00:00:01 John Daub: Alright, are you guys there? Wonderful! So I've just arrived in Kirishima, which is a city in Kagoshima Prefecture. I arrived at the airport. It's not that far to get here. It's about a 15-minute drive. There's not a lot here. However, that does not stop us from doing a livestream and showing you something really interesting in this part of Japan. I guess it's interesting to you. This street looks like everyday life Japan anywhere. You got the power lines, you got the poles above, all the shops. You need a car to get around.

00:00:48 John Daub: And I'm actually getting out of the car just for one reason. I wanted to show you Sakurajima, which is the volcano that looms over Kagoshima City and Kagoshima Prefecture. This area of it is just less than a minute this direction. So I can show you that. I can show you a view of it. And then we're getting in the car and I want to take you down the main street. Just drive down the main drag and then show you what's going on in this town. It's got a lot of hotels in it and the airport's pretty close so it's a convenient place to stay if you want to spend a day or two looking at the national park, which is the real draw.

00:01:32 John Daub: That looks like a ramen shack. That's an izakaya (Japanese pub). Wow, that is what I call a nice looking izakaya. You don't have places that look like this in Tokyo because everything is so small. You don't have space to build an izakaya shack. Oh, I love it. Alright, just to the left here. Look, there it is. So I just wanted to give you a quick look at Sakurajima. That is an active volcano. In fact, just on the left side of it, right here, you can see the smoke coming out of it. It erupts every now and then and it's pretty amazing to see. In fact, the city of Kagoshima often has soot, ash covering the streets and they have to plow it sometimes. It's pretty exciting.

00:02:34 John Daub: Kagoshima! Oh my god! I haven't been here in a while. Super sunny. The weather is warmer. It was raining in Tokyo. I got off the flight and it looked like this. Check it out. Oh man, that's beautiful. I don't think it'll erupt on our livestream. I couldn't be happier if it did, but I'm going to say don't erupt. There's a couple of hotels. There's a Yamada Denki, which is an electronics shop over there. All the big chains are here and you're going to probably see them as we now get back into the car here.

00:03:18 John Daub: I'm staying in a little ryokan (traditional Japanese inn) about 20 minutes from here that's got an onsen bath (hot spring). And tomorrow I'll be covering an event for the next few days, which I'm not going to tell you about yet. Some of you might have guessed. It's a pretty big one, I think. It's got a very significant purpose that you'll learn about. If you know anything about this channel, you know what my passions are and this is one of them. But it's a really cool thing because now we're starting to feel like life is coming back to normal. These events can be held. And if this event was held a couple of years ago, they probably wouldn't have had it going on at all. So now they are. And that's huge!

00:04:09 John Daub: Hey, Wayne from Western Australia. Thanks for joining me. The manhole covers here are not that interesting. Kirishima might be, but I know Kagoshima City is not. One of the reasons is because they have the ash on the streets all the time. They say that you can't really see it anyways. This is the one here. It's pretty, but it's not the same as some other places. Oh man, it's hot.

00:04:41 John Daub: So I've rented a Toyota Raize. And I had to get a press armband. And in order to get it, I had to come to a place like Workman. And inside Workman, they sell Japanese work clothes, but they also have specialized things like armbands for media. It's kind of cool to get a media pass. There she is, the Toyota Raize. It's like a mini SUV. And we're going to drive in her. Oh, it's so hot. Yeah, I don't need that. I'm going to take you off of the gimbal and put you into another gimbal. Hold on a second.

00:05:50 John Daub: Alright, there you go. Let me turn it around, make sure you get a nice view at the windshield. Oh, that's pretty nice. Alright, we're going to go down the main street here. If you have any problems with the reception, not a lot I can do about it because I'll be driving. But to share with you this experience is kind of cool. Over the course of the next couple of days, I'm going to be able to take you to different locations around this part of Japan. Kind of maybe even stop in some roadside stands and get some lunch. Eat something interesting here, some local food. The Satsuma-imo (Satsuma sweet potato), which is a purple potato that you might have seen, that's from this area. It's the Satsuma area. And in fact, in a few days, I'll be going to Satsuma Town to film another topic which I can't tell you about.

00:06:41 John Daub: Alright, I don't know exactly where I'm going, but we're just going to go down the main drag because I kind of use this as my navigation. Although I do have it here. I put a link in the description in case you're interested in learning about Kirishima. These navis really stink. I have to delete the destination or else she's going to be talking to us the whole time. Delete destination. She's going to talk to us and tell us what to do. Alright. Here we go. Downtown Kirishima. Yee-haw! There's a lot of traffic. Loads of restaurants. Every chain seems to be here.

00:08:00 John Daub: That includes Yoshinoya. Aoki, which is a suit shop. There's an izakaya there. There's a Komeda's coffee shop. There's an A-Cut, which is like Supercuts out in the countryside. That's 1400 yen for a 10-minute haircut. You don't have to tip, by the way, for haircuts in Japan. Do you tip in America? I guess you would tip. Oh man, traffic's coming the other direction now. Yee-haw! So this is the main street in Kirishima. You can see it's pretty colorful because of all the road signs. There's a Docomo shop. Oh, there's the udon shop. Oh, there's a Tsutaya with a Starbucks.

00:09:14 John Daub: I've noticed that a lot of the Starbuckses out in the countryside, they're in collaboration with Tsutaya, which is a book and video rental shop. ABC Mart's pretty prominent. ABC Mart's a shoe store chain. Everything is chains on this road. ENEOS, the gas station. I'm going to take a right onto Route something. Whoa, look at that! 100 yen curry? What? I got to eat there. There's Coco Ichibanya. Tomato Ramen? What? There's a Nitori, which is accessories and home appliances and stuff. Here's the Kirishima City Hall. It's not exactly something you want to write a report about. Wow, this looks like every small city in Japan.

00:10:45 John Daub: I've been seeing the price per liter. I think it's around 150 yen. Is this Route 60? Yeah, let's make a right turn here, even though the lady said take a left turn. And we're going to go down another central drag. And maybe I'll pull into a convenience store because I could use a nice coffee. Enjoy the traffic patterns of Kirishima. John, listen please. Listen, I can't listen because I'm focusing on the road. I can hear. Do you have a DJI Osmo 6? No, I don't have that. Did you crash your motorcycle again? No. When you're traveling to do a job with luggage, your motorcycle might not be the best way to go. So in these cases, you can pull up to the center of the intersection and wait for the traffic to allow you to turn to the right here. And now we got a chance. Boom! That is the sound of me making a right turn.

00:12:05 John Daub: There's Sakurajima straight ahead. There's Sakurajima, the volcano on the right side of the road. That is pretty, it's like a video game when you see that. Can I zoom in? Let's see if I zoom in, it starts to shake a little bit too much. But you can see the volcano. Gosh, imagine you're driving down this road and it erupts and you see red lava flowing off of it. Whoa! Like an explosion 10 kilometers into the sky. Oh, here's a cheese restaurant. And a supermarket. Look, you know, I wanted to turn off this destination thing. I don't know how to use this navigation system. A lot of factories here. There is a Sony, I don't know what they do. Maybe they're making the sensors for the cameras or something. I think that's in Kumamoto though. But Sony's got a lot of warehouses and factories in this area.

00:13:28 John Daub: Oh, there's a FamilyMart. Whoa! FamilyMart with Sakurajima! Oh, this is awesome. It's like a video game. I wish I had like lasers on this car. Melt the cars in front of me to get through traffic faster. Look at that. FamilyMart with Sakurajima volcano. And you can see it's smoking. Do you see that? The volcano's smoking. Oh, that's too awesome. That is awesomeness. I'm going to pull in where this car... Oh! Oh, okay, you can go out now. I was going to pull in there. Can you let me pull in here? Oh, that's nice of you. Arigato. Shomatte. Arigato. Thank you. Domo. That is awesome.

00:14:31 John Daub: I can see between here a smoking volcano. Do you see it? Right between the buildings. Oh, that's so cool. It's smoking like this car because it's just so hot here. So as you can see, there's not a lot in Kirishima. There are some hotels. For the event that I'm going to be covering tomorrow, there's a lot of people staying here. All the hotels are like three to four hundred percent above the normal cost. The Apotto Hotel was 30,000 yen a night for closet-sized space. I'm not paying that. I had every intention of staying and sleeping in this car, but we found a place. I told them I'm going to be there at four o'clock. It's a little teeny ryokan about 15 minutes away from here that I told you about. It has an onsen and I told them no dinner, but I might be changing my mind now. I don't think there's anything else to eat around there.

00:15:27 John Daub: I'm going to go to the hotel. I have so much stuff to do. I'm going to go to the venue as well to just scope it out so that I don't have any troubles on the day of the event. It's a pretty big one. I'm debating. I think I'll be able to take you in there live if there's a signal or Wi-Fi, but as media, I'm guessing they have a special media Wi-Fi router thing for us. Yesterday, we had the Korean missile go through here. I think it was the first missile that was sent over Japan and that's making big news. All the American evening news was carrying that even the next day. It's pretty crazy. I know a lot of people would be nervous about that, but I don't think anything's going to happen of it. Just to follow up on some of the comments, I know we're not going to get into a war over this and technically it went up like a thousand kilometers into the sky, which is kind of outer space. I'm not even sure if that invades Japan's airspace. Is outer space Japan's airspace?

00:16:29 John Daub: I don't know what level of the height it went over Japan, but my biggest worry is that North Korea and their very smart scientists don't make a mistake and then hit Japan. Japan's been warning them for 20 years since the first missile in 1998. Imagine if they just made a mistake and it accidentally hit Hokkaido or it hit Japan. It kills a couple thousand people. I mean, then that's pretty bad, right? It's not like I'm worried about it, but I am because we can't really trust them to be accurate. Again, I was talking about Scud missiles from the first Gulf War. How accurate are these things? I don't know. That's what worries me the most. That worries people in Nemuro when I was there talking about these types of things. They have Russia on one side. Then they have North Korean missiles. They live with that every day and they talk about it quite a bit. At least the people that I was talking to.

00:17:36 John Daub: Today, I'm not sure what I'm going to do tonight, but if I find interesting things, you're going to want to subscribe to the channel and make sure you get the notification because I'm just going to go live with maybe five minutes notice and I'm going to take you to some really cool stuff. At least I think it's cool. If it's not cool, probably won't click the live button, but it's interesting to travel around Japan to new areas outside of Tokyo and not a lot of people are going to be coming to Kagoshima. Maybe you will after this. It's pretty cool. Whoa, look at that. What is that? They have like a nikuman (steamed bun). Oh wow. There's a sale for nikuman. These are these like steamed meat dumplings. Or as Peter von Gomm says, manly fart. Just take the M and the... See what he did there? FamilyMart, manly fart. See what he did there? It's Peter.

00:18:31 John Daub: If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below. I'm going to get back to it. I got to get to the hotel, start settling in and get my equipment ready because tomorrow is going to be a super long day to make this main channel episode, but I'm super excited because I haven't had a chance to get out and make one of these for a while. Yeah. Get some of those baggy carpenter pants. I know at Workman, they got some cool stuff there. I have to admit, I was probably walking around there for a few minutes longer than I should have just looking at how unique it is. They have... That in itself could be a pretty cool episode.

00:19:06 John Daub: All right. I'll see you in the next livestream, probably maybe tonight and definitely tomorrow. We'll do a couple of them most likely. I'll be here until October 11th and then we'll do an airport livestream at Kagoshima and then we're going to do a Haneda Airport International Terminal livestream on the day that tourism opens, which is going to be pretty awesome. I don't know. I arrive back maybe 4 or 5 p.m. So it's not going to be that long. It's going to be the ideal time for the U.S. But hey, Hawaii and Europe, woohoo. And you'll get to see the playback the next day. So until then, enjoy a smoking volcano. You can see that right between there. Look at that. That's awesome. Sakurajima. That's such a different view than Tokyo. I love it. See you, everybody.