00:00:00 John Daub: July 9th, 2022, and it's been a very devastating 24 hours for the country of Japan and for my own family. We've been just as shocked as a lot of you around the world, especially in the U.S., waking up to this news. It happened about 24 hours ago. Former Prime Minister Abe was shot giving a speech down in Nara. I don't have to rehash all the details that have been playing on the news. I think by now, if you're watching this, you probably know it.

00:00:30 John Daub: So in this live stream, I just want to go over my own feelings and how former Prime Minister Abe really shaped what I do as a YouTuber and how people see Japan, because he is the longest serving Prime Minister of Japan. I believe it was eight years and eight months, which is a significant amount of time because he followed a string of failed Prime Ministers who couldn't last a year, which was a very difficult situation for the country. And well, I have newspapers right here, all the front page headlines and whatnot. And I've been asked by hundreds of messages from a lot of the viewers around the world to make a comment on it and talk a little bit about it. I think this morning we're coming to grips with what had happened. And I think I'm ready to talk a little bit about it. I'm going to leave my bicycle here and we're going to walk over to the river.

00:01:34 John Daub: Yeah, the feeling in Japan, just watching the news is everybody is quite devastated, of course. And just 24 hours ago, he was here and he's not. And whenever you have a leader who was so influential and so powerful because he really did get many things done here—he was Prime Minister for eight years. I think it's a nice spot down by the river. I live here and when he took office in 2012 that was about the same time as I was really considering launching Only in Japan as a way to promote Japan because I felt bad that people, when they heard the words Fukushima, thought really negatively about the country. Having lived in Fukushima, I had a lot of feelings about that and that's primarily where this series comes from.

00:04:06 John Daub: And when he took office in 2012 there wasn't really good leadership but he had been Prime Minister for a year during those string of failed leadership tenures and when he came back he was extremely decisive—and that's a good quality you want in a leader. He's also very patriotic, very much loved Japan. There's an excerpt in the New York Times this morning that I think pretty much summarizes it and I'm not sure if a lot of you know much about Prime Minister Abe other than he was somebody who worked with Presidents Obama and Trump and found a way to be really successful in doing that. Here's the headlines from the Japan Times right here this morning—really big picture waving at the people. Are they calling it an assassination? I guess we won't know all of the details of what happened for a couple of days.

00:05:17 John Daub: I'm gonna go past the Japan Times straight to the New York Times in an article written by Motoko Rich this morning. You can see a lot of the pictures—he is a very strong leader. He was the longest running Prime Minister; before him was Junichiro Koizumi who was very charismatic, got a lot of stuff done. I wouldn't know if I'd call him nationalistic—I'm not sure about the politics too much. I just know that he loved Japan very much and I got a chance to meet not him but people who had worked with him, worked for him, who had gotten a chance to meet him and everybody always said nobody had any negative things to say about him—always very kind, he had a very soft voice, kind eyes. It's a shame I would have loved to have met him but you know he's the Prime Minister—he's got lots of things to do even outside of office.

00:06:12 John Daub: But there was a passage here in the New York Times I think I'd like to read to you guys to try to put in grips his leadership here and why it was important. It starts here: when Mr. Abe gave the first speech by a Japanese Prime Minister to the U.S. Congress in 2015, he acknowledged the weight of the past but avoided the direct personal apology for Japan's role in the war. Now I think that's something that might be somewhat controversial but something that was really strong in the way that he led Japan—like the war was over 70, 75 years ago now, World War II. And it seemed like when I got here in 1998 a lot of Japanese were really still apologetic—they were born maybe two generations after the war and they were still kind of apologizing and not feeling like being Japanese was a positive thing. They had a culture of being apologetic.

00:07:15 John Daub: And I think Prime Minister Abe when he came in he wanted people to be proud to be Japanese and that might not be the best thing for the neighbors in the region who had suffered but this we're talking like two or three or four generations removed from the war and he wanted to build a strong Japan and I believe that his policies did that. He started off with in 2013 announcing that he wanted to have 20 million tourists come to Japan—Japan wasn't even in the top 40 as a tourist destination until Prime Minister Abe took over. And having a strong Japan here—let me finish this article here to get a better understanding of how he felt about this and this is all very relevant here: "History is harsh. What is done cannot be undone," he said. "Our actions brought suffering to the people in Asian countries. We must not avert our eyes from that."

00:08:16 John Daub: On what was the 70th anniversary of the end of the war he reiterated his support for the past official statements of remorse but also seemed to suggest that Japan had done enough. "We must not let our children, grandchildren and even our future generations to come who have nothing to do with the war be predestined to apologize." And when I read those words this morning it brought back all the conversations that I had about Japan's history with other Japanese and how they were very apologetic and they felt bad about it—they didn't want Japan to be a world power and they didn't want Japan to have any role whatsoever and they just felt negative on this. Even during the holidays you don't see too much patriotism within Japanese—at least not 20 some years ago. And Prime Minister Abe just wanted to turn that around. I'm not going to say if that's good or not good—I'm not going to get into it—but he wanted a strong Japan and he wanted to put the past in the past.

00:09:20 John Daub: We're seeing now with Hiroshima—an episode a few years ago on this—people want to move on from that being known as the main reason that people go to visit Hiroshima. There's a lot of love about that; people want to move on from World War II and I guess in Asian countries it's really hard to do that but he had set it up like this. And you know when he started to open up the country of Japan—this is coming from me as somebody who has lived through all eight years of him being Prime Minister. He's such a patriotic person; when he opened up the country to tourism and wanted people to come here that really made a big impact because Japan is such a protectionist place that maybe would want to keep away from outsiders. We see this even with the policies of Japan's entry ban but in 2013 when he said he wanted a goal of having 10 million visitors then the next year 20 million visitors then 40 million visitors—these are some huge things.

00:10:24 John Daub: Immigration to Japan also I believe increased. I believe it was the Kyoto News this morning that wrote that there's some neighborhoods in Tokyo that have 15% of the population are people that weren't even born in Japan and that was all a result of Prime Minister Abe. So I mean he was very nationalistic I guess you could say—very a patriot that might be a better word. But he was also very open and understanding that you had to let people in in order to build a country with the declining population. But also I also noticed a result from 2013 when Japan started to open up the tourism to today—there's a lot more pride in Japan. You see it in the TV shows; there's one TV show called "Why Did You Come to Japan?" and Japanese for Everyday Life here—it's not anything that's really special but when you have people from the outside world falling in love with this country and saying such nice things that means a lot to the people here I think.

00:11:41 John Daub: And people are proud I guess a little bit more to be part of this, to be from this country than they were before Prime Minister Abe in 2012. And I'm a little bit emotional because I know where all of this is coming from. Yeah, so if you look at the Japanese newspaper here, got a couple of them. Oh, this is so hard. Again, the front page is quite large with the death, the shooting of Prime Minister Abe. I guess you can call it an assassination. And it's a heartbreaking photo on the front page of him on the ground. And it talks here on the next page, on part three, it talks about how he wanted a strong Japan.

00:12:40 John Daub: And I think any country wants to have a strong country, right? But it just seems after World War II, and of course it's not going to be that way, but there had to be a point where you stopped apologizing and you moved on from that and you started to grow from that. And I'm really appreciative of his efforts. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. It's not an easy thing to be prime minister of a country, especially one like Japan, where Japan is ruled by consensus. There's no one leader has a lot of power. You really have to build consensus and it takes quite a long time to get anything done in this country.

00:13:26 John Daub: And we saw that in 1989 after the bubble burst. The world's second largest economy, now the third largest economy, has been rocked. And we have to give Prime Minister Abe a lot of credit for Abenomics and turning around, or at least sort of giving more energy to the Japanese economy and the Japanese people. I think he called it like the three arrows. And you can see more about that in the news, and they'll talk about it, I'm sure. But he really opened up the country like it hadn't been before. And when I came in 1998, Japan was not on anybody's radar as a tourist destination at all.

00:14:14 John Daub: When I got here, there were some towns that had never seen foreigners. That's why they had the JET program to bring foreigners into the Japanese schools so that they can have exposure to non-Japanese people. It wasn't a country that was open, that was really attractive to visit. I had a lot of friends—and this is a true story—I had a lot of friends in college that I tried to get, because I came here pretty much right after college, I tried to get people to come to visit me in Japan, and nobody would ever come. I think one friend, Jonathan, came. My friend Tom came a couple of times. My friend Carmen from Spain came. But that's about it. Nobody else was attracted to come to Japan until around 2013, when YouTubers like me and all the others out there really started to promote the JNTO, Japan National Tourism Organization and the effort that they put in, JTB, all of these wings of Japan trying to make this place an attractive place, showing the attractions that were right in front of our faces that nobody had ever seen before.

00:15:25 John Daub: That really changed. And again, a lot of credit has to go to former Prime Minister Abe for that. And I'm really grateful. It changed Japan a lot. This country's amazingly changed from 1998 to today. I guess you can see it. The longer you stay here, the more you can see it change. And I don't say it's for the better or for the worse. You can just see the society changing, the generation changing, the way people approach things changing. It's a lot slower than the West. You don't really see that unless you've been here for five or 10 years.

00:16:06 John Daub: And even then, I don't think I really got a grip of how much Japan has changed until about 15 years into living here and going back and looking back at my experiences, reading some of the things that I wrote and said about Japan when I first came here, and then looking at the old pictures, and then looking at what we have around us today. It's pretty amazing. And a lot of that growth happened under Prime Minister Abe. I don't want to go on about this too much. I do get quite emotional. It's just 24 hours removed from what has happened. And my feeling is that the country is really trying to come to grips with this.

00:16:51 John Daub: We still have an election to do. They're not going to postpone it. I think they're going to continue in the spirit, knowing that in order to have a strong country here in Japan, we need to all come together and move on together. And that's what I'm hoping for. And hopefully the election, when it's over, we all have a time to kind of look back. And I'm sure that the news media over the next couple of days is going to really look back at his life and his career. Gosh, I have a bunch of stuff here that I wanted to say. But none of it's going to do any justice, because I'm just a YouTuber who's been living here for almost 25 years now.

00:17:44 John Daub: For me, to see you visitors who make Japan a destination that they want to come to makes me really happy, because I know that it wasn't always like that. And we lost a person who really loved this country and wanted to see it change and had the fortitude to do that, which is rare. And you'll be missed. Whether you agreed with him or not politically, you'll be missed. So there you go. There's my comments. Well, it's hard not to tear up a little bit, because you look back and there's so much behind me now. Calling Japan my home. There's so much behind me now. I want to look forward and see something positive. And I can see that happening. So that's something that's quite good.

00:18:47 John Daub: In regards to the gun culture, that's something a lot of people have been asking me quite a bit. I think the shocking thing for me and Kanae Daub, when we saw the news last night, it took a while. Actually, the Japanese media was well behind the foreign media in reporting this. And this wasn't anything surprising. We could turn on the internet and see clips coming up from things that they weren't showing yet to the domestic news media here. And I guess it's maybe a little bit more sensitive in that respect. But it was the use of a gun here in Japan. We do see what's happening in the US and other places around the world. There's more violence, more gun violence, especially in the US. But we never really think that that's an issue here. We never feel it.

00:19:50 John Daub: I could go out at midnight and walk around. I could walk around downtown Tokyo in some places that people might call dangerous or just seedy, and not really worry about my personal safety, not really worried about getting attacked or having something violent happening against me, being assaulted. I never had that fear. I'm somebody who hitchhiked the entire country, Kagoshima to Hokkaido. And in reverse, too, 17 years later, I did it twice. It's because I know that Japan is such a safe country. And I think sometimes we take that for granted. We do have tragedies, usually with knives. But to hear those two gunshots in the videos that came quite late to Japan—we didn't hear and see this until a couple hours after it had already been reported in the foreign media.

00:20:45 John Daub: To hear the guns here with police around, with other people around, it didn't really register. I mean, it was just shocking. Again, this is such a peaceful country, right? You don't come to Japan thinking that any harm is going to come to you. And maybe we do take that for granted sometimes. And maybe the police did. And I'm sure in hindsight, they're going to do a lot of checking to see what went wrong. And we're going to see this in the news media as well, internationally, on how this could happen. But that was as shocking as the loss—that this could happen. And even if it wasn't a former prime minister, if this had happened on the streets of Tokyo, it would be just as shocking that this could happen.

00:21:41 John Daub: I don't have to go into the details. Again, you've probably seen this on the news. And I'm just talking about my opinions as someone who lived here for 25 years, and my feelings, and what I'm gathering from the Japan news media here, and the feeling of the people and our family. It's a hard 24 hours. And I don't know. This weekend is going to be really tough, too. We just kind of try to move on. And remember, after these elections, which will be good when it's finished. I've been in the US for the last two weeks. So I haven't had to deal with the constant noise. I'm actually here instead of downtown in the city, because I'm sure that there are some politicians out there campaigning. And it can get quite loud during the politics. It's a political season.

00:22:29 John Daub: But just to sum everything up here, the country right now is coming to grips with what has happened. I guess in a way, I'm still kind of in shock. But the things that happened in the last 10 years as a result of the leadership of Prime Minister Abe were pretty huge. And I think the country is a much better place as a result of it. And I think looking at The New York Times and some of the other newspapers here, they give you kind of a clip of his career and highlight some of the things that he did. Of course, any politician whose tenure is long will have scandals. And there are things not to like, of course. But as a man, as a person, he really loved this country. And he wanted to see it be stronger. He wanted to open it up more to the world.

00:23:36 John Daub: Although at times it seemed like that was not the case, it's still a lot more open as a result of Prime Minister Abe's efforts than if he had not been one of the leaders. And having a long leader for eight years—you can hear in the background maybe there's some politicians driving around in the vans with political messages. It's pretty crazy right now around town. Yeah, it's a sad, it's a big loss for Japan. Over the eight years that he's been Prime Minister and I've been watching the news quite a bit, a lot of assistance, a lot of people had gone through his administration, who started up working with him, for him, being senpai, kohai (senior-junior). A lot of people grew up and took jobs as assistants in his administration because he was there for so long and he's made some big changes to them as well.

00:24:33 John Daub: Japan is a country, you just don't get the feeling that there's a lot of really strong leadership here. You really don't. Prime Minister Abe was one of those people that was a really strong leader. You could see it in the way that he could embrace both President Obama and President Trump for the good of the Japanese people. And there's a lot to love about a person who can do something like that. He can endure a five minute handshake. He can endure political differences between two parties that have different ways of thinking. He can invite the president to Hiroshima to put the war behind. And I think that's really one of the lasting things that I have from Prime Minister Abe was that he just wanted a really strong Japan.

00:25:25 John Daub: Again, you can disagree with visits to Yasukuni Shrine. The political side of it is huge out there. But what his hopes were for this country, I hope this country does become stronger and I hope that tourism returns really quickly so a lot of you can come here and see how great this country is, how safe it is, how beautiful it is, how delicious the food is, how nice the people are, how much this country has changed, how technologically advanced and unadvanced as we still have newspapers, people reading, the circulations of newspapers are quite high. That is one of my hopes and I hope you all can come here and see this great thing.

00:26:08 John Daub: And when you do come to visit, I'm a sentimental person. I like to think that this tourism boom is a result of a lot of hard work that he pushed through and convinced people because he is such a patriotic person from a political family here. When he said, let's open up the country to tourism, let's get more people here, people who might have been hesitant would listen to somebody who was as patriotic, nationalistic, conservative as him. When he says that, it means a lot. And having 40 million tourists, maybe in 2023—who knows? Record-breaking year. That would mean a lot. And yeah, I hope you put Japan on your map and I hope the videos that I produce can be one of the reasons why.

00:27:15 John Daub: Any questions here? Sorry, I wasn't really... Nationalist is the right word. Thank you, Frank. It's hard because it's so bright to see the screen. PM Shinzo Abe's life could have been saved. Yeah, nobody would have been saved. Nobody deserves to die in a senseless way. I think in hindsight, what's done is done. In hindsight, there's going to be a lot of soul searching. There's going to be a lot of people seeing what went wrong with this. Can you shout out a world leader? Shout out to Prime Minister Modi in India, who has all flags down to half mast around India to pay, I guess, to remember former Prime Minister Abe. So I think that was a really nice thing.

00:28:08 John Daub: Kanae took it as shock. Gabrielle, she was in shock. We both didn't really have words, but we were glued to the TV. Shocked. I think we still are in many ways. I'm not sure about the details, the funeral. [inaudible] The biggest announcement was that the funeral was held before the wedding. After the wedding. It was so fascinating. The funeral was right after the wedding. They can't have weddings and all kinds of things like that. But right after the wedding, the wedding is being celebrated in a sense in country. And one of the [inaudible] is Junichiro Koizumi, no, finance executive. And it's packed with people, so it was a very detrimental place. It was quite a psychological situation. And then I thought the news came out. The TV came out. What's going to be 100 years from now and 25 years from now. I mean, what is the limit of apologizing for what your great-grandfathers did?

00:29:18 John Daub: I think he just wanted to find a way to put that in the past, and the moves he did were controversial because they changed a lot of things. But a strong Japan is something that the citizens could feel pride in, being Japanese. And now that I have a family here, as someone who's American and very proud of being American, I hope that they would be proud of being Japanese, right? We'd want that. The victims of the war were still alive. But the people who committed... Look, I don't want to get into the political debate on this. It is what it is. I'm just saying his policies were for a strong Japan and that we have to move past this. And I think he really set a good example and helped to get to another step to move past it. It was an important step, and it was a really hard step. And I don't think a lot of leaders could have done that.

00:30:19 John Daub: I still consider Japan to be one of the safest countries. Yeah. Again, I've never had any crime. I've never been assaulted. Only once or twice have I seen anything violent happen. And usually it was a result of somebody who was maybe not mentally all there. I see a lot of stuff on the subways, which probably shouldn't happen. But there's a lot that you can talk about with Japan that's wrong. But there's so much that's right, too. And I always focus on the positives as much as I can.

00:31:04 John Daub: Devastated writes in, Harry, as I followed the trending news last night, I looked you up in case you were covered. I was covering the sad news. How did this happen? The newspapers are all reporting that. John, what was terrifying for me watching the footage, this comes from Miracle Emery, was the reaction of the bystanders. No one ran. No one ducked. They stood there confused, like, where did that loud noise come from? Exactly. For us, when we heard gunfire, I don't think that's something that we recognize, because we never hear it here. Maybe the blast of a fireworks or something. Because it's not a sound that we're used to. Even watching movies and whatnot, it's not in public. Not with police around. Not in a political speech. Shocking.

00:32:02 John Daub: Yeah. People hold insane grudges. I don't even blame people. We're talking about the people that are still alive from World War II. That's true. I talk to a lot of them. Many of them are apologetic, and maybe that's fair. But their grandchildren? Come on. That's not fair, right? And maybe Prime Minister Abe felt a responsibility to that. I don't know. I'm not Japanese. But I've been living here for a long time, and I really love this country. I want the best for it. So I am going to be biased to a point.

00:33:02 John Daub: It was an improvised gun, yes. They found a bunch in his apartment. Again, you can look at the news for that. I'm not going to talk about what's going on with the shooter and what has happened, because the news has done such a good job of it. It's not necessary. It didn't register for Abe as he turned around. I'm sure it didn't. I'm sure nobody thought that something like this could happen in Japan. Again, that's another reason why we're all kind of shocked that this could happen here.

00:33:30 John Daub: Helen writes in here, the sins of the father, not the sins of the sons. What goes on in the subways in Japan? You know, sometimes stuff happens. There's some men who might be messed up in the head, and that's a whole other issue, but I would consider that to be some sort of violence, so it's not good. Chikan (groping) is the word, right. Again, that's something you can look up if you want to, but Japan has its share of problems, absolutely. It's not a perfect place, and I think every politician who takes this job as prime minister is not going to be perfect, and they understand it's not a perfect place, but you have to have the will to do your best for the people that you represent. And I think Abe-san, he's a human being. He's going to make mistakes, but he very much loved his country, very much.

00:34:31 John Daub: As I've talked to people who got a chance to meet him, they took pictures with him, they talked with him, they worked for him, and I got a chance to talk to them, and they always had really nice things to say about him. So, again, you can disagree politically, but as a person, no. I'm a World War II survivor in Nagasaki. He spoke so nice, and even though I spoke only a little Japanese, we bonded. I could feel that he didn't have any malice towards me or other Americans. I made a video on a survivor from Hiroshima as well and talked with the people. I lived in Hiroshima in 1999, and when I moved there, I was worried. I said, I wonder if they feel upset at Americans because of what had happened. And it was the opposite. They moved on.

00:35:34 John Daub: And even the city of Hiroshima, I believe, is trying to put that in the past and saying, look, we feel bad. We lost a lot of people. The area around the Genbaku Dome (atomic bomb dome), which is a memorial, a remembrance, a place where you can remember what had happened, it's starting—you're starting to see people like paddleboard around it, attractions happening around that. You're starting to see sprouts of life around what was once a huge tragedy that I hope never happens again. And that's only natural that there's a point where we just have to move on from this. And Prime Minister Abe recognized that and took steps as a politician to do something about it.

00:36:17 John Daub: Your mic is low. It could be because I'm using an external mic. It's better than the YouTube app. Would you say the media in Japan is also filtered? I think all media is filtered, first of all. Every reporter has an editor. So there are editors that are editing every newspaper article. So there's a filter on everything everybody does pretty much. I have no filter, although this video could be banned. I don't know. But I would say so. And I believe the filter is a result of culture, too. It's not a political agenda. It's a cultural feeling of sensitivity. So in that sense, they blurred the blood. The first images I saw were from an Indian news outlet on YouTube. And they didn't blur the blood on his shirt. But the Japanese media blurred the blood on his shirt. And again, that's the sensitivity of the domestic media. You don't need to show gore. You don't need to show this because you know what has happened.

00:37:41 John Daub: There will always be violence and evil. No matter what is done or laws that are passed, there's always someone who needs help mentally, yes. Do you think that will affect tourism? I don't think so. It's an event that happened. Japan is not a violent country. I don't see—I think this is an outlier. We don't know what has happened. So I'm going to let the authorities do their jobs and reporters do their jobs, and then we'll find out the answers over time. But I think today is not a day where we focus on that. And again, I started off this live stream. I just want to focus on the person. I just want to focus on the people that we lost. And I think that's what this day is for.

00:38:35 John Daub: And over the course of the next couple of weeks, I'm sure we're going to have more details. The suspect has admitted to what he did. So, you know, I'll let the police dig out what the causes were. And I'm sure that the Japanese media, and by the way, the Japanese media is very aggressive. The questions that they asked of the doctor who was operating on him when he was tired. The first thing that Kanae said was that the Japanese media is suing him. And they're super insensitive to ask these questions of the doctor. I was pretty shocked at the Japanese media's questions of the doctor. They really wanted to get into details that it was not the time to do that. And the doctor did a really good job of maintaining composure and giving answers to people. But I'm not a big fan of a lot of the Japanese news media outlets when it comes to these types of sensitive things, people's privacies and things. They do a good job with blurring faces and whatnot, but they also are very pointed when they ask questions as direct as that. And we thought it was pretty rude, but I guess they were just trying to get answers.

00:40:01 John Daub: Did the media ask why security was? I don't know. They're asking questions right now. It's the weekend, so you don't get a lot of news reports. A lot of the big news media shows are going to report on this more thoroughly in Japan on Monday, I'm sure. After the elections, you'll hear a lot more news, and I hope that they pay more tribute. We don't like to see anything like this happen anywhere in the world, and that's why it's so shocking that it happened here.

00:40:24 John Daub: Our Discord server over the last 24 hours has been really busy. I want to say thank you to everybody who's been in there and been very respectful. I know that there's a lot of questions, a lot of it having to pertain to tourism, a lot of your trips and all this, but yeah, I appreciate the respectfulness that everybody has been paying in the servers and our moderators for doing a very good job. We don't know anything about the funeral and those details, so I'll let the media do its job. I just want to give you my feelings and my opinions and my thoughts as they were asked for by a lot of you, and spend some time with you all because a lot of you have been seeing this on the news too, and I feel more connected to the outside world of Japan when I do these live streams, and I think maybe a lot of you might feel more connected with Japan when you watch the live streams that I do do here, so it is relevant.

00:41:32 John Daub: Please let this be a sign that we need to be kinder to one another. Very wise words indeed. I don't know, I've already said my last words on my feelings on this, but I guess overall, what you wrote is, and it looks like Bela said something—I miss that, Bela. I think the thing that was shocking, there was the sound of the gun and the loss, of course, but it was, he was such a powerful person. A powerful figure, influential—he was very vocal, but it makes us think that how precious life is in general, right? Whenever anything happens, any shooting happens, we're getting so used to it in the United States and the news media reporting, but how precious life is that we have, and when we lose anybody, somebody of course as a stature, former Prime Minister Abe, who led a very significant life—every life is significant, everybody has a mother who loves them, a family who loves them, they're an important person to somebody, right? And that makes life very precious, and losing anybody in this kind of way is very sad. It makes us, and it should be a time where we reflect. It should be a time where we all really reflect, right?

00:43:22 John Daub: There you go. I'm going to leave it at that. In fact, as we see some love going on here, aggressive love, pigeons are going at it. Is that a mating thing? Not sure. Burn some incense for Prime Minister Abe. I will do that, and probably for a while, and for the country of Japan, too. And I want to say thanks to everybody who sent their prayers to Japan, and I will, as somebody who is here, I will give those when I go to the shrine later today.

00:43:59 John Daub: Peter von Gomm and I are planning to do a live stream in a few hours as well, and I wanted to put this behind us as well, because I know that a lot of you are going to be asking about this. I know that this is on a lot of your minds. Peter and I are going to do a live stream in about 3 or 4 p.m., so it'll be quite late for the U.S., even for California. But we're going to buy some motorcycle clothes, and I wanted to address this before, because I know it's such a sensitive topic, and it does deserve its own live stream. But there's going to be, in this country, a great sense of loss for quite a while, and we'll eventually find a way to move on.

00:44:39 John Daub: But when you do come to Japan, and you are considering coming to Japan, I like to think that Prime Minister Abe and his leadership from 2012 to 2020 might have been playing a part in that. And in Japan's ability to have pride in itself and feel enough of that to be able to promote itself, because of all the countries in the world, and I've traveled to about 72 or 73 countries, but I've been to about half the world's countries as a traveler, as a backpacker, and this country might be the one country where it is the hardest for the people to talk about themselves. So for people to have a little bit more pride in their country, I guess we could say thank you to Prime Minister Abe and making Japan a more beautiful place. I would certainly agree.

00:45:36 John Daub: Thanks everybody for being real kind in this live stream. It was a hard thing for me to do, and I might have had some moments where I reflected back on the many years I've been here. It is a very personal and sensitive thing, and I did my best. Take care, everybody. I'll be back in a few hours. Enjoy. Thank you. Last couple of seconds looking at the Sumida River, as it's one of the places that I love. I've come to reflect on life in general and kind of relax. Thanks everybody for the positive vibes as well.