00:03 John Daub: Hello everybody, welcome to Haneda Airport, Terminal 2 in central Tokyo. There's a Solaseed flight, which is part of the ANA group. Solaseed goes to Kyushu, and you can see it's represented with Kumamon, the big mascot from Kumamoto Prefecture in Kyushu. They're the budget carrier. In this livestream, I'm going to take you through Terminal 2 a little bit. This is the ANA side of things, mostly domestic flights. There's also an international terminal at Haneda Airport. You've seen Solaseed, which goes down to Kyushu. There's another ANA-associated airline called Air Do. You can see Tokyo Skytree right there. Air Do on the runway or tarmac is Air Do Hokkaido. So that last "Do" stands for dō (prefecture), as in Hokkaidō. This is going to be a little confusing. Air Do was an actual airline, and then I believe it just became part of the ANA group. A lot of the airlines are struggling, so it's code-sharing. It's a beautiful, mostly sunny day here in Tokyo.

01:20 John Daub: I'll be leaving from gate number 58. This is 52. There's not a lot of stuff inside the airport here. How you doing, everybody? I'm on my way to Hokkaido. Sapporo is about a 75-minute flight or so, maybe a little bit longer. As soon as I get there, I rent a car, and I'm going to be driving up to see the Hokkaido melons, which are very premium, very high-grade luxury fruits. But we're going to get really deep into it. I'm filming this for a main channel episode. I'm pretty excited about this. I don't get a chance to fly that often because of the pandemic, so this is a big special treat.

02:02 John Daub: I noticed that inside of the terminal, here's some news for people who are flying domestically in Japan. They do have a lot of bento (boxed lunches). None of the domestic flights serve food. Maybe Okinawa does because it's a little bit longer, but everything less than two hours doesn't seem to serve any food on board. So there are some bento that you can buy, but the options are limited once you go through security. So you might want to get your bento in advance. Here's my bag. Look at these massage capsules. These are pretty cool. 12 minutes for 300 yen. That's actually pretty good, right? That's about $2.50 for 12 minutes of massage. I'm feeling pretty good, so I'm okay. I don't need to get it. This gate number 52 is leaving to Tottori.

03:13 John Daub: Now the inside of the terminal, once you go in through security, there's not a lot here. There's a Starbucks on one side. But if you're on the wrong side of it, it's very hard to get a coffee. I might actually get a coffee here. This is a restaurant, Air Festa. A&A Festa is the airlines restaurant. And they got some good offerings here. I don't have enough time to stop and eat. But if I did, I would get a nikutama udon (meat and egg udon). Nikutama. That's about $10 for that. Oh, man.

04:01 John Daub: Kanai won't let anybody touch me, including machines. So I will trade that massage maybe for a sandwich. Hey, now. So this vending machine has a pretty good selection of Japanese sandwiches, including menchi katsu (minced meat cutlet). And we have a mixed sandwich with tamago (egg). That might go pretty well with the flight and my coffee. In fact, this bag that's weighing me down on my camera is massaging me. Snack will do. You can see President Biden is here in Japan. I was just doing a livestream on security. And we've been seeing helicopters going all over the place around downtown Tokyo. So I'm not too sad about leaving right now.

05:14 John Daub: So my flight leaves at 1 p.m. And I have a little bit of time, but apparently the flight starts to board 30 minutes before. The great thing about domestic flights in Japan, if you're not aware of it, is that you don't have to check in two hours in advance. You can do it 45 minutes before the flight. You can check in and still be OK. That's pretty cool, right? And you can bring in liquids through domestic flights. They have a special machine that will check out the liquids to make sure it's not something suspicious. I don't know why more countries don't do that scan liquids. But international flights, I think it has to do with dealing with the other countries that might not be OK with these kinds of machines. There might be some kind of risk.

05:56 John Daub: These look really good. Komeda's cheese cookies, chocolate cookies with berries. Oh, they do have bento. That looks like a really good hirekatsu (pork fillet cutlet) sandwich, which is a really good cut of breaded pork cutlet there. If Dean Newcomb were here, I might be tempted, but I'm driving, so I have to stay away from alcohol. I'm driving in a couple of hours. So it's calling to me, though.

07:37 John Daub: That's a good looking breaded chicken cutlet. Yum yum. I have an ANA gold card. So they give me miles. So I got like two miles. Whoa! Hello, Baskin-Robbins vending machine. Popping Shower. Caramel Ribbon. Ooh. Orange sorbet. Oh, my gosh. How dare they put this in the domestic flight terminal? These aren't actually like ice cream cones. These are in a cup. Popping Shower. Should I try this? Okay, everyone says popping shower.

10:18 John Daub: How do you eat this? A spoon of ice cream. The spoon is below the lid. That makes sense. All right, let's go eat this over here. Got to lick it. I got some ice cream. There is no spoon. What the heck? How do you eat this? There's no spoon. It's not under the lid. There's nothing here. You can't use the lid either. It's solid rock. I'm putting this in my pants pocket so it'll melt. And maybe in 5 minutes I can eat it. Everyone's trying to be smarter than me. I'm not sure what to do. I guess we gotta go back to the store. You know what, I'm gonna melt it in my pocket and then get a coffee and then I'm gonna go to the airplane.

13:01 John Daub: Hey what time is it? Does anybody have a time check here? Can I drink coffee inside the plane? Yes you can. Then I'll take the size of today's coffee, hot and milk. It's cold so it's ok, just a little. 383 yen. Today we have a discounted price. Oh, I forgot the spoon. I'm sorry, how much is the spoon? We got a spoon. I don't have to melt it in my pants, although it did soften a little bit. Oh my god, why do these things turn into misadventures? I don't even know what time it is. Oh my gosh, I can't miss the flight. When they say final call, somebody listen for final call flight to Sapporo. I'm kind of far from the gate. I shouldn't have done this.

15:12 John Daub: Let's try the ice cream. Look, they got cup ice cream. They have rum raisin. 12:29, thank you. I don't want to miss the flight. That could be bad. Spoon's gonna break. Oh, there's like rocks inside. Gotta dig for treasure. Okay, we don't have to make a mess. I got some rocks. Oh, that's pretty good. Alright, I'm gonna save it for the flight now cause it's too hard. It tastes, it's got like a candy crunch to it. It's pretty nice, it's not a pop rock but it's got a candy crunch to it. They're not pop rocks, they're just kind of like rocks, like pebbles. Alright, we gotta get to gate 58, I'm getting nervous. There were no shops around gate 58. I had no choice but to make this hike. Now I have to hike back.

17:21 John Daub: You know, there's one thing about missing a shinkansen (bullet train), missing a flight, that's not good. If you look back at the archives of Only in Japan Go, there was a time at Narita Airport where I was livestreaming and Kanae couldn't find me and I almost missed the flight cause I'd done a final call. And then we ran, I was livestreaming and I was still livestreaming when I got on the plane. I was all exhausted but I think I got some melon KitKats or something. Might have been worth it. I think that was four years ago. We're going back to international flights in one month from now.

18:29 John Daub: We're good, there it is. 1pm, Sapporo. Nobody's boarding yet. I'm not at diamond master level so I don't board. There's no social distancing here. Oh check out that, that's a weird looking tea. Juwari (100% buckwheat)? Oh look at this one, this is a water, I think. Yeah it's like a bath water. Really? I'm not gonna buy that. It's like Tokyo bath water. Remember back in the airports like 20 years ago they used to have little computers where you'd put 100 yen coins in and you'd be able to use the internet and the keyboards were made of metal. Not a real good typing experience. Whatever happened to those? They still have these grey phones. And the grey phones are interesting because 23 years ago I used to use these for internet and I would lock in my computer with the jack and call America Online in the USA and download my mail by long distance call. That would take about a minute and then I'd do my emails and then go back here, connect a computer up, call America and then send it again. That's how I used to send my email. It's crazy, it's funny to still see these phones here.

20:29 John Daub: Oh there's a Tully's Coffee over there. They got good stuff too. I guess let's just keep walking a little bit longer because apparently we're not boarding yet. So we can extend the stream. Click that like button, I'll be in Hokkaido and I'm gonna do maybe like 10 livestreams from Hokkaido between the time I'm shooting. So it's gonna be kinda cool to go up there, it's still chill. So I had to bring almost late winter stuff just in case it gets too cool. So I'll be there for a week.

21:06 John Daub: Now some of the things at Terminal 2, they go down, especially the low cost carriers. You gotta go down and then from there you take a bus to get to your flight. So whenever you have to go down, just assume you gotta get on a bus. There's a stylish store. Again there's not a lot of airport stores in Haneda. See it's best to buy your stuff before you go in, for the domestic terminal. Your choices are very limited. Oh what's that? These look like cakes. Oh they look pretty good. And then there's the security. They have banana smoothies in a can? That looks good, is that Hokkaido milk probably in there, nice.

22:16 John Daub: So which is the best airline? That's easy, ANA. ANA is the better airline right now because JAL went bankrupt and they weren't able to do a lot of stuff over the course of the bankruptcy. So they had a lot of things against them. But I think JAL might catch up and maybe in a few years they'll be back at this level as ANA, but ANA just put on the gas and accelerated. And that's why you see these collaborations with Star Wars and the Pikachu ANA flight and you have all these really cool things going on with ANA. I went on a flight and I was able to meet Yoda. It's weird.

23:08 John Daub: Was that a flight announcement? I think so. Alright guys, there you go. I hope this is fun for you. This is my life. I'm going to get in the car and then driving up to Yūbari, which is about 40 minutes away from New Chitose Airport. And then I'll see if I can livestream. I'm staying in a guesthouse hostel which is really nice and they have this amazing dinner made from food that was farmed right there, so I'm looking forward to it. Maybe I'll livestream that. But give me a thumbs up and let me know what you think. I'll see you on the other side in Hokkaido everybody. Have a safe, have a nice day, I'll have a safe flight to Kanai, nice to see everybody. I'll see you on the other side of Japan. Go to sleep and don't give your mom any trouble if you're watching this. Bon voyage to me, I guess. Where'd that plane go? Wow.