00:02 John Daub: Hey everybody, welcome to the city of Akeshi. It's a stop on the Hanasaki Line, the JR Hanasaki Line between Kushiro and Nemuro. Here's the front of the station. You can see it's not exactly the most lively place in the world, but it is a place, and we're here. Therefore, we're going to live stream this entire area and the station. How you doing everybody? I arrived here on the Hanasaki Line about 15-20 minutes ago. I looked at when is the next train for me to go back to Nemuro. I'm scouting this out for an Only in Japan episode, and there's only 4 or 5 trains a day. So I have to wait for about an hour and 45 minutes for the next train.

00:46 John Daub: So hey, why not bring you guys with me? Because when I was hitchhiking 5 years ago, this is what I would do. I would bring you with me and share the experience. And here you are in Hokkaido, live in Hokkaido with me. How cool is this? I'm going to show you guys what I'm doing. I'm going to take you inside of the station just to give you a quick look and see what it looks like, and then we'll be on our way. I'm going to take you down the main street here in Akeshi and show you some of the stuff. They're very famous for whiskey. There's a whiskey distillery up on the mountains, but unfortunately because of the pandemic, it's closed at the moment. So I can't take you there, but in the future that might be a really interesting place to go and check out.

01:30 John Daub: Let's go inside the JR station. There's one vending machine, always. Sometimes there's two. Because the next train is so far away and there's nobody here, it's actually closed. Now compared to Tokyo, the vending machine for tickets is more like a ticket machine you find in a restaurant. I thought this was interesting. You just pick the button. There's not a lot of choices here, and you can find your destination. Everything's in Japanese though. They also have kids prices, which are half off. To go back to Nemuro, it's about $15 according to the exchange rate, or 1,890 yen. But I already got my ticket, so I'm okay. They're not open all the time. There's the list of the train times. Back to Nemuro, there's one, two, three, four, five, six trains. That's pretty good, that's one more than I thought. They do ask that you make sure your temperature is low and you don't have a fever and you're wearing a mask on the trains, except when you're eating your ekiben (station bento) and there's nobody here.

03:16 John Daub: All right, let's move on and show you some of the town here of Akeshi, A-K-K-E-S-H-I. I'm actually surprised there's taxis here too, and they're hybrids. I don't think anyone's ever live streamed here. We're one of a kind. So this place, this restaurant here on the side, this is an ekiben shop. So I'll see if I can put this on Instagram, but I actually had an octopus ekiben delivered to me at the station. This is really cool. On the Hanasaki Line about 20 minutes into this trip, an old lady who made the bento drove to the station and hand-delivered me the ekiben. There's only one door that opens on the Hanasaki Line, so it's easy to find out which door she's going to be at, the only one that opens. And she brought a delicious bento. I gave her a thousand yen. I think she was smiling. She was wearing a mask. Then she gave a really low bow and stayed there to wave to the train as I departed. That's what we call omotenashi (Japanese hospitality) in Japan. It's pretty cool to have that kind of service.

04:51 John Daub: I never heard about that delivery service for bentos at local stops. You have to order it in advance because they need to know you're coming. So this one also will do the same service. You order the bento, they'll run it over to the station right here. They make it fresh, and then when the train stops, you give them a thousand yen and they give you your food and you can eat it on the train. Pretty cool. They're closed. I was going to get this one too, but they have a kaki (oyster) bento. Oh, you satanic birds! Hey, you get away from me. I know your kind from Hokkaido.

05:50 John Daub: Toby (crow) is from Hokkaido. First saw Toby in Noboribetsu. He's the king because I threw a piece of salmon. I was in Noboribetsu, and for a couple dollars they give you a bag of salmon. You throw it to the bears and the bears catch it in their mouth. The bears are living in a cement place in a big pit, so you feel really bad for them and want to get extra salmon. It's a vicious circle. Let the bears free, but then they're so big, the mammoths, they probably eat people now that they want revenge. Well anyways, the Noboribetsu Bear Park is kind of a neat place if you want to see crows, because these acrobatic crows. I took a piece of salmon and threw it, and in midair this crow swooped down, grabbed it in its beak, and flew off to the side and devoured the piece of salmon. It's on a live stream on this channel. Never seen anything like it. He's evil. He took it from the bears who can't escape the pit, but Toby could. So we named him Toby after this guy who was trolling me on a live stream, and ever since then the legend of Toby was born.

07:36 John Daub: All right, here's the main street. Not a lot of people here. It's a pretty quiet street. This is a reason why you explore, because you never know what you're going to find. The lake is over here, and I want to see if we can find a better place to see the lake. I don't know, it's not a lake, it's like an inlet, a bay maybe? I tried to put a map in the description, but there's a bug with the YouTube app that freezes the app if I try to change anything. Look at that little teeny mailbox. Because there's so little mail here, they have these little mini boxes. That's cute, it can hold like six letters.

08:33 John Daub: Joy, there's a deer. What? There's a freaking deer here. Bambi. Okay, I approach the deer, it seems to be the logical thing to do. There's a deer. Deer me. My first reaction is to bark. I don't know why, maybe I'm part dog, DNA issue. Hello sir, ma'am, you from around here? I'm just visiting. They're tame, they're not even freaking out. I'm like right on top of them. Christy writes, just observe. Okay, that makes sense. We're in the middle of a city looking at deer and they're looking at us. Dear, you're on Only in Japan Go, the live streaming channel that brings the world of Japan to you. 280,000 subscribers.

11:24 John Daub: Okay, stay. You know what? I'm sorry, you just do your thing. I'm just gonna get out of here now. Are they following me? That's it, let's move on, we got a long way to go. One thing about Hokkaido which is really cool is that these roads go on forever, they're all straight because they got so much space. They're all straight. Do you see that number one? It tells you the height that you're at in case it's tsunami. Unfortunately we're at one meter high which means that we'd probably be devastated, depends on the tsunami of course. Manhole covers here are not inspirational, but I found that a lot of regions here in Hokkaido, here's a manhole cover, kind of nice. It's famous for birds and a bridge.

13:24 John Daub: How do residents make money? All right, there's a couple, there's a distillery. So they've been making whiskey here recently. Think about it, this place is perfect, the air is so fresh and clean here. Sorry about the black screen. We're back, I'm walking to the end of the line here and there's a supermarket, that's about a 15-minute walk. Apparently at the supermarket. Look at this, they're just drying fish here on the side of the road. This is so Japan. I guess you dry them and then you grill them, they're pretty good. You won't see that in Tokyo. It doesn't smell at all, but then it's so cold right now. I just smell fresh air and people with burning fireplace wood, smells like fireplace wood. You can see they celebrate oysters, look at this, they're celebrating the oyster culture with stained glass. I'm digging it, I like this town.

14:59 John Daub: Again for those that don't know, I'm in Akeshi. Akeshi is the name of the town. Tokyo is so hot here? Yeah I know, it's freezing here. Have one hand in my pocket, the other one out, I alternate hands because it's chilly. Unfortunately I couldn't put a link in the description for a map because YouTube app wouldn't allow me to do that, there's a bug, one of many. Be grateful that we have a YouTube app I guess. So I talked to StreamYard and was gonna use another app to livestream which also does 1080p, but the problem was that you can only use one camera, it requires four clicks to switch from front and back camera where YouTube app has one touch. StreamYard is working on the issue apparently and they've taken user feedback. But it's hard to pay a premium for an external app that requires me to do so much work. Those are oyster shells. So I'm trapped with this app for the moment. My train's at 2:20 p.m. Japan time, so let me know if I'm close to that so I can make a run for the station.

17:23 John Daub: Welcome everybody, welcome to Akeshi. This is the main drag. How far is the supermarket? John has plenty of time but he will probably wait until the last moment. It's like you know me. Had a seafood shop, I'm using an external mic because the wind was really strong. This Hokkaido is RAV4 country, that's a Toyota mid-sized SUV. I'm looking for a car to buy and that RAV4 looks pretty good. They have these retractable sunroofs now, it makes it into like a convertible, pretty sweet ride. They have hybrids now or EV RAV4s apparently where you can get 50 kilometers of battery life to go around town. Where are people? They're inside because it's cold and maybe working because it is a weekday. Here's the local politicians, they look healthy, big smiles. I'd vote for you because I hardly know you. I want to go straight to the supermarket, but I'm looking over there and we can see the water, so that might be interesting to take you over there. This is a restaurant, they also have really good seafood here in this town. Whiskey and seafood. So I'm going to cross the street here and take you to the sea because I see the sea.

19:56 John Daub: There's not a lot of people, no police either. I was driving slightly above the speed limit because everybody else was. It's not your fault if the car in front of you is going 15 kilometers over the speed limit, the car behind you is going 15 kilometers over, you're in the middle. Are you breaking any laws? If the guy in front of you is speeding and the guy behind you is speeding and you're just going the speed of traffic, should you pull over? It's a dilemma. I'm always trying to do the right thing. Sometimes you do the wrong thing though. Oh there's a dead end, I can't go in. Can't really see the lake. Fresh Hokkaido water. Let's take a quick look, I came all this way. It's like minus 30 degrees or something. I got no towel anyways. This makes sense, very deep live stream. Got a refrigerator, can find some good stuff here if you search. Let's go back to the main street, just give me the creeps. It's like somebody pulls you in and ties you up and puts you in a refrigerator.

22:19 John Daub: There's no people, maybe there's a reason why. Do you see those deer? We've seen more deer than people. Is that a seagull, part of the evil trifecta? Maybe Toby and his minions took over the town, it's highly possible. Deer and crow working together. The deer seemed to have free rein to walk around. Obviously the deer know something that we don't know. Deer are the king. If you want to see the deer, I walked up to a family of them, you can see it in the playback. Rent a bike would be nice. Maybe Toby's driving one of those cars, I haven't seen any drivers. Coffee Rest Robinson, that's kind of neat. I wonder if it's a Japanese owner. Look at the menu, that's a big menu, that's a restaurant right there. If you like this town, hit that thumbs up button. If you don't like this town, hit that thumbs up button. Just hit the thumbs up button. There's a lot to like about this town. Very little people, good for people who don't want to be around other people and like chilly springs. It's cold.

25:20 John Daub: I was talking with the city hall in Kushiro, I got a chance to meet with two really nice guys. They're gonna help me with the Hanasaki Line episode. And big thank you to JR Hokkaido too for letting me film and working with me to try to make a good episode on this. I gotta come back in May because it's gonna be more green, it's just depressing, nothing's alive out there. As you can see there's nothing alive out here either. They said that a lot of the businesses are just closed, they just decided to close because there's just not enough customers to justify being open. And apparently there's subsidies if you close your shop, some kind of subsidy for reduced hours or closing. So things close pretty early. That's a cake shop, yakitate (freshly baked) cake shop. Sushi here is amazing, it's like they catch it and then they cut it, it's crazy, good sushi here. East Hokkaido is so unexplored by tourism, it's the place to go. If you just stay in Japan another month and go to places where nobody goes, that's where you start to discover stuff like this: an empty town, an empty phone booth, a statue of a woman. It's beautiful, it's art.

27:21 John Daub: Oh this is the planetarium right here, do you see that up on the right side? It's the Marine Museum slash planetarium, and apparently it's a really good museum. The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, women's speed skate champion was from this town, congratulations on the silver medal. The speed skater won the silver medal in Beijing from this town, this is a banner to say thank you. That's nice, the whole town is very proud of her for her speed skating ability. And I saw some signs in JR Akeshi Station also saying congratulations. This looks like it's the center of the town, here's like an amphitheater or something. People can sit there but it looks kind of not alive. Kanae should dance there, pretty cool, get some people to hang out there. It's the Marine Museum so you have some propellers, but it's also a planetarium and it's also closed, and it's also a shame. They have one of those iron lungs as well and some old scuba diving equipment where you'd have to pump the air, like Bugs Bunny used to wear those, remember those Johnny Quest cartoons from the 1950s where you'd have the frogmen.

29:55 John Daub: This is the supermarket and I'm feeling the cold. And I'm thinking to myself, yeah you know what, no, I don't think we need to go to the supermarket. Take a zero on this, come back another time when it's warm so I can start a bonfire. There's another RAV4, they must have gotten a discount for RAV4s. Nice looking car, RAV4s are pretty sweet, better than a Lambo. At the end of the street is a supermarket called Fukuhara, but I'm thinking Fukuhara might not be worth it. The Akeshi Gourmet Park, that's something. Walking 1K is about 15 minutes or 10 if you run a little. Alright I'm going to give up on the supermarket. Oh my god I think I've walked two kilometers or something, 30 minutes of walking. So I have 40-45 minutes, no I don't think I'm going to go to the shopping mall.

32:24 John Daub: If you are insistent I will do a driving stream tomorrow because I've got to drive back to New Chitose Airport, and it's about a 5-6 hour drive from Nemuro. I could use some company, but is it really that interesting to look at the highway? I don't think I'm going to take the tollway. This is how I scout, I work the ground, I look around, I try to find something interesting to cultivate a story. This town's not speaking to me. The distillery is up on the mountain about 4 kilometers away. With this side of Hokkaido you really need to have a car, taxis are okay but they're pricey. It just makes a lot of sense to get a car. Now you can get subcompacts for like $30-40 a day, but it's so much better to have a RAV4. I'm driving a Raize, R-A-I-Z-E, it's a Toyota car, pretty nice sweet ride, like a small SUV. It's more than I should have paid but I got a gold card because I've been renting a lot from them, like $85 a day or something, but it's a good ride.

34:28 John Daub: Alright let's go to that cake shop, let's take a quick look-see. By the way I got 10% battery so I don't think this stream is going to go on much longer. Speaking of batteries, my personal battery is getting low. I hope that cake shop has got something. Yakitate meaning it's fresh out of the oven, but how could that be, there's no people to buy it. It's just pretty amazing that we saw the deer, I'm still kind of amazed that we saw deer. So tomorrow morning I intend to go to the easternmost point of Japan to check that out, see how close Russia really is. Can I shout, can they hear me? We saw today this morning that 18 kilometers is not that far, we can see the mountains in the distance of Kunashiri (island).

35:53 John Daub: Alright let me get my mask on, I could buy something. Yakitate cupcake, let's see if they have a cupcake here. Get some cash out so I don't have to fumble in my wallet. I got a spending limit of 700 yen, can't imagine one little teeny confection being that much, but it's nice to support local businesses. Konnichiwa. Thank you. It cost me a melon pan. They had like three chocolate chips on this one, it was talking to me. A hundred and sixty yen is a lot for one melon pan though, you can get them at the convenience store for a dollar but this is kind of warm. Oh it is warm. Maybe it's because it's heated inside there. I was wondering if I should even leave the nice warm shop.

38:40 John Daub: I'm walking and eating, and you know what, there's no humans to report me, these cars are self-driving cars. Whoa, there's chocolate inside this! Awesomeness, it's still slightly warm. Never had a chocolate melon pan. Wow, that hit the spot. How can you be on a diet when there's all this good food around you? Yeah walk it off, that's what I did. The train ride from Akeshi back to Nemuro is about an hour and a half, and I got a chance to film a couple really good scenes. There's a nabemono (hot pot), $15 a person for that one with meat, and they have some kaisendon (seafood rice bowl). After the stream I'll put a link in the description.

41:23 John Daub: All right guys I'm not gonna take you back to the station, we've already seen this stuff, you're just seeing it from the other way. But this is what Akeshi looks like, it's a seaside town in the center. There are supermarkets, there are shopping malls as we found out from you. So I'll put a link in the description of a map, you can check it out. It's like a little traveling, you've seen it now, you can go and explore it by Google Maps, find out bakery and pin it. Some good melon pan. All right everybody, thanks for watching and hanging out with me for an hour as I'm scouting this area. It's interesting to see another area of Japan. I'll be in Hokkaido for one more day, I got a long drive back. So maybe I'll do a livestream, if we get a thousand likes on this I'll livestream a little bit of the drive back, maybe stop off at a service area which are pretty amazing compared to the ones in Kanto near Tokyo. These are basically like a shack and a vending machine but it's a good place to stop, great scenery. I'll show some of the scenery. All right everybody have a good day, thanks for joining me. I don't know if I'm going to do a night stream, I might do a night stream to show you Nemuro, I'm not sure, I'm pretty tired. But I'll show you Nemuro tomorrow and the easternmost point of Japan, and then we'll see what happens. There's a lot of livestreams I've been doing but it's fun, share the adventure. See you everybody from Akeshi.