00:01 John Daub: Hello everybody, welcome to Shodoshima's port town Tonosho. I just arrived here about 20 minutes ago, already got to rent a car, and you're seeing one of the big ferries taking off, heading back to somewhere. Maybe Okayama, I don't know. I just got here. I came here from Takamatsu, and I'm ready to explore this island. It's pretty exciting. This is one of the islands I've never been to. I've been to Awaji Island, I've been to a bunch of other islands. I used to live in Hiroshima and would take ferries to the islands of the Seto Inland Sea, and now I'm finally here.

00:43 John Daub: I've been trying to get a permit to film here for about two years now, and finally got what I needed in order to bring you this amazing episode, which starts with what is right in front of me. These are olive trees. You can tell from the color. I've been all over Greece, so I remember seeing them. I've seen these olive trees everywhere. It's kind of neat to see them here in Japan. And Shodoshima is in Kagawa Prefecture, which is Shikoku, even though we're very close to Honshu Island. But this is considered Shikoku, part of Kagawa Prefecture, one of Japan's 47 prefectures.

01:18 John Daub: And that ferry, these ferries are the way to get here. I don't know if there's an airport, to be honest with you. This statue at the port is called the Gift of the Sun, I believe. And it's a very beautiful statue. It's a pretty neat olive wreath. You can see down here, olives. I guess it's somewhat sponsored because there's names on each one of those leaves. But the port's pretty comfortable size. I gotta be honest with you. I thought it was gonna be a little bit smaller, even smaller than this, but it's not.

01:50 John Daub: And I'm gonna take you inside this Tonosho Kanko Center here. This is the, a lot of gifts in there. Of course, made of olives. And this is the ferry terminal that I came in. There are two ways to get to this island. One of them is on the slow boat. Hey, Arthur! Thank you. One of them is a slow boat, and the other one is this one right here. Boom. This is the jet boat. So the slow boat's much bigger. Or I'm actually going to Okayama. I flew in through Takamatsu. I'm leaving and going to Okayama from here. But I took this ferry. This jet boat. And it got me here in like 25 minutes, which is really fast.

02:35 John Daub: Beautiful day like this. I probably should have taken the slow boat, but I was just in a hurry to this live stream. The water's really beautiful. It's a little bit hazy because of the overcast skies we have here. I believe a typhoon has just gone through Japan. So maybe this will clear out tomorrow. The seawater, when the sun is shining through, it's this beautiful blue. And I'm gonna take you over the course of the next 72 hours to some beautiful locations all over Shodoshima. Here's the Olive Port Tonosho right up here. Hey, there's Danny. That's funny. I just messaged you on Discord. And here you are. Awesome. Yeah, the high speed boat is what they call it. That was 1,140 yen, I believe, which is less than $10 with the exchange rate here.

03:30 John Daub: So let's go have a look around. But first. I got something at the gift shop that I wanted to try before we go in there because I'm dying of thirst. This is an olive cider. It contains less than about 1% olive juice, which I guess is a good thing for cider. But it's kind of neat because all the gifts here on Shodoshima seem to have olives in it. And the olives are a claim to fame because I think it was back in 1908. There's a story behind it. Back in 1908 when none of us were born, they imported some olive trees to Japan. And they planted it in three different locations around the country to see where they would grow. And the only place in Japan that the olive trees would take root is right here at Shodoshima. So it became part of the island's identity.

04:21 John Daub: And now they have an olive harvest which will be taking place. I'm coming back here to film that. But I'm here mostly to scout out and get ready for this amazing olive harvest. As you can see, there's no olives yet. Never mind that. And if you keep watching till the end, please do, I will take you inside of my James Bond car that I have rented here. That's right. It's a really weird car. It's a Daihatsu. But if Bond were to ride a Daihatsu, it would be this one. All right. Let's give this a try here. Oh, my gosh. That's fizzy. Oh. Oh, mama. I don't taste any olive at all. Really? It's sweet. It's really fizzy. And maybe a subtle olive perhaps.

05:30 John Daub: Maybe if I eat one of these. These are olives. I'll get that olive taste. So olive soda, not really olive tasting. But I like the label. That's half of it. This is $2 at the gift shop. I'm going to take you in there. And then we're going to go through here to the car where I'm not going to drive this time. But tomorrow or maybe later this afternoon or the day after tomorrow, I'm going to take you on a ride in this car. It is a convertible. It is really low to the ground. And it's small. I didn't realize that when I rented it that I wouldn't be able to put anything in the trunk if I opened the top. But it's going to be an adventure.

06:18 John Daub: The reason I got an open car is because I'm going to be using drone shots and then driving and following me with the open car to show you the beauty of this island. I think an open car would be the best way to feel and smell, taste the air. JKO Adventures are in Bond car, Aston Martin, BMW. Daihatsu? You have to put it in a question mark. I don't know which Daihatsu convertible. I just know that the people at the Shodoshima rent a car were really nice and the car was slightly dirty. I mean I had to wash it out myself with alcohol rags that Kanae Daub gives me to be safe. Not exactly, I wasn't really happy about that. There were like hairs in it and stuff like that. I was like, whoa, really? But it's a local rental company. I try my very best to support the local businesses and here on an island I think that's kind of really important too.

07:18 John Daub: I do it because a lot of you are all local business owners yourself and I think so is every YouTuber. I think every YouTuber is and we support, it's like a network. We support each other. Alright, let's go inside here where it's nice and air conditioned. You'll see olive trees all over. I've only been here for like 30 minutes now and I'm just really excited about this. Oh baby, it's a lot of fizz. We're just going to walk through here. I'll show you just briefly some of the gifts. They do have olive wagyu which is very unique to the island. So there's a restaurant over here. And they do have olive wagyu on the menu. Do you see that? It's like an olive burger don. I might get that for lunch actually. But everything is olives.

08:36 John Daub: Olive oil. Olive shoyu (soy sauce). Wow, olive shoyu. It's in an olive jar. Here's olive oil. There's dashi inside that olive oil and this is garlic olive oil. Wow. And here's just salty garlic olive oil. So there's all sorts of different kinds of olive oils. I guess you'd get that if you're making olives here. Oh wow. So there you go. There's the brand and that's the mascot I believe. You have to have a mascot. Wow. Look at how sunny it is. It's so hot. There is a 7-Eleven over there. I walked in there. Nothing from Shodoshima inside. So I guess they make sure right across the street if you want to get the local product, you have to come to the local center here. This is the Shodoshima Visitor Center or Kanko Center (tourist center) I guess.

10:07 John Daub: You can get gifts there. The rental car place is just down the street. That's a Shell gas station. That's where I'll be filling up and bringing the gas tank back full. They made sure I did that. Are you ready for this? All right. Okay, hold on a second. I'm going to take you now because I want this to be a valuable live stream. I'm going to take you just over here and you can take a look at the ferry schedule and get an idea of what the high-speed ferry looks like. I'm sure a lot of people want to come here. There's my car. Look at how small the freaking thing is. Look at how small the other. Look at this. What? This is a Daihatsu Copen [?]. I never heard of this either. A Robe maybe. It's a cute little car. Scares me. Looks like I'll get trampled underfoot.

11:07 John Daub: Yeah. Jack writes in here, looks like a toy. Kind of feels like one too. When I drove out of there and I drove out of there fast, I floored it and it didn't go anywhere. So there's not a lot of power in it. That seriously, look at this. And the top does come down. Again, this is why I got it. And I'll be flying the drone following me on here, which is going to be, that's the reason why I got it. When I come back here for the harvest, I don't think I'm going to be renting this thing. It is tight in there. Okay. All my bags are in the front seat. I'm here alone. You can't put anything in the trunk because then you can't put the top down. So there's that going on here. Yeah. And then there's a G350. Wow. Impressive.

12:00 John Daub: Hey, you guys want to have lunch with me? Maybe I can order some food together. So this is the high speed ferry terminal. I'm going to take you in there. The screen's gone dark just based on how freaking hot it is out here. They have an olive Wagyu burger. Don't. So the hamburg is on top of the rice, I think. And that looked pretty darn good. And the price looked good too. But any Wagyu burgers? I've never had a Wagyu burger that was better than an Angus burger, like a US beef hamburger. Consistency is too oily, I think for burgers, but you're right. Wagyu people get excited. Hey, Brondani is in the house. Thank you. That's going towards lunch.

12:55 John Daub: All right, let's just take a quick look. See here. Wow. So you can see up here in the map, Shodoshima is not a really big island, but it looks like it is on the map. Doesn't it? We're over here on the left side and my hotel is just down here. All right. So everything is kind of on this left corner, but today I'm going to try to explore as far as I can, maybe even circumnavigate the island. And there's some fields here, which I thought might be really beautiful for riding with the car and the top down and the drone. So that place looks really good. They got deer and stuff. Is that reindeer? And this place also with the mountains in the background. And then there's on the right side, there's some pretty fun looking places and natural places to drive the car and get some of those shots.

13:59 John Daub: Cause I wanted to do that. So this is going to be a fun video. Hey, Brian C. How you doing? I'm finally going to Japan tomorrow. Whoa. The whole COVID procedure. We're really stressful. I know. Anyways, greetings from Bakersfield, California. Well, I'm really happy that you're going to be making here, buddy. And Kata Yama's in the house. How many hamsters under the hood? I think there's just one and he's a, must be a really big one. I guess it's like a guinea pig. I don't think they could fit many. So the ferry times are pretty frequent here. You can get your ticket from a vending machine. So maybe not this one. I'm not even sure how this works. I think that's a different ferry. Maybe it's over here. Oh, this is Naoshima, which is the art island.

15:01 John Daub: Oh, yeah. So it's pretty close here. Naoshima is close, right? Is it close? I want to go tomorrow, but it's about 20 minutes away. I want to go to Naoshima. Oh, about 40 minutes. Thank you. Interesting. So Naoshima's about 40 minutes from here. The ferry network in Japan is really good. So you can get around the Seto Inland Sea pretty well. Again, when I was in Hiroshima, I would ride the ferries on the weekends, try to explore. Would definitely hit Matsuyama, go to Dogo Onsen a couple of times. So nice. Nice! There's a map of the island right here. Oh my gosh, I'm sweating. Oh, this has pictures. This looks great.

16:06 John Daub: Look at this. This waterfall here. And the Twenty-Four Eyes movie village. This looks really neat too. Location of a movie showing the traditional appearance. So they made a movie set here and that's pretty deep on the edge of the island. Interesting. Oh, look at these. This is where I wanted to drive the car. Looks like where Bond would go. The Nakayama Urai Rice Terrace. I'll be going there today. Trying to find a place. There's no rain scheduled for the next couple of days. Matt votes for the waterfall. I'm with you there, buddy. I probably will go and explore it. I think the day after tomorrow I'll have more time and be able to hit the far end of the island. So today, I'm just getting a lot of B-roll today. Trying to get as much as I can for this video.

17:03 John Daub: Because summer is a completely different feeling to other times of the year. Right? So summertime, it's hotter. It's got a different look to it. And I think if you're going to an island, which I learned when I went to Ogasawara and Aogashima and some of the other beautiful islands of Tokyo and Okinawa as well. Just there's a different sunshine. The way that the lighting hits is so different in the summer compared to the fall and the winter and the spring. So you want to be here to get that. So the sunset is going to be really beautiful. And there's a place on this side of the island where you can see a beautiful sunset. And believe you me, I will have the drone up and get some really good shots. And I'll see if I can share that on our Instagram with you. Let's go see if I can order this Wagyu burger.

18:03 John Daub: Just walking over here. I wish they had olive ice cream. And they kind of do. They have olive ice cream. But I think I'm going to get this here. What do you guys think? The olive buta hamburger don. Okay. Alright. So the ladies asked me to wait. Hey, get away from my car. Look how small that thing is. Even from a distance. I thought maybe if there weren't any cars around it at all, it looks pretty impressive. Ah. Let's have some lunch here. I'm glad that I'm not eating alone because it's kind of sad. I wish that Kanae Daub and Leo could make it here. I wish that Peter von Gomm could. But he's back in the States. I wish that you could too. But you're trapped in a foreign land which is called home.

20:14 John Daub: Is that for me? Did she say juuban? I need you yoban. Okay. Alright. Listen for juuban. That's my number. I've got to go get my lunch here. So today, I'm going to be eating at a restaurant called Juba [?]. I'm just going to try to explore. I check into the hotel around 2 o'clock. But I want to scope out the sunset position. Maybe even go swimming. Get the beach up. Get the drone out. Follow the car around. I want to scout out where the olive trees are being grown. Tomorrow one of the officials from the town is going to meet me. Juba? Oh, you're fast. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to go get my lunch. I'm going to use this spoon. This spoon? Yes. Thank you. Looks delicious. That was so fast. I thought it would take some time. Oh, look at this thing. Wow.

21:22 John Daub: So that is, I believe, olive pork on a bowl of rice. And this will sustain me for the next few hours. Look at that. And there's some ginger on top. You see some green onions on there. Let's give this a whirl, huh? Give it a ride down the digestive track. Oh, then I got to get into that car. If I was driving it in Tokyo, that would be such a death trap. I can't imagine. I'm looking at it now. It's so low. It's so low on the ground. Oh, hey. I saw some chats come in here. Muhammad, hi. How you doing? And Aiken's here. I'm glad you're able to travel and explore again, John. Thanks for these streams. You're very welcome. Glad you're with me, buddy. All right. Let's give it a try. Yeah. There you go. Itadakimasu. Mm. I can definitely taste the olives.

22:45 John Daub: It's got a really, it's a little bit saltier and there's an edge to it. You know, if you eat olives, and not everybody likes olives, but if you eat olives, there's a, like a salty, very distinctive taste to it. It just has it. It's really nice. Sprinkle some MSG. MSG gets a bad rap. It's not that bad. It's something people complained about in the 80s. A bunch of babies. Yeah. It's like a spice. When you think about it, MSG, it's a pretty remarkable invention. Guy was able, some dude was able to come up and make a saltier salt. Think about that, all right? You can't, you know, I got nothing against MSG. You say kanpai when you're drinking. When you're eating, you say itadakimasu. Itadakimasu. Which is a way to say, to thank for the sacrifice of the food, which is very much like saying grace.

24:20 John Daub: MSG is not a salt. It's a flavor, right? MSG is found naturally in kombu. I couldn't understand why it got such a bad rap. I remember in the 1980s and early 90s, Chinese restaurants and Asian restaurants got hit. Like, no MSG. Like, it was such a, like it was a killer. Salt is, do you think salt's any better? No. I like any donburi, actually. I like it. It's like, it's good. Mmm. One of the easiest dishes. Just get a bowl of rice and dump something on it. Donburi. So nice. So you just, they just basically put a burger on rice with sauce. It's really good.

25:19 John Daub: It's storming here in Tokyo. Wow. When we left the flight here. So I flew from Haneda Airport, which was really busy, to Takamatsu. And there's a bus and the bus waits for everybody to get on so you don't have to worry about it get your luggage the bus was still there so rushing at Takamatsu Airport doesn't make sense so I got on the bus with everybody else it was on the airplane and it took about 45 minutes to get from the airport to the ferry terminal. The English I will tell you this if you do come to Takamatsu the English announcements is the worst I've heard in Japan ever it's like one of those auto voices the pronunciation is all wrong and it says the final destination Takamatsu station so I almost got off and then it said in Japanese that it wasn't the final station the final station was the ferry pier so foreigners were getting off there and walking for 10 minutes to the ferry pier if you didn't speak Japanese that's funny I was the only foreigner though.

26:45 John Daub: I wasn't the only one that could tell you know they couldn't afford PBG or they just don't know about Peter he's freelance he's hip Peter could do it he wouldn't do it for free though so our mutual friend Josh another really great voice artist here in Japan Josh American voice he does all the announcements for the Tokyo metro so whenever I get on you know in that area and I get all the Tokyo subway, the metro, the male voice is Josh. It's just funny because like every time he's... I picture him there with me saying these like next stop is you know Hanzomon. It's hard to find MSG in America because it's just stigmatized I think. If there was a battle between MSG and salt, salt won. Josh Keller, super talented guy. Yeah, good friend of Peter von Gomm's and mine. We drink. Yeah, Ajinomoto is in just about everything here and I mean I guess it's like amino. I forget what they refer to it as in the label. They don't write MSG but Kanae Daub tries to avoid anything that's not organic although she tries.

28:45 John Daub: I'm probably gonna go get an iced coffee and then drive over to the hotel just see if I can check in and then take the car over to some of the fields. Tomorrow's a long day. I'm pretty excited. Just a note, this is not about Takamatsu, about Shodoshima but today Peter von Gomm and I booked the ticket to go back to Hokkaido to do one last ride as a stretch goal and a way to say thank you and because we reached 700 people yesterday which is... I'm still off of this amazing high from the excitement of these 15 minutes that like we got so many new supporters in like this 15 minutes which gives the show like I'm not a really good salesman but if you don't make an effort to do that, if you don't make an effort to promote yourself. If you don't make an effort to try to make a living off of this, it's really hard to make a living off of this but you can do it.

30:06 John Daub: I've been waiting to come here for two years to get this permit and the access to film. I'm just about done with the video. I'm about to upload the melon auction of Iwaki for the last two weeks. I just needed one more day, but this came up and it's a hard stop. I have to film this. I have to film the other island I'm going to. Then, for the next two weeks, all I'm doing is editing. I might cut down on live streaming a little bit, but I'm just going to focus on the main channel and getting things back together again. It's been hard. You have to choose, man. It's not an easy choice either. There are these things that are time sensitive that you can only do once. I don't know if Peter von Gomm and I are ever going to be able to do the motorcycle thing again. We can't keep talking about it. You've got to just do it.

31:08 John Daub: When the chance came up in his schedule, right before we went to... I mean, I went to America and in my schedule, which is somewhat flexible. There was this trip and then there was that trip and so much stuff happening in between. After this, I'm probably going to lean back a little bit and just edit at home. But I have to be honest with you. Editing at home is not easy anymore. If I'm home and Leo and Kanae Daub are home, I can't focus at all. Leo comes into my editing area. Kanae Daub will ask, can you watch Leo? And then, of course, the answer is yes. I'll say no and then I'll get this. And then I say yes. It's hard. And because Leo wakes up at like six, I can't edit until four anymore. That's when I get most of my stuff done. I have to sleep. So I'm totally out of sync. I'll get there.

32:21 John Daub: There are some offices that you can rent for the month. And I might try that out. Just to get some sleep. I'll get out of the house and edit somewhere else. Because of the coronavirus, I guess. I mean, I take the risk. I don't go to cafes to edit like I might be doing. When you have a family, you start to think differently about risks. Like, is it worth it? Right now, it would be yes. Yeah, peso. I'm working on that as well. But to take on an office and more overhead doesn't make a lot of sense either. So I have to kind of find a way to make this a win-win situation. I have some friends that have offered, you know, like a desk space and things like this. I mean, I might do that and then move into an office. But you kind of grow into it. You don't just go ahead and invest a lot of stuff in it. Because having to restart over was, you know, I'm still kind of catching up. But everything's going good. You know?

33:45 John Daub: If I was home, I might even lick the bowl. No, I wouldn't. I might. I could. It's that good. Done. It was a good burger. All right. Onwards. Get this day moving. I've driven that car a total of 400 meters from the rental car shop to this place. Now I'm a little bit scared to drive that car. It's looking at me. It's so small. Look at how tall the people are. And they're of average height. They're of average height. So. Oh, baby. It's nice to be in Shikoku. Yeah. It feels good to be out of Tokyo and not Hokkaido for once. I've been in Hokkaido for ages. That has been my stop. I did Tohoku for ages as well. Now Hokkaido and now Shikoku. And I'm hoping that I can get a couple other episodes in Kochi maybe. I love Kochi. It's a great place. That's on the other side of Shikoku Island.

35:08 John Daub: If you have any questions, you can leave them in the comments below. Thank you. I will do another travel update when things change. Probably in September because right now with Kishida-san's new government just starting and the Obon holiday and the seventh wave, I don't think there's going to be any massive changes in tourism. I could be wrong. But looks like once summer is finished, probably we start to see some steps towards reopening Japan, serious ones. The next step, I'm not even sure what that looks like. But I know that a lot of you don't want package tours. As I said this when I was in Haneda Airport a few hours ago, nobody wants package tours. There's 800 comments, 800 freaking comments. It's amazing. On the livestream I did a couple of days ago, talking about how Japan only had 8,000 people come to Japan from June to July for two months minus 10 days. It's like 45 days or something. 8,000 people came as tourists. That's not open.

36:16 John Daub: Well, that was the point. That's why I was angry. That's not open. And I believe something says that we'll hear an announcement in September and then I believe Japan will open up better in October. I don't know what that'll look like yet. But I think you're going to have to get a visa for a while. It's not going to be a visa on arrival like you could do in Japan quickly. But I think it's going to be more like what the US does with this ESTA system. They have a system that Kanae Daub has to get. She has to register online to get the visa. Everything has to be done online for confirmation before you enter in the country. I believe they're going to do a system like this. ESTA. Right, Calvin? It's kind of annoying. She's like, I got to renew my ESTA and she's like... It's so easy to come to Japan. But I believe a lot of countries are going to be doing this pre-registration that before you travel to that country they want to know who's coming.

37:13 John Daub: Coming in and who's not, and they're going to do a better job digitally to track people. For your own safety, I'm kind of not happy about any, all of this, but that seems to be the way that the world is working. Everything is trackable. Everyone's got a smartphone in their pocket, and because of that, they use that to their advantage to make it easier, but also make it safer, I guess. There's advantages and disadvantages. Privacy is probably the biggest disadvantage, but if you have a smartphone, you're already putting yourself at a disadvantage from privacy issues, no matter what people say. It's just a fact, and I don't think about it. Nobody does. Bob writes in here, ridiculous. Does any tourists from other countries need to have COVID health insurance before entering Japan? I'm not sure if you need to have health insurance at all, but if you were to get sick in Japan, don't look to the government to help you out.

38:09 John Daub: They're having a hard time right now. They're in the seventh wave, and the last thing they want is people coming here to get sick and putting a strain on their medical system, which has more old people than anywhere else in the world. It's like, this is an old country. It's top heavy. No one's having kids, but everyone's staying alive to 100, so no one wants to go to a hospital filled with COVID from abroad. Can you blame the locals? I guess not. They don't care if you come as tourists. This is just the tourist industry cares. I care. I care. I care. I'm gonna get in this car and drive around. I will take you with me tomorrow for sure, and on the 15th, probably I'll give you a drive. We'll drive around in that car before I return it.

38:56 John Daub: I'm leaving to Okayama in the early evening, and I'll be staying in Okayama at night, for a night, and then I go to the next island. It's a busy, busy four days, then I get to go home and see Leo, who probably learned a few new words every time I go back. Yeah. I feel like I'm missing it, right? If you're a father and you're away on it, you feel like you're missing it. I don't want to miss it. It's another thing, you know? It's hard. I love this job. I love to chase. I love to find a story and chase the story. You get an idea. And here it brought me to this island today. And now I get to chase it down. I got permits and I got, you know, interviews all set up. And now I get to make it, get to collect the ingredients, and then I have to cook it, edit that thing, and upload it, and it feels so good. And that's part of why I'm a YouTuber. It's actually the main reason, maybe, the chase of an idea to something. You're making something. It's cool. And that's what I'm here to do.

39:54 John Daub: So I better get to it. Have a good day, everybody. Take a look at that car for the last 10 seconds. Oh, look, it looks so much bigger when there's not another car around it. Doesn't it? Click like if you think you could drive that car. And click like if you think that you couldn't. I don't know. Just click like.