00:00:07 John Daub: Hello everybody, welcome to Ueno. This is one of the most famous areas to see the sakura (cherry blossoms), which are at 100% bloom today. Let me swing over here and you see the entrance to Ueno Park, Ueno Koen (Ueno Park). This beautiful tree here. There are many different varieties of sakura tree. This one is done because the birds pick it apart. How you doing everybody?

00:00:35 John Daub: So for the next 20 minutes or so, I'm going to take you down the main road. Hopefully the signal holds out. This is a live stream and give you a little bit about the experience. Now this is 2022. We're still in a pandemic mode here. A lot of the hanami (cherry blossom picnicking) has been banned. They ask you not to set up blue sheets or anything. Next year in 2023, I'm guessing things are going to change and get back to normal. But for now, in this area, they ask to wear your masks and be good citizens.

00:01:06 John Daub: Wow, this is, I don't even know what variety of cherry blossom this is, but it's so much more delicate than some of the other ones. Hey, Silky C's here. Andy's taxes. It's nice to see everybody. Larry's Fisherman Peso. It's reverse JD time. That's right. I started early because I know that the signal is going to get worse and worse because it's getting more and more crowded. Just go, which is Only in Japan Go. You know what I mean?

00:01:35 John Daub: And we have a special guest who's waiting for us right there in the center of your screen. Joining us in a baby car, also known as a stroller, is Kanae and Leo. This is Leo's first time to Ueno Park. And Kanae hasn't been here in ages. And the wind is down, too, so I can not use the external microphone, which is good news because the audio, especially the residual audio where you can hear some of the sights and sounds of Ueno are even better. And I will be doing that for long stretches as you experience this as though you were here, too, with me.

00:02:12 John Daub: Hey, Chan is in the trunk. Sorry, in the house. Hey, Leo. Hey, Kanae. Welcome to Ueno Koen, as we say in Japanese, a language Leo has yet to learn. You're not looking exactly happy about this. Leo is like, Ueno. It's Ueno. But if you say it in English, it comes out really quickly. Ueno, Ueno, Ueno. Off we go.

00:02:50 John Daub: People, I like the way that they do it. Orderly left and right sides for directing traffic. And the whole purpose is to just absorb the cherry blossoms on this walk. They even have on the ground telling you which direction you should be going. So nobody's coming in the opposite way. This is the Japanese way. He wants to walk, too. Well, you can get a chance to walk, but let's wait till we get to the really pretty area.

00:03:22 John Daub: Hopefully the signal holds out. If not, you're watching in playback. You can skip ahead when the signal looks bad. Leo, very important notice here. And this is good for all of you, too, who are watching and not from Japan. Don't touch the cherry blossoms. Okay. It's very important that you don't do that. They have to be enjoyed by everybody.

00:04:01 John Daub: How many of these trees are plum and not cherry? That's a good question. I believe on this road, they're all sakura trees. Some Yoshino mostly at the front. There's a couple of other varieties. But the reason why they're picking some Yoshino because they bloom at the same time. So you have the impact. If you have different varieties, you'd have different stages and some trees would be green and some trees would be white.

00:04:44 John Daub: We can't stop here in the center. Leo is going to hold Leo while she gets him out of the stroller. Let me show you a little bit of the map here. So we started here at the front of it. And now we're going to walk all the way down this road, which is the most famous for the cherry blossoms. But they have them in here, too. And maybe I'll just go up here and show you really quickly. Can you wait here for one minute? Okay, so Kanae is going to wait here for one minute. I'm going to take you up here.

00:05:22 John Daub: A lot of you have been to Ueno before know where I am. If you don't, I just showed you on the map. So you should know. Now we get a lot of different varieties of cherry blossoms up here. But there's a different vibe up on the top here. This one, I believe, is a rare type of sakura. I don't see this one in a lot of places, but it's more spaced out. It's more delicate. Yaebeni shidare (weeping double-flowered cherry). Like a willow. Weeping willow type of cherry blossom. Beautiful.

00:06:46 John Daub: Sorry, I don't know how it's going to look. But as Kanae puts Leo in the stroller. So I wanted to show you up here. There is an amazing amount of cherry blossoms up here as well. But different varieties. This pink one is very famous as well. And people like to come up here and take pictures of it. Look at that. This is a stunning one. Mixing with the white over there. I got some pictures of my mom when she visited about eight years ago down there on the other side. But the vibe is just different up here.

00:07:39 John Daub: Back down. I love how they do the recycling bins as well. Everything is so clean in Ueno Park. There's the statue of the walking the dog samurai. It's over there. Can anybody tell me who that statue is of? You get two points if you can tell me who that is. Hint. He was in The Last Samurai movie. It was not Tom Cruise. It wasn't Ken Watanabe either. Saigo Takamori. He's originally from Kyushu, from Kagoshima, part of the Satsuma clan and portrayed by Ken Watanabe back in the day.

00:10:24 John Daub: Kanae, what are these chochin (paper lanterns) up here? These lights? Oh, they're sponsors. Oh, there's Keisei. Keisei's the train company. So the lanterns you see on the left and the right. Oh, there's some restaurants on there too. London Sports. That's the cheap sporting goods store in Okachimachi. Interesting. So they all sponsor part of the chochin. I guess gives a little bit of money to the city to help pay for the workers to set these up maybe.

00:11:01 John Daub: I'm not liking the crow action here. Luckily, I don't think we'll be the first people to be picked off, but Leo is small. Toby (crow). Here's another intersection clearing. It's just absolutely beautiful. Oh, look. The Yudakyara's face has been destroyed. She's actually on our Discord server. She's one of our emoji.

00:12:25 John Daub: Look, there's a restaurant here and there's already at 11 o'clock quite a line of people. All right, let's keep going. This is where it gets beautiful. And again, we're only going to be going for about 20, 25 minutes. Oh yeah, it's getting hungry and sleepy. We're actually almost there. Just about 150 meters or so.

00:13:09 John Daub: Saigo Takamori-chan. It took five minutes before somebody could get it right. Well done. The best part of this is the statue of the walking samurai walking his dog.

00:13:47 John Daub: Now typically, the left and the right of the street would be full of blue sheets of people celebrating, drinking. And there are signs right now telling you not to do that, cones on top of those green barrels there. Normally the lowest guy in a corporation, the freshman, he would get here the night before and sleep on the blue sheet to protect it so the next day the bucho (section chief) and the shacho (company president) and everybody else could come out and have a spot to sit. That was the value of him to the company. But I haven't seen it in a few years now. It seems like this culture might be over. They're doing cherry blossom by Zoom. And we have a few hundred people here doing cherry blossom by YouTube. Seems to be the way the culture is going. Oh it's so beautiful. It's a shame the sky isn't blue. We had overcast conditions come in and the weather got a little bit cooler.

00:15:03 John Daub: We're coming up to the end of a very crowded area. I apologize if the signal is not good. I plan to film a bit of the 8K video I'm making on the cherry blossoms here so you get a little bit of that a little bit later on Only in Japan Go. But just different when you're here live, you know. Again in about an hour if the signal is going to be impossible. Right, it is almost 11 a.m. March 29th in Japan.

00:16:18 John Daub: Thanks nightbot. Mike's repair stuff, thanks for telling me that the stream is strong. I appreciate that. It's hard to know. Here they're telling you not to set up the blue sheets on the ground here so that culture is done. Leo is hungry. Leo look at the cherry blossoms. One little finger, clap clap clap, point to the blossom. There's a lot of nationals here. Monday they're closed by the way. Don't ever come to Ueno on a Monday. Yeah Leo wants some milk boy. It's beautiful. There's nobody around here.

00:17:40 John Daub: I like the way they tag the trees so this one says Soma Yoshino on there which is the most typical tree. But I would love it if they put the age of the tree, when was it planted. I think you'd feel a little bit more of the history if you knew the age of the tree. Most of these are probably after World War II because this area was bombed pretty heavily in the 1940s and reconstruction in the 50s maybe the 1960s. See Ryan found our Karate Kid Easter egg. If you are right Alex, the firebombing of March 10th and that whole 1945 and 44 were really bad for Tokyo.

00:18:39 John Daub: A couple of other things I wanted to tell you about the park. For everybody who is a member, thank you so much for being a member of Only in Japan Go. You have emoji and I added a new emoji yesterday. Can you guys find it? It's one of Leo in a better mood. Who's gonna be the first one to use it? Megan found it quick. Then Becca went Leo crazy. That's from yesterday when he was walking around. I'll be adding some new emoji too this year so we're gonna keep it fresh. Leo look, you're an emoji. Same hairstyle. We haven't cut his hair yet since he was born. You ready for breakfast?

00:19:34 John Daub: Yeah time for Kanae to get her coffee. Bob Joe writes in here howdy John, the cherry trees are in full bloom here in Virginia. Oh that's awesome. The whole world is blooming. I know that they've cut some of these down too because of the typhoons that have come in and broken some of the branches. That's always sad to see. Yeah I'll see if I can film some of this for the 8K video and upload that in a few days after I get the monkey video out there. But it's just nice to share the cherry blossoms with all of you.

00:20:08 John Daub: Again this is the time where we all party, get underneath the blue sheets, have some drinks and meet up with friends. And just we haven't been able to do that for the last few years and it's kind of sad not to be able to celebrate a little bit more. But it sure feels nice to see the blossoms. Leo's going to walk. Do it Leo. Dad dad walking. You're not supposed to walk this way. You're not following the rules. You're not following the rules. Yeah you're breaking the rules. I think he needs a helmet. Johnny's already rebelling.

00:21:09 John Daub: Park is too crowded. It's getting there. We came here a little bit early. It's gonna be really bad in about an hour so we're gonna just spend a little bit of time and then get back home. By the way last 48 hours to get this postcard if you want to add it to your collection. This is the snowmonkey of Nagano doing their morning meditation. It's available on Patreon and you're supporting the channel. I will send this out right away if you order today. Just a little plug there. And we're running, we're getting down to the last few blu-rays too of the hitchhiking video on the onlyjapan.tv store. So you can buy that there.

00:22:01 John Daub: Got a question, do these cherry trees fruit? No they do not. I don't know why they call them cherry blossoms. It's actually the variety is sakura. They're not actually cherry trees. They're sakura trees. So that's important to note that they don't actually bear fruit. As soon as the blossoms are done here, green leaves are gonna sprout out of it and the trees are green for the rest of the year until winter and then those leaves will fall off. But you can already see the greens sprouting through there.

00:22:46 John Daub: Alright Leo, let's go, let's go to get some food. Alright, Kanae's very ready and it's my turn to hold him. Alright everybody, have a good day. Thanks for joining me on this mini adventure in Ueno. And if you have any questions about visiting Ueno Park for this experience, send me a comment in the comment section of this video and I'll try my best to help. But it's 2022 so there's not a lot of people and not a lot of food stands which is a shame because typically there would be a lot of food vendors and people partying and we don't have that this year. But next year experience I'm hoping is gonna be a lot cooler. Although I'm just really grateful to be out here. Thanks everybody, see you next time. And thank you, thank you Nicholas and everybody else. I appreciate it. Tig, gonna use that for breakfast.