00:00:09 John Daub: Wow. You can see the sun just starting to come up on the horizon. That's the seaside of Okayama over there. This is Bizen, famous for its swords. And I'm John. This is an Only in Japan walkthrough of a small town here. I'm here to do a live stream on Facebook in a couple of hours. I don't know why Facebook hasn't asked me, but I'm working with J&T O to introduce a sword museum, which is going to be really exciting. It's the Bizen Osafune Sword Museum.

00:00:41 John Daub: I'm going to give a look inside and talk about the sword making process, which is what this town is famous for. But first, I thought we would take a look around this town a little bit before I get a chance to go out to the museum. It's still kind of dark, but you can see over there the leaves have changed color. And Okayama is a little bit later than Tokyo and some of the other areas. I know Kyushu doesn't start to change until December. So that's kind of a good thing for me because I kind of missed the fall colors this year.

00:01:12 John Daub: This is the water will come up to here. It's now low tide. But I noticed that a lot of the buildings are raised off the seaside. You see that? That's the hotel we were staying at behind the Tomato Bank, which is a part of the Okayama City Tomato Bank. I'll talk about that in a second. But our hotel's on stilts. So in case there was a tsunami or something and the water level rose, I noticed that there's a lot of buildings that have that. Here's the post office. So I'm just gonna take a little walk around here, give you an idea of what it's like.

00:01:42 John Daub: This is connected with the Ako Line, which is not a line that I would take very often. It's a rural line from Okayama City. It kind of wraps around Okayama. This area very famous as being part of the Seto region. Very good lemons, for example. A lot of sunshine in this area. Really easy to live. But this town looks like a lot of towns in Japan. Again, this is the main post office here. It just kind of looks a little old, rough around the edges. Things are rusted. I love that.

00:02:13 John Daub: This is an electronics store. And there's the supermarket, the Max Value, which I guess opens up at 9am. But it was actually open until like 10pm, which is quite late for small towns in Japan. It's a railroad town. You can see that right here. Wow. I guess this is where the old station used to be and they moved it. So I'm walking actually to go get a coffee at that convenience store up here. So you guys want to join me for that? There's not a lot of people out here. You can see the Lawson's over there. There's, I think, one convenience store in this town.

00:03:30 John Daub: I put a map link in the description and also a link to the Facebook page where I'm going to be doing the live stream in a couple of hours. Oh wow, I want to go out and take a look at the seaside over here but it's really hard to get to the sea. I don't know if I'm going to be able to do it. First I think we need a coffee now. The air has gotten drier with fall settling in. Hey everybody, I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. I went to bed at 10:30 and I woke up around five-ish, couldn't get to sleep. Maybe because of the football games going on in the U.S. I don't know. But I put work over pleasure and missed that game. Thank goodness it did not turn out well for my Buckeyes.

00:04:36 John Daub: Wow, I love the color of the sun. I think we can go down to the sea really quickly now. If we get a chance I want to show you the manhole covers here. It is absolutely spectacular for manhole enthusiasts like us—well, me. It's an image of sword smithing because Bizen is a sword producing region of Japan. Just a little bit about this region. I had to memorize a lot of facts and information about that. There's three kinds of katana, the main ones. There's a tanto which is a lot smaller and a wakizashi which is a waist sword. But the tachi is the long sword and then there's the katana or uchigatana which is the normal katana, the bigger one that was in the sash. That's for hand-to-hand battle. And then there's the wakizashi, which was the companion to the katana.

00:05:49 John Daub: All that stuff I'm gonna have to introduce to you at the museum in a couple of hours. But you can appreciate—look at this—what a beautiful sunrise. Thanks Jim. Hey hello i21. Thank you. A really peaceful slice of the Japanese countryside here. This is Okayama.

00:06:03 John Daub: You can hear some of the factories I've already started. This I think this is a bakery. Is this one of the Wonder Bread bakeries? I'm not sure. It looks like a bread truck to me. Maybe it's the colors. Or that's a supermarket there. It is a little chilly but it's not as cold as you'd think it would be for November. Maybe it's because I'm in Okayama. All right let's go hit that Lawson's right now. You'll see in the Japanese countryside—do you see there on the side of the mountain? Those cement fortifications are to stop landslides, which there are a lot of hills in this area.

00:07:11 John Daub: You see that hill there and there are a lot of landslides after a lot of torrential rain or typhoons, for example. We see them especially recently in the Hiroshima-Okayama area. So it's nice to see that this town looks safe with the fortifications there. WRX Turbo is in the house. These manhole covers are lacking. I will show you a better one in the live stream I'm going to do. An Only in Japan Go live stream after the museum. But I encourage you to watch that because there's another YouTuber that's going to be in there with me who's reporting from Niigata at the exact same time and that's pretty exciting.

00:08:12 John Daub: All right I've got five minutes to get this coffee and get back. Heavy traffic—are they gonna be okay with me live streaming in here? I guess so. All right let me get my 200 yen out for the coffee. Hot coffee please. Oh wow, English. All right so we got a coffee coming in here inbound. Oh look at that hot brew. I kind of want a mega coffee actually. Mega—I've never seen a mega coffee before.

00:10:05 John Daub: All right okay we're out of here. That was pretty good. I kind of want to—I'm curious now about this mega coffee. What is a mega coffee? It must be really big. This is a large in Japan. All right so you have to give Lawson's credit. They one-up 7-Eleven—they have a mega coffee. That wasn't a choice. I asked her the big one. They always ask you what size coffee. I always think that there's one size of coffee in Japan but no, there's like four now and we're having some mega coffee. How cool is that? Oh well it's not cool at all—it's really hot, which is brilliant.

00:11:29 John Daub: All right we're just a couple of minutes away from the hotel. Yeah again this is just a small town. I thought it would take you through here. A lot of local businesses. You could see I love the characteristics of these local businesses. I love this one—I like her products, these incidents I love them. This is just a small town. Look at this alley here. Well it just gives you an idea. Again this is all the drainage that goes underneath here. They have cement blocks on the road so it's easy to pull up and clean out the drains. Usually it was a canal and they covered them over. And a lot of the older towns are now bringing back those canals and just beautifying them. But I guess they put that over there because it's just not practical anymore.

00:12:12 John Daub: I found a really delicious looking confection shop over on the corner here but they closed too early. It was just closing up shop. They had some nice looking cakes in here. And whenever I go to a local town and I find a bakery I'm like a fly to honey. My metaphors are not good at six in the morning. Yeah it is a cute little street. It's a seaside town so every now and then you'll have a sea gull but it's not quite the sounds of the seaside that I would think. Again as the sun comes up and it rained really hard yesterday so I'm glad that we've got some sunny skies. It looks like the autumn foliage is just in peak right now in Okayama area.

00:13:13 John Daub: And that's gonna bode well for me as I finish up this live stream. I'm gonna have a little bit of time possibly to do another live stream after the sword museum. Again those are joining us—I'm gonna be doing a sword museum live stream in a couple of hours on Facebook for J&T O. And then I'll do an Only in Japan Go one. And then I'm also going to see what I can find on the way back home to Tokyo because Kanae and Leo are waiting for me. I love these—like I don't know what you call them—like popcorn hills. They're like all over. They just kind of pop up out of the mountain. And if you go to Mie and Okayama you got a ton of these popcorn hills. I don't know what else you call them—like mounds. I guess it's volcanic influence. I'm not sure. But here we are back at the hotel, smack in the middle of the town. Ohayou gozaimasu.

00:14:17 John Daub: And there you go—an enjoyable very light stream. I bucked the peso rule. I'll see you in a couple of hours at the sword museum. The vending machine choices are pretty light so I'm glad that I hit that Lawson's. If you can't find a convenience store you can always go for a hot coffee at a vending machine but it's just not the same as a freshly brewed lovely smelling cup of joe from Lawson's. Thank you hello hi A21 for that. I'll be enjoying it for the next I don't know five minutes.

00:15:09 John Daub: All right everybody have a good day, have a good night. I'll see you again in a couple of hours on Facebook Live. Don't forget to check out our Facebook page and subscribe to our channel. There's actually a quiz in there where you can win a 70 or $80 gift certificate, which is kind of an exciting little tidbit of information for those of you who are watching. You might be able to get that gift certificate. I don't know if there's more than one, but there'll be a quiz. I can't tell you the answer, but I don't think it's that hard. Just pay attention to the stream and you'll have a good chance. I think you have to be on Facebook though to take that quiz. All right. I'll see you in a couple of hours. Bye-bye everyone. Bye from Okayama, Bizen.