 to 6 p.m. according to Google Maps. But yeah, sometimes they open a little earlier. Sometimes they close a little earlier. I don't know.

00:13:45 John Daub: This is an older service area. The one that it was at before this, that's even older than this. So you will find new service areas that are so beautiful. You go in there and it's like going into another world. They've done an amazing job. There's another one in Saitama that looks like old Edo. You go in there and you're like, what? You're like three centuries ago with thatched roofs and stuff. Still got phone booths here. And the recycle bins are very good. They're constantly changing these as well. So you have glass, black, and white. These are the plastic bottles, PET bottles, and then waste paper, which are things that are usually considered burnable.

00:14:29 John Daub: Oh, look, and here's an electric charger. So if you have an electric car, you can charge it here, EV. But right now it is available. Not too many of those. I bet you they increase over the next couple of years here in Japan as Toyota starts with their electric cars. They're way behind the curve. All right, here's old Starbucks. Let's see what they got. Oh, check it here. Looky, looky. They have themselves some Sakura Latte. Look, they make a tree trunk from the chocolate. Very nice.

00:15:17 John Daub: There you go. It's going to take forever to get the drink and I got to get on my way. So hope that this is an informational live stream as... And they also have copyright music in there. At the end here... Here is a smoking area. And if you're smoking, you can't smoke in front of the rest stop. There's a designated area for it. The staff will come and tell you not to smoke there and you might even get fined. Just depends who's got the power when you get there.

00:16:01 John Daub: And not that far away from the service area. Usually there's a place where you can walk your dogs, play with the kids, a park in the back. We got that here. And then right here. And then it's not that far before you get into the town. Kamisato town. And it looks like... What is that? Strawberry... Strawberry farm or something.

00:16:27 John Daub: If you have any questions, you can leave them in the comments below. I am going to be doing it like maybe three or four live streams over the next 48 hours, 24 to 48 hours as I'm in Nagano. I'm on the road. It's a little bit more exciting than me walking around Tokyo streets, which I've been doing for the last two years. I want this channel to be pretty special to show you other places around Japan, especially the countryside. I'm going to be doing a lot of stuff in the future. That's what Only in Japan Go is supposed to be all about.

00:16:51 John Daub: New video on the main channel is set to drop. It's all done. I'm just kind of fixing up an edited part of it, which is a mission where... This is at Ueno Station, and it took five weeks to get permission from Japan Rail. But we got the go-ahead and I'm just kind of tweaking it a little bit. There's a scene where I'm with the staff and we're taking the toilet paper to the toilets before we cleaned the toilets at the station. It's a pretty interesting look at how Ueno Station runs and I'm just tweaking that and then I'll upload that probably um maybe I can upload it tonight for early access for insiders and Patreon supporters um but uh it'll be dropping very very soon.

00:17:26 John Daub: And then there's a blizzard of content right after that just run one after the other it's gonna come like it's gonna rain it's gonna pour blizzard so there you go uh my final destination today is Jigokudani and if you know what that is then you know that there might be a special private live stream for um members of the YouTube channel that has to do with monkeys bathing in a hot spring just saying it's supposed to snow too today and tomorrow I maybe I timed this pretty good so lots of content coming your way thanks for waiting I will see you on the road maybe I'll do another live stream today I'll show you the ryokan where I'm staying at tonight so loads of stuff I gotta get myself a coffee I gotta get back on the road I still got 169 kilometers to go see everybody