00:09 John Daub: Hello everybody, welcome to the city of Tokyo. That is a FamilyMart. This is one of the top three convenience stores in this country. And today we're going to be getting an onigiri from here. One that makes me really excited. Do you know what an onigiri is?

00:26 John Daub: How you doing everybody? Onigiri is a rice ball. They say that in English. There's no real way to translate onigiri without making it sound boring. Rice ball. But it's essentially a triangle-shaped rice ball. But it has seaweed in it. And the thing is the seaweed, often they found a way with plastic to separate the seaweed from the rice so it's crunchy. It gives it this really amazing texture. And inside of the onigiri usually there's some sort of surprise. Some kind of flavor. It could be meat. It could be vegetables. It can sometimes be a surprise. Sometimes spicy mustard and wasabi. Just to freak people out. It's kind of a game.

01:09 John Daub: But today I found a place that has chicken nanban. And that's one of my top five dishes of all time in Japanese cuisine. Don't ask me to list the other four. I'm not sure of the order. And it changes all the time. But right now it's in the top five. Chicken nanban is a dish that comes from Miyazaki Prefecture. It was initially a western cuisine dish but it became a Japanese dish. And we'll talk a little bit about that after I get one. Now I already bought one. This is the thumbnail. It looks kind of nasty. So I'm going to go in here and get a new one and see if they'll chiri suru. Chin is the sound of the microwave bell going off. And maybe they'll understand me. So let's get our masks on and go inside the FamilyMart and get ourselves a drink. And chicken nanban onigiri baby. Oh man. It's exciting. Chicken nanban. It's deep fried chicken baby. Alright let's go get some.

03:15 Staff: It's okay. I don't need it.

03:17 Staff: Can I have some?

03:18 John Daub: Yes please.

03:19 Staff: Thank you.

03:20 John Daub: It's warm. 298 yen.

03:24 Staff: Yes.

03:25 John Daub: It's delicious.

03:26 Staff: Oh, it's an IC card.

03:27 Staff: Yes.

03:27 Staff: It's a gift.

03:36 Staff: Please.

03:39 Staff: Thank you.

03:46 John Daub: You're welcome.

03:47 Staff: Thank you.

03:47 Staff: Thank you.

03:48 Staff: Thank you.

04:02 John Daub: Chicken nanban. Oh it's nice and warm in my hand right now. Alright, what should I do? Where can I eat this? There's no tables. You know what? This might work pretty good. Although it might be slightly illegal. That's alright. We're gonna go across the street to the... No, I'm not gonna do that. There's a post box and that seems like the perfect size for this. I think we'll just hang out on the corner here. This'll work. Alright. Oh my gosh. I got it. Chicken nanban onigiri baby. Oh, this is gonna be fun. They might have tables. But guess what? They also have copyright music. So let's not press our luck. And everybody knows that street food is a thing.

05:08 John Daub: This is so exciting. I can't hide it. That's how excited I am. We're right near the air conditioners. Now chicken nanban is considered to be western cuisine here in Japan. But it has become a Japanese dish over the years. Initially, two dudes who were serving at a restaurant down in Miyazaki Prefecture came up with this dish called chicken nanban. Which is a breaded chicken cutlet that's been... Initially like a vinegar sauce on there. Like a savory sauce on there. And it's on a bed of rice. But over the years, the two of them broke up. And they went into two different trains of chicken nanban. One guy kept the original recipe which is kind of boring. Probably lighter. But very tasty. And the other dude came up with tartar sauce. Japanese tartar sauce. And tartar sauce usually has a Japanese egg in it. And everybody knows that Japanese egg is really awesome.

06:15 John Daub: How do I eat this then? I have to find the right angle. Alright. I put it on a bush. This is the best we can do. You're on a bush. Boom. That's not gonna work. How do I eat this? I'm gonna keep it back here. It's shoganai (it can't be helped). Alright. I'll go down like this. So that... I was just in Miyazaki. And when I saw that chicken nanban, FamilyMart had this, I had to try this and share it with you today because this is my lunch. And I'm on a diet. So deep fried chicken sounds like a pretty good idea. This tea is from Ito En which is a very famous green tea maker. But it's hojicha (roasted green tea). And I haven't tried it. I've tried hojicha from this maker before. So I'm pretty excited about that too.

07:04 John Daub: Eat it with your mouth. That's how. Alright. Chicken nanban. Of course in Japan, they say open it here. There's actually a place that says open. Let's take a look at the wrapper. Wow. You see the wrapped rice ball with the seaweed around it. Looks like it's got two pieces of chicken in there. And the tartar sauce. Oh wow. It's on the outside. 167 yen. 180 with tax which is about a dollar thirty. The exchange rate. So this is it for the historical record. They don't last too long. So it would expire tomorrow. But how many calories? Do I want to know? 272. Is that... That's bad. How much fat? No, it's not. Don't even look at that. Okay.

08:04 John Daub: Michael Sassano. Thank you, buddy. Welcome. Here we go. It's lunchtime. Oh. Look at that juicy piece of chicken. Wonderful. Inside is the tartar sauce. I guess we got to take a bite to get in there or else it's going to get messy. Very messy. Chicken nanban. I forgot to say itadakimasu (I humbly receive). Oh man. This is really good. I'm blown away. Maybe I just wanted to eat chicken nanban so bad that I'm... I'm going to eat this. I'm so happy with an onigiri from a convenience store. But you can see the tartar sauce in there. The deep fried chicken.

09:14 John Daub: Now, after the deep fried chicken cutlet has been deep fried, they put it in that savory, kind of slightly vinegar, very ever so slightly tangy sauce with onions and stuff. And then they put the tartar sauce on there. So you get double. Irvin, if you're here, you can try this. This is at the FamilyMart buddy oh my gosh this is so good you have to make sure you microwave it yeah microwave it it's the best if you get it fresh at the restaurant the fried chicken is still crunchy but half of it has that savory sauce on it and then the tartar sauce that creaminess mixed up in there and inside the tartar sauce it's different there's like Japanese pickles just amazing flavor with that deep fried chicken and then the rice of course is always good it's a combination that is so magical. I definitely consider this to be Japanese cuisine although it originally comes from a western train of thought best dollar thirty oh man you can see in here it's kind of a mess most foods that taste real good are a mess anyways oh baby remember that word it's one two words chicken nanban i could eat this all day it's a little bit heavy in a way this would be like the Philadelphia cheese steak of Japan it's very heavy kind of oily meat creamy got a mix of stuff healthy probably not probably not that's all i want.

12:26 John Daub: One i have another one in my bag i'll record it for a main channel episode because one of the reasons this is on my mind is because i was in Miyazaki just last week yeah and the last day i filmed an episode on chicken nanban i went to one of the best restaurants and i went to the original chicken nanban restaurant i'm making an episode on it but when i heard that FamilyMart had it here in Tokyo like yeah i gotta try this today it's that good it is that good it's a little bit of a mess but anyway i'm going to try it today i'm going to only at FamilyMart right now I don't know but onigiri these rice balls this one is is I guess sometimes they have it with like yakiniku they've got wagyu inside they have all sorts of different flavors right now they also have a spam one which is a kind of a Hawaiian Okinawan mix type of thing but yeah chicken nanban down from Miyazaki down in Kyushu best darn top five dishes in Japan for me with the tartar sauce I like that one oh my gosh remember the first time I ate it it was just slathered in that tartar sauce it's different than what you would think like a tartar sauce I guess they call it that because it's some some of the things that are the same in there but they found a way to make it better here in Japan and you know how the Japanese tamago (egg) sandwiches are there's like that creamy egg in there oh my god and then they put that on deep-fried chicken they use waka they use young chickens though you know what I mean?

13:57 John Daub: Not and I learned about chickens in Japan it's very much like wagyu there's actually like premium chicken brands here in Japan Miyazaki has one of the three famous chicken brands in Japan Iwate I believe it was Iwate or Yamagata I can't remember up there in Tohoku there's one there's kochin chicken in Nagoya and then there's the Miyazaki chicken down there and oh my gosh they do such a great job of raising it I went to a chicken farm I saw them being free range grown down there they allowed me on there to take a look at one of them oh my gosh I don't feel bad about that at all eating the chicken like seeing them I'm just happy that they're having you know fun it can go outside mm-hmm you treat the livestock better it just makes better food it's food it's food they're not pets it's just good that they're cared for they eat pretty well pretty good mix of food I think they take good care of them. These chickens happy chickens are delicious chickens that's couldn't I couldn't have said that better myself same with any livestock really and they are livestock they're not pets yeah that's all I had today if you have any questions you can ask right now this is the time of the livestream where this is a live stream this is the time where you actually can write in and say where you're watching from if you're shy to ask me a question you could just say you know from Malibu California or Cherry Hill New Jersey or Sarasota, Florida, Bucharest, Romania.

15:40 John Daub: It's a good town. I like Brasov though. And Incheon of Pope guys is a nice city. NYC, we got the first one. There we go. Yeah, we got Jason from Canada, Australia, Mount Rushmore. Patrick, you are not around Mount Rushmore. What is, who is, who is written that? Weather's warm today. It's enough where, I mean, you probably don't wanna wear shorts, but I am. It's warm. And I gotta get some vitamin D. Get the sun. Yeah. You can ask me on Discord as well. Absolutely.

16:26 John Daub: The video is not sponsored by FamilyMart. Nobody, convenience stores don't need to sponsor anybody. You can pick whichever one. I find myself going in a 7-Eleven more than FamilyMart. How about that? There's your sponsor. That's sponsored by Patreon, baby. Speaking of which, we have one week and you can grab one of these. This is the 150 years of trains in Japan. This is Mount Fuji with the Shinkansen, the Tokaido Shinkansen cruising by at a pretty fast speed over that bridge. Very famous bridge. If you've ever taken the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto, you will know this scene. And yeah, I'll send this to you from here in Tokyo where the first train station, the first trains were. A hundred and fifty years ago last week. It was on the 14th of October celebrating a hundred and fifty years. It's pretty cool. I'll even give you a train stamp special train stamp to celebrate the hundred and fifty years. Yeah, we got 25 new postcard club members this month. So thank you guys so much. That's who sponsors this baby. See, I eat chicken nanban. I get a little cocky. It's a chicken nanban talking. It's taking over. There's cocky chicken in there. 150 years of trains in Japan. Shinkansen came in 1964. Everybody knows that. Olympics.

17:54 John Daub: Does the red label tea differ from the green label tea at Ito En? Yeah, Ito En, green would be green tea, red would be hojicha. And hojicha is a roasted green tea, so it's got kind of this really pleasant bitterness to it. But what's more than that is that when they roast the green tea, it takes away the caffeine. Or greatly reduces the caffeine. So if you don't like caffeinated drinks, hojicha, which is roasted green tea, is really good. And refreshing. Yeah, hojicha, man. I love the hojicha chocolate too, because of the bitterness. It's got this special, it's got more characteristic than just green tea. So hojicha chocolate is, green tea chocolate is better. Than normal green tea chocolate. It's nice to see Tuotaku here. How you doing? Hey Amber.

19:03 John Daub: We are planning to go to Okinawa next year. So I've got a bunch of episodes to edit, which is what I'm going back to do right now. I decided just to, it's been hard, the matcha video, the green tea video. So I'm going to divide it in two videos, because I think it's better than a 20 minute video. Two 10 minutes. One on matcha production and one on green tea production. How it's made. It was inside of a factory. And it was a fascinating look at the machinery that they use to mass produce the green tea. And the company that I went to, I believe they supply matcha to Starbucks for their cafe lattes. Matcha cafe lattes and stuff. I know they export a lot of it abroad as well for that purpose, which is cool.

19:52 John Daub: Alright, I can't quite see. Hold on a second. The iPhone 14 just went dark. It's hard to see now. It's supposed to be the brightest phone, but it's gone dark. Can't see anything. Got to fix the settings. I'll be here. You know, we're going to, I'm going to try to do some sort of meetup once a month. They might be more casual meetups instead of getting a whole group of people together. Like yesterday, 15 people came to say hi. A lot of people before I streamed and some people after I streamed and about seven or eight people during the stream. So I'm really happy to see visitors again. A lot of people have just come in the last week or two and many of them are staying for more than a month, which is probably a good way to make your time here.

20:43 John Daub: Or is this a, that's kind of neat. He's got this box on the back with kanji on it. Shin Tomy something, no? It's an Uber Eats. Yeah, I'll be here. I might not do meetups when you want me to do them. Cause my main goal is to edit the video and make content. But if I could possibly meet with some of you, that would be really happy. Just if you could just say hi. You know, it's, it's, it feels good for me too, to do that because I miss people. You know, I miss being back in 2019 and I think a lot of you too. Here in Japan, we had it really bad just because of the lock, not the lockdowns, but just the, the entry ban made it really hard to have a normal life. But I can say that perhaps it kept me safer. I really don't know, but we're just, I'm just glad that that stage seems to be over with. And we've moved into the next one.

21:46 John Daub: Prices are going up on stuff and I'll be doing a live stream on that next week about inflation in Japan. It's noticeably higher. I went to the supermarket for some eggs and milk and I paid about 30 yen more than I normally did, which is over a 10% increase on that. Probably more outside of Japan. But Japan is not a big country. You see inflation. Drinks from the vending machine have been 120 yen for a long time. They just went up to 130 yen. So, you know, 25 years, it's only been increased 10 yen. That's just crazy. Now, you know, it's going to happen. The yen got up to 152 to the dollar as well before we believe, although it's not confirmed that the Japanese government intervened because the drop was too steep, I think. But I think that it'll go back up to 150 yen. Hopefully, these interventions don't work out so well for the Japanese government. You can't fight the market, baby. That's the chicken nanban talking.

22:45 John Daub: All right, everybody. Have a good day. Thanks for hanging out here. WRX Turbo is in the house. See how smooth that was? That's how smooth that tartar sauce was. If you missed it, go back to the playback. I'll see you tomorrow to talk about another topic. Midnight snack run is imminent. I'll be doing that before the end of this month. No, I'm not going to Shibuya for Halloween. At least, I don't think I am. But anyways, alcohol has been banned. And hopefully, those tourists and people who go will keep the area clean because even Shibuya should be responsibly kept clean. Take your trash out with you. See you, everybody.