00:00 John Daub: Hello everybody. Welcome to Tokyo Station. That is the Marunouchi side of one of the busiest stations in Japan here. And I'm at the Kite Building which is the Tokyo Central Post Office's main hub. And this is where I send a lot of my packages and postcards because it's not too far away from home and. And it's also, you know, like the headquarters. It's an old historical building that has been redone and now it's location of a live stream.

00:40 John Daub: How you doing everybody? I have some very good news after almost a year. Something that's been very irritating to me and my viewers, especially on Patreon where I send packages to Daimyo supporters. It's back. I, you know I was so excited yesterday. I was about to go to bed and I checked online and there it was — a new notification from Japan Post stating that mail to Canada has returned. And of course you could send letters and postcards and it took a very long time. It wasn't always the case. Airmail was also suspended at a period. But now packages are back and they'd taken packages off of the list. That meant that you didn't have a lot of options to send things to Canada. You could use DHL but that would cost an extravagant amount of money. You could use UPS, but that's not really big here in Japan. Again like prices started $100, which is crazy. EMS starts at like $20. So what? Look at that car in front of the post office.

01:46 John Daub: Really? I don't know. You got to give that person some credit. This is not as cool as Shibuya or Ginza. Maybe they're looping back around the Ginza besides Canada. And I'm going to talk about what this possibly means because it might have a here. And Brandani is here in Hawaii. She received her EMS package I sent on 28th October today. Congratulations. You win the first package of the month here. That was only four or five days which is meaning that the mail here in Japan is moving much quicker. I always use the mail as indication of what the routes are. If the airlines are adding more routes to other countries the mail will also reflect that and you're going to see mail times increase — at least getting to the other side — and to the United States it has certainly increased by a couple of days, I've noticed. So there are more routes being added because mails leaving Japan quicker instead of waiting for maybe bi-weekly flights, but to places like Germany, to the United Kingdom I've noticed the speed is going up.

03:00 John Daub: Switzerland is ridiculously fast. Usually there before Hawaii, not this time. So it's an indication of how travel is shaping up. And Japan had suspended the Canadian route as well as Australia. Suspending Australia too, for almost eight months after being suspended for a year before that. So they had reopened. Then Omicron hit and then they suspended once again. I mean, it's just like looking at the Japan Post is sort of a microcosm of the way that the Japanese government is thinking about travel in general.

03:35 John Daub: If the routes are suspended from Japan Post, this probably give you an indication of how the government is thinking too, because I don't know, maybe it's a government associate, a government institution perhaps. I think it's private though, because Japan Post is also a bank and they have one of the biggest savings. It's. It's an ama. Japan Post is a massive place for savings to be held. The interest rates are like 0%. I think it was like 0.001, but it wasn't. But the interest rates are minus. So they had to give something. I guess it's kind of weird how why anybody would put money into a savings account. I think your mattress, at least you'll get like a bigger mattress. You put your cash underneath there. I don't know.

04:39 John Daub: Another bright spot with the reopening yesterday. And it's funny, I'm doing a live stream on mail. How exciting I am. I'm a sort of a stamp — stamp otaku, a stamp geek. I love to see the news stamps that they put out every month and they get more diverse, more colorful, more, I guess, meaningful. When you start to see anime and manga stamps, they're pretty cool. You know, we had some big ones in the last couple of years. Too many to say because I don't watch manga or anime and I don't know what they are.

04:56 John Daub: These are the postcards. This is significant. I want to shout out to Solvu Alexandru in Bucharest in Romania, who has been in the postcard club for two and a half years and hasn't received any of them. And his collection here is like — it's like the history of the Only in Japan Postcard Club. Look at this. Like, this goes back all the way to like 2020. Like there's me and Kanae in Niijima Island. That is a free onsen that you can soak in, separated from the Pacific Ocean. And that's Kanae there. It was a fantastic — like, he even got the posters from the fireworks Kickstarter project here. It's pretty incredible. We have a couple of people from Romania, but Cosmo's been here since the beginning.

05:52 John Daub: There's the Ameyoko postcard. Every single fireworks from our Kickstarter project all in one picture. Look at that. Is that Matsumoto Jo in Nagano. There's the Asakusa one. The Tohoku Shinkansen. Look at this Sumo. There's the one from Kanae. And I for the end of the year card from last year. This is going to another supporter in Romania. This is the nada image. The Olympic rings. That's crazy. And yeah, there is the Olympic stamp on there too. Check that out. So you get a track and field stamp. Here's the one with Greg and where Greg and I did Wild Onsen in Fukushima. Oh, there's the Buddha sunglasses. This really is like a history of Only in Japan Postcard Club. This is the Torii Gate on Lake Biwa in the center of Japan. I thought that that was a pretty cool shot. And the color of Biwa is pretty emerald. It's pretty striking. There's Kodo banging the drum. Some of you might remember these cards too.

06:55 John Daub: This is Shibuya. When was this? This was May of 2020. And you can see almost no people in Shibuya. This is when they'd done this lockdown and I went out there to report on it. I wasn't locked down. I mean, you could still travel within your city. But I thought it was remarkable. You can see the cracks in the street in Shibuya. Cherry blossoms from spring. I love this card. In Aomori airport of two staff waving and bowing to the passengers. Just a show of respect. There's the sushi art episode. The end of year for 2020. It's Kanae and I, Kanazawa before Leo was even born. I'm sending these out. This is crazy. This is the most recent one. You can see the speed blur of the Shinkansen passing Mount Fuji over the Fuji River. That's pretty cool. That's another supporter in Romania. And then we have the Furano in Hokkaido. The beautiful lavender flowers there.

07:57 John Daub: I mean, that's just a history of the channel, right? Another reason to sign up for the postcard club so you can get yours and you start building a collection. But I'm just like, really gonna miss this because now I have to send — I'm gonna send them in like three groups so they're not all arriving at the same time. But I'm gonna miss having a collection of them by my door because as these routes were suspended, I would hold them for supporters and it felt like you were there with me. And it's going to feel a little lonely now not having them when I enter and leave my house every day because it's almost gone now.

08:31 John Daub: What hasn't Japan Post opened up yet? There are a bunch of routes that are pretty significant. India is still closed. Brazil is still closed. Portugal, which is like very — I can't understand that. But they're still closed to packages. But I believe they still get postcards and letters. The UAE, which is United Arab Emirates, which is weird because there's some pretty big urban centers there — Abu Dhabi and Dubai come to mind — that are major routes like the crossroads to Europe. A lot of flights are going through Dubai. I'm not sure why that country is closed to airmail. Doesn't make any sense. So I hope that they open up India very soon. I can't understand why it's closed. The only thing that I can see is that perhaps they don't have enough routes here. Hey, Cosmo's here. Wow. Hey buddy. So I got them all here. I sent you mail on Patreon. Now that you're here, you could just chat. You don't have to super chat. But do you want me to send them all together at the same time or do you want me to send them like two or from different post office at different times? Just let me know and I will do it. I'm at your command. I'm just so thankful you hung in there. And this is like — there's like a book of postcards coming to you. This is crazy. This is really crazy.

10:10 John Daub: But Romania was one and I have friends in Cluj Napoca, Brasov. Now that Romania is opening up to Japan, I'm pretty excited perhaps to go visit there next year with Leo to see some friends in Cluj, Brasov. There's so many beautiful cities in Romania too. The Black Sea. Oh, Chris writes in here: "Make it a surprise." Very, very well. Could do that. Why wasn't Japan Post open for letters but for — you could send C mails and in 2020 I sent. The only option was C mail to the United States for example. When this outbreak happened, I think that one reason this is a pretty significant live stream and marker for me and the community and for travelers is because we look back on the period of time over the last few years and we noticed that in 2020, it was really, really bad. I rely on viewer support to travel and to run the show, as well as livelihood too. And 2020 was a particularly hard year. We lost a lot of Patreon supporters just because it was a hard time economically. I couldn't do as many episodes. And I'm still kind of regrouping on that too, because of the pandemic. At that time, I couldn't — all the access and permission to film was canceled. I had some really amazing episodes, especially up in Tohoku, canceled. I didn't know what I was going to do. So I started doing camping indoors.

11:44 John Daub: And the Only in Japan Go channel became a place where I would do travel updates and let you know when Japan was reopening. So this marks a pretty significant step, having Canada reopen as well as Finland. Positive in a negative sense perhaps, right? Yeah, because it wasn't a very positive thing. And it was only Japan that after a certain period in 2020, we started to diverge between the rest of the world and Japan. And I think especially in 2021, following.

12:16 John Daub: Oh, check it out. Look at the kimono. That's a beautiful shot of people come here to take pictures of for the wedding because in front of the Tokyo Station you have this beautiful facade and there's a long walkway from the Imperial Palace to the Marunouchi side of the station. It's a beautiful place to take pictures. And this is a unique angle, I guess, but it's a very symbolic change to Japan. And now they've caught up with the rest of the world, which is a very good thing.

12:49 John Daub: It means that the routes are open, and I'm pretty happy about that because now I can finally send the packages to Jason and Christopher and Alex and even Catherine who left us. But still, I have a lot of stuff to send to supporters that have been hanging on there for a long time. I just want to say thank you to everybody, not just the Patreon supporters, but everybody on the channel, because it's been a hard time for creators. I think that this is all over now and everybody is getting back to the swing of things.

13:25 John Daub: This is sort of a half Japan travel update. So I'll give you a couple of important notes, one of which is the My SOS app is now — Toast. Toast. You have to use the Visit Japan Web app to fast track into Japan and please fast track. Check it out. It's a — it's a Hato tour bus. They're back. So you have to use the Visit Japan Web now and not the My SOS app. So that's a pretty good nugget of information for you. The other one where there were a few of them, travel updates, little informations that I had.

14:00 John Daub: So this November — hold on a second. Now I think you can go to November 14th with it, right? Wasn't it — oh, the MySOS web starts today and you have until November 14th to use. You can use My SOS until the 14th of November. But today starts the — yesterday started the official start of the Visit Japan Web version of this, which makes more sense because My SOS was not really designed to be a fast track pass. Yeah, there's that. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that's going on.

14:33 John Daub: So besides the packages, Finland reopened — that route was canceled due to the war in Ukraine and flights could not go over Russia from Japan. So I'm really happy that I can now send postcards to supporters in Finland. So, Tomi, your postcards are on the way. Thank goodness. It's been since the war started. I think it was in March of 2022. Mail to Finland was suspended. Italy had been suspended for a year and a half and those postcards have gone out.

15:04 John Daub: So I want to say thank you. We have supporters for this channel in almost every country I've sent a postcard to. One of my favorite places to send them is Greenland. We have a supporter there — Nico, thank you. It's always fun to send it to where the polar bears are. Kanae's images of Greenland is really romantic. So she's like, "I want to go to Greenland." We're putting stamps on the postcards and we see Greenland. She goes, "I want to go to Greenland." I think it'd be really fun. And I said okay. She doesn't talk like that, by the way. But it's truly a global community.

15:36 John Daub: I had a couple of other travel update stuff I wanted to share with you, but I can't think of it. Yeah. In terms of the masks, I do have — I think that Japan is starting to turn the page on this. But I want you to understand that I'm having a hard time again, I'm not wearing a mask, but I will when I go inside the post office and you can see everybody else is wearing them. As long as you're social distance and you're outside, it's not a problem. But always have one in your pocket. Always have one in your pocket.

16:43 John Daub: I'm having a problem with filming some of the locations. A lot of them — I don't want to have masks in the Only in Japan edited videos because it's just a bad reminder and you can't see people's emotions, you can't see their face and it's not a really good look. You don't see models on advertising wearing masks. Right. So I'm — that's a beautiful kimono. So I'm that, that's the outer coat to the kimono but it's made of silk and very beautiful. But putting on a mask and doing a documentary, it just doesn't make sense. And I've had locations — even though I said I will take a PCR test, I've been vaccinated three times. I feel fine. If I have a fever, I won't go. Let me remove my mask and film this after. This is before and after opening hours.

17:13 John Daub: But locations have been very — I don't know — they won't allow me to film without having a mask on. And I end up canceling some episodes because I just — I know that in two, three years it's just depressing to see videos with masks on. And I won't take a thumbnail with a mask on. It just doesn't make sense because TV entertainment should not worry about — make you worry about this despite it being the reality. Like everyone has a mask on except those guys.

17:46 John Daub: So just keep that in mind — you know, I'm not an anti-masker but I think we have to turn the page and use common sense and base it on science. And the Prime Minister is telling us to take off our masks outside. So I mean like, yeah, you're gonna have to make a judgment call. But always travel with a mask in your pocket and if you're shopping indoors, they will ask you to put one on. And that's respectable. I think on public transportation inside of stores where the air is very stale, it's not filtered or anything like that. I still wear masks for that. And even at intersections I'll put them on where it's a crowded location. Just because you're still in Japan and you want to fit in. I'll be wearing mask until Japan's performance is over and then I'm not worried. Yeah, I think I'm in agreeance with this. I think it is a little bit too much to do that. Let me get this. And I can walk around a little bit. I think it's a little bit too much.

18:59 John Daub: But it's not my country, you know, I'm — I live here I'm a resident of it. I guess it is because I pay more taxes than probably some of the other people live here. I don't know. I pay a lot of — everybody does — pays a lot of taxes. So I guess it is my country in a way. But I don't make the rules. And it is a societal rule. It's not the rule, but it is something that people are very sensitive about. Restaurants and businesses still want people to wear masks. And you have to be very considerate about that and think about other people's feelings besides your own.

19:33 John Daub: And I think Japan will turn the page. I think they'll turn the page in their own time. And that's understandable. That's their country. But I was very disappointed in the Shibuya Halloween, as you all know, and in yesterday's call in Q and A, I really leaned into it. And I thought that the police did a fair to poor job. They did a good job of getting people across the street. But you know, we should not have a hundred thousand people all crammed into alleys after what had happened in Korea.

20:09 John Daub: Again, if somebody had a pack of firecrackers and threw them into a group of people, we'd have a riot and we would have a stampede because people can't differentiate between gunfire and firecrackers. And that could be a particularly dangerous situation. Again, firecrackers, you can get them in Nagasaki and they're available for festivals and things like this. That's not out of the realm. But I just think that it's something that they really need to consider to have groups of people so packed in there, a lot of them not from here in Japan, so they can't take commands properly.

20:49 John Daub: Another YouTuber, Japanese YouTuber, was cleaning the streets and he approached a group of foreigners. This was really big on Twitter. I think it had like 7 or 8 million views on it. Now, he approached a group of foreigners that were smoking and throwing the tobacco, the cigarettes into a bush and making a big mess around there, drinking alcohol, which was banned from Shibuya during the Halloween, and they wanted to fight him. He was maybe a little bit too aggressive and confrontational, but nevertheless.

21:25 John Daub: And they could speak some Japanese. They used that and had their Western thinking into this. Why not just put it out and walk away? They couldn't do that. And it created a negative feeling. And I think a lot of Japanese, if you ask — I did a Twitter poll and I thought that it would be more favorable since more Westerners are watching the show than Japanese. But it turned out to be very — the unfavorable rating of the Halloween party was much higher than I thought it would be based on your feedback.

22:00 John Daub: So I really do hope that Tokyo thinks about this and maybe they find another way to do the party rather than just opening up a public street. It's not an official event. You can't stop people from going into a city. But if again — this keeps getting big, keeps getting bigger and I don't know, man. I just — I can see the potential problems. All right, everybody, you can write in your $0.02 below. Make sure you hit the like button.

22:31 John Daub: And I will have a new video tomorrow probably. I get that video uploaded. It's done. Just redoing the thumbnail right now, which is always a very important part of it. But kudos to Japan Post. It took you a long time to make up your mind. Mail from Canada to Japan was coming, by the way. You could still send a package from Canada to Japan. You just couldn't go the other way around. And I just couldn't for the longest time figure that out. And now it doesn't matter. I did tweet the ambassador to Canada. I know Jason also called in the embassy in Ottawa. So I know that we were pushing and we eventually got there. It's no longer an issue. DHL was brutal. Yeah. It's so expensive. We really need.

23:39 John Daub: And I'm hoping though that I — I think I just saw a question here pop up on my notifications from another platform. So only EMS is available to the United States, to Canada and most of the world, to Australia and to Singapore. We have small packet ePacket, which is a small packet which is about half the price of EMS and takes just a few days longer. Those are available to Australia and Singapore and some European countries, but EMS is available only to the United States and to Canada. And it's very expensive. And the thing is, to Chicago it's taking longer. It's taking two weeks, and it's supposed to take three days. It's supposed to be like Federal Express EMS. It's taking two weeks to go through Chicago and it's taking six days to go to New York.

24:16 John Daub: So I don't know what's happening in Chicago, but it's a disaster. And Los Angeles is about seven days. So Chicago — it's weird. So you're paying a really big premium for really crappy — what would be normal, like, economy airmail. So hopefully things get better. I'm a positive person. Although I can be negative for 30 seconds. Give me that. But it's all getting better. And this is a sign that things are normalizing for business and commerce.

24:46 John Daub: And as more routes open up, I'm guessing the more economy air mail or normal air mail for packages will open up right after Christmas. I'm pretty sure that USPS is like, yeah, we're not going to do normal small packets. If people want to send packages, you're going to have to pay a premium. And I'm guessing that that will all change right after Christmas time. I don't think that that's going to happen next month, but if you want to — you could join our Daimyo group. And we have — I have openings once again after so long. I've also had suspended those.

25:19 John Daub: Thanks everybody for joining me in this live stream from Tokyo Station. Kind of fun to look around here. Check it out and as always, send me a message. Say hi. Always happy to hear from you. Bye. From Tokyo Station and the post office. Arigato Japan Post. Oh, look at the autumn colors at the end. We're so close. Wow, it's beautiful. Hey, Pavan. Hi from India.