00:00:08 John Daub: Hello everybody, welcome to the Wagyu Olympics. I'm behind the scenes here in Kagoshima—they're holding it in 2022 at this location. Last time it was in Miyagi Prefecture near Sendai, and this year I'm pretty excited because I missed the last one. To come here and get a better understanding about what the Japanese Wagyu beef brand stands for—what is the best Wagyu beef in Japan? This is the Kagoshima competition that decides it, and I have access as press media to take you behind the scenes and give you a little insight into this amazing event held once every five years.

00:00:38 John Daub: Right now they're washing the Wagyu and getting them ready for the competition. This event's going on for the next four days, and they got to look their best to win. I'm making a main channel episode out of this, so don't worry—you're going to get this in glorious 4K on the other channel. But I thought it would be pretty nice to bring you here just a little bit to get you a taste, so to speak, of what this event is all about.

00:01:23 John Daub: Oh, there's Shimane Wagyu. You can see all the Wagyu brands are here—41 of the 47 prefectures are represented. I believe there are 440 cattle here, and I believe I'm the only international press here, which is crazy because Japanese Wagyu is such an important part of Japanese cuisine. Oh, they're finished over here. What I wanted to show you for sure was this place—this is the practice ground, and you see three Wagyu cattle over there. They're three ladies: the grandmother, the mother, and the daughter. Lineage is very important for Japanese Wagyu—that's one of the things they want to promote here at the Wagyu Olympics.

00:02:14 John Daub: The lineage, forming regional brands all from the same area—because a lot of the Wagyu beef in Japan comes from Kagoshima and Miyazaki. You can see on their birth certificate the line that they've traveled to get to where they become, let's say, Yonezawa beef or Hida beef (famous in Gifu). But raising them all in the same prefecture is something in the future I think more and more places are going to be doing. Oita Prefecture is—I think one last year based on that. You can see the grandmother, the mother, and the daughter. That's crazy. They're getting ready for the opening ceremony.

00:02:52 John Daub: A lot of Japanese media is here—behind the scenes is pretty cool to see. These cattle are treated very well—they're the best of the best from each area, getting patted down, shampooed, soaked, dried, washed, and dried. It's pretty much like going to Supercuts without the cuts. It's pretty cool to see how well they're treated here with hot water—by the way, this is not cold water; this is nice warm water, heated on the other side there. I want to know what shampoo they're using—what brand? If it's strong enough for the Wagyu, it's strong enough for me. Somebody make note of that brand—I'm going to try to buy that online.

00:04:16 John Daub: They're all very well behaved. You think of the movies, the cartoons where cattle are charging people, but cattle in Japan are quite the opposite—they're very shy and very docile, and it's nice to see them being treated very well. They can do that though, but not being able to control the cattle can be very harmful. Here they are—they're practicing the flags for the opening ceremony. I believe each brand has a flag. This is very medieval looking—this is so cool. How is it not like the regular Olympics? Now each brand is a competitor—each Wagyu brand, each cattle is a competitor, just like the human Olympics.

00:05:03 John Daub: There are strong competitors and weak competitors, and everybody knows that certain prefectures like Miyazaki and Kagoshima here—they're very strong. There's others that haven't won yet but are trying their best, and each five years is a way for them to break out. Because if you win the Wagyu Olympics, you all of a sudden get a lot of orders internationally—people are watching this, following it to see what is the best of the best.

00:05:43 John Daub: The pens—these are all just makeshift tents. This is actually a camping spot, but you can see inside there the all-stars, the athletes, are all waiting. Luckily, we have really nice weather here in Kagoshima—nice and warm, not too humid. That bath's got to feel good. They wouldn't be here if they weren't bred for that—so they wouldn't be here at all without their ultimate purpose, which is to be eventually eaten. But you have to take note of how well they are treated, and this is something I hope other ranchers around the world can understand: the nicer you treat the animals, despite their ultimate purpose, the better their lives are and the better meat they produce.

00:06:44 John Daub: For Japanese cuisine, Wagyu—which actually means Japanese cow, Japanese beef—is a very important part. Food quality is important for most people, and you get that represented. The tags on their ears have a 10-digit number which can track their lineage from birth—that's amazing. If you want to make sure you're getting real Japanese Wagyu beef, make sure you get that 10-digit number to track the lineage. You can ask the manager of the restaurant if you're paying a premium for that—don't forget about that. There's a Wagyu beef database that allows you to search online, going all the way back—you can search the mother's mother's mother, like 10 generations or more. I think I searched one cow all the way back to 2002 when I was doing a video about it.

00:07:41 John Daub: I thought this would be interesting to bring you behind the scenes. If you do appreciate it, consider giving me a super thanks if you're seeing this in playback—I appreciate the support. I'm here on my own dime—this isn't a sponsored video; it's just something I have a great passion for, and I think a lot of you want to see how your food is sourced. Having events like this, a competition where ranchers are competing to treat the cattle well to make sure they're getting the food and look well—it creates better beef, and I like that competitive spirit because it makes everybody strive for that. I think that's something missing in a lot of other beef industries around the world—it's not just meat; as you can see, it's a living creature, and seeing them treated so well, I eat it knowing they came from a good source.

00:09:01 John Daub: The Wagyu Olympics—I'll be able to tell you a little bit more as the days go on. I'm going to be here for a few days. There's two competitions: one about the breeding evolution or the breeding—it's more about the cow herself or himself; it's not about the meat. Then there's another one just about the meat and the marbling—they have seven or eight categories, I believe. One of the new subcategories this year is fat, because the Wagyu Association wants to show that it's a totally different fat from other varieties of beef. By putting a category on the fat, that's interesting—it's never been done before, and I'm curious to see how they judge that. But one of the things they do not judge is taste—keep that in mind. So when you see the winner of the Wagyu Olympics, it's interesting to eat the brand that the winner comes from, but that doesn't tell you the taste of the Wagyu—that's up to you, the independent eater.

00:10:13 John Daub: I'm going to get a chance to eat some of the Wagyu beef at a tent on the other side—there's a whole compound here where you can get an experience. Because I have press credentials, I can go in the back here and show you a little bit—and because you subscribe to this channel, you can come with me. How cool is that? I love the flags they have here—does that say Okinawa? That must be Ishigaki-jima. That is some of the best beef. You know, the winner consistently for the last three Olympics, the last 15 years, has been Miyazaki—they've had either won both or one of the two categories. Miyazaki beef is one of the most prized—I know a lot of you know Kobe beef, but again, it's just one brand.

00:11:16 John Daub: Wagyu beef is completely different from Kobe beef—Kobe beef is a type of Wagyu beef. Wagyu beef is not Kobe beef; Kobe is one brand of many. For people in the West, Kobe beef is not Wagyu—Wagyu beef is one of the many brands of Japanese Wagyu, and it's the most famous, but it doesn't necessarily make it the best. Again, the taste is the most important, and the exclusivity—how well is it treated? How good is the supply chain? How does it go from the farm to the processing factory? What do they eat? What's the weather like in the prefecture? The geography, the age of the cattle, and the sex are also very important—females are more desired because, just like human guys, males have more muscle, so the meat is tougher, whereas females' meat is more silky smooth, so they say.

00:12:27 John Daub: I'm going to take you into the tent now, and I'll be back here in the background later to show you what the opening ceremony is going to be like. Security is extremely high this time because we have some VIPs coming in—I'm not exactly sure who, but it's going to be interesting. Then I'm going to be filming this for a main channel episode in totality because I really want to get a better understanding about what makes Japanese beef the best in the world—and if you're ever going to go to a place to figure that out, it's this event. Now the Wagyu come down the road here into the tent and then go into this mega tent.

00:13:18 John Daub: You have to sanitize your feet before you come in here because there's a lot of people. This is a security check—I've already gone through. I'm up here with the other media. This is the main ground where the cattle are going to be competing, and a lot of the competition requires really well handling of them—the ranchers and staff have to really be able to handle the Wagyu. If they get out of line, that can really hurt the score, but they've been trained—they've been practicing. I was here yesterday for the rehearsals, and everything went so smoothly. Again, Wagyu are different than other cattle because they're so shy and so docile—and if the handler is well known to them, they're so well relaxed. But it's the other things happening around the Kuruge Wagyu Ushi (black-haired Wagyu cattle) that makes them kind of freak out.

00:14:53 John Daub: This event is really cool because it's a chance to showcase Japanese Wagyu—people get excited for it in the industry. This is an actual real competition—the implications for the winner means tens of millions of dollars more. After Miyazaki became the winner and one of the strongest brands in Japan as a result of the Wagyu Olympics, their production and support from the local government went way up. In fact, I think 30% of the Wagyu beef is produced by Kagoshima and Miyazaki down here in Kyushu—that's a significant amount. A lot of those younger ones are being exported to other prefectures to be grown as other beef brands, but I think over time, lot of these beef brands are going to want to breed them within their own climate, location, and lineage—and they're starting to do that more and more.

00:15:53 John Daub: I can attest that it's as clean as this—I've been into so many farms, and they're so clean; you can't smell what you think you would. It smells like hay and fresh poo, which is not that bad—not human poo; human poo stinks. And this is where the VIPs are going to be giving their speech—I'll probably just take 30 seconds and get out of here. My focus is the real stars: the cows. Oh no! Chumamon's here! It's the evolution of beef—that's just fun.

00:16:45 John Daub: Let me take you up to my perch—here I got the A1 going, and I'll be filming here as much as I can from this spot. Above the tent you can see all the flags of the 41 prefectures and localities. I honestly can't tell you what they are, but they look very medieval, maybe like samurai clan flags or Canadian hockey flags—Americans have no idea what it is. A lot of the Japanese that come here don't really know what it is either—only a couple flags have the location, like Shimane Prefecture and maybe Gifu. But this is the Wagyu Olympic opening ceremony that's going to be taking place really soon—gosh, I'm just so excited! This is the ultimate beef fair, ultimate beef competition, ultimate beef brands.

00:18:11 John Daub: To get the access and the permit, I had to apply months and months ago—so I don't think there's any foreign media here; everybody's local. It's crazy—like, this is only once every five years, the Wagyu beef competition for probably the best steak brand in the world, and there's no foreign media that I can see. People are asking me who I am—I said, a YouTuber—and I still get a lot of respect. YouTube has earned a lot of respect over the years—some of the best videos on Wagyu beef are YouTubers showing the marbling, the taste, explaining it. I think it's such an amazing platform, and to have a YouTuber mingling with the Japanese media and doing the job is pretty cool—I really love it.

00:19:07 John Daub: The stakes are high—S-T-E-A-K-S are high. There are protocols here in place. I believe it started in 1966, every five years—they had some off years in the beginning, but now every five years, two brands are crowned: one for meat quality, one for breed quality. The stakes—tens of millions of dollars in livelihoods can be made. Each one of the brands has been practicing for five years to get to this point. It may seem silly for some people that they're taking it so seriously, but this is a lot of pride for the people here in Japan, a lot of pride for this industry to raise and parade the best cattle for consumption.

00:20:54 John Daub: This is the kind of food that I would want to eat, where the cattle ranchers take those little details to such an amazing length. The suspense is killing me. Oh, that's volcanic—this is probably Kagoshima, the host prefecture, having the videos. Did you see that? The shabu-shabu came out of the volcano—that meat came out of the volcano. A lot of people say one of the reasons Kagoshima and Miyazaki have the best beef is because of the fertile volcanic soil here with so many minerals—the water is clean, the air is clean, and volcanic areas always have so much minerals in the produce, so the feed is even better for them. But you don't know until the taste, and they don't judge that here.

00:22:40 John Daub: You have some of the teams up in the corner here—they're all waiting, all competing, all kind of together. I guess you wouldn't want to put fans in different areas—you don't want Michigan fans in the Ohio State section. It's like the Olympics. We're just moments away, and I'm going to cover this—I'm not going to do it live, but I hope this is informational and gets you excited. When you come to Japan, they did a poll and 71% of international people want to come here to eat—that's pretty amazing. Kobe beef might be the brand you know that's best and it is a good brand, but there's a lot of other brands that might be better—a reason to travel around just to eat meat. 41 prefectures out of 47 are here—it's the biggest turnout for the Wagyu Olympics ever, 440 cattle. The Wagyu beef from Hokkaido and Okinawa traveled up to three days to get here by ship.

00:24:08 John Daub: All right, everybody—thanks for the support. If you like it, consider giving a super thanks after playback to help me fund this thing, because that's where this and Patreon are funding this adventure. I'll be here for the whole week filming, and I'm going to take you to a couple other really cool things—one has to do with chicken, and the other maybe potatoes. Food ingredients are such a vital part of Japanese cuisine, one of the top reasons people travel here—so food is always going to be a big draw. This event is open to the public—if you're in the area, you can come in and get some Wagyu beef; they have amazing courses—pretty reasonable, five Wagyu beef from certain brands around Japan. They do have shuttle buses, but very little information is in English—I think next time, as a result of the video I'm producing, they'll consider doing it in English because this is pretty exciting.

00:26:02 John Daub: Those chairs are not for the cows—they're for some of the team members, I believe; there are 41 prefectures here. I'm very passionate about Wagyu beef—I have a lot of respect for the cattle because I eat them, and when I do eat Wagyu beef and say itadakimasu, we're giving great thanks for that sacrifice. If you feel uncomfortable about eating beef, I completely understand—everybody has different diets and cultures. What I love about the way Japanese raise the beef is that they give a lot of care and love into the process, and the result is really delicious beef and probably a happier cow through the life that they are here—it is a living creature after all.

00:27:07 John Daub: All right, everybody, enough of me on the stand here—take care. I'll bring you more really cool stuff from this event, and I'm glad that you're with me. I'm so excited—I can't wait. See everybody.