00:01 John Daub: Hello everybody, welcome to the kitchen inside of a yakisoba restaurant in Hiruzen, Okayama, part of the Daisen-Oki National Park. They're going to be making right here—that is the soba, you can see the noodles. Yakisoba is one of my favorite Japanese cuisine dishes, teppanyaki—teppan being this really hot plate that they cook upon here. And joining me in this live stream is Dean Newcomb.

00:27 Dean Newcomb: Hello everyone, I feel like you work here since you're in the kitchen.

00:31 John Daub: Yeah that's right, I'm in the kitchen. We're going to watch them make this, this is our lunch, and then afterwards of course they're going to bring it out to the table and we'll get a chance to eat it.

00:45 John Daub: Oh, hai. This is pork, right?

00:52 Staff: Yes.

00:53 John Daub: What about the chopstick?

00:54 Staff: Oh, chicken.

00:55 John Daub: Chicken. Is chicken okay?

00:58 Staff: Oh, anything is fine.

01:10 John Daub: So, what meat is that?

01:13 Staff: No.

01:14 Dean Newcomb: I just took a picture.

01:15 John Daub: Oh, right, that's what I thought, yeah. There's chicken and then the other one was... This is chicken. This is horumon (offal).

01:22 Dean Newcomb: Oh, horumon. Is it chicken and horumon?

01:24 John Daub: No, no, I think it's for a different customer. Oh, it's for a different customer, okay. That's what I was a little bit confused about. Hormon is the innards, the guts, which is actually really good. Now they fry up the cabbage with the noodles there. Here comes the yakisoba sauce. Oh, they just dumped it on there, look at that. This is the sauce.

01:47 Staff: He mixed your sauce in. This is called the sauce.

01:52 John Daub: Sauce? Oh, the sauce, yeah. And we've also ordered on top of it these eggs. These are the eggs. See right there, they're making eggs which are going to go on top of the yakisoba, which is really part of the...

02:14 Staff: If it's too strong, it'll burn.

02:16 John Daub: Oh, I see. What a pile of noodles though. This is awesome.

02:22 Dean Newcomb: That looks like a lot of food.

02:24 John Daub: That is volume. That is a lot of yakisoba. Ah, Hiruzen yakisoba.

02:33 Staff: I put in a lot of daikon (Japanese radish).

02:43 John Daub: Well, you make a lot of them every day, don't you?

02:45 Staff: Yes.

02:47 John Daub: Every day they're making a lot, serving. I'd say, how many customers do you have every day?

02:55 Staff: A few.

02:57 John Daub: A few? Oh, you make a lot of them every day.

03:04 Staff: Natsu wa isogashii (summer is busy).

03:06 John Daub: It's very busy in the summer, not so busy in the winter, which is why we can come back in the kitchen—if they're really busy it would be impossible. We had to come a little bit after the lunch rush, but it is so worth it. Finally, this is our order. So that's ours right there that they're making. This smell is indescribable.

03:29 Staff: We can try it.

03:30 John Daub: What do you smell here, Dean?

03:33 Dean Newcomb: I actually smell something sweet from the sauce.

03:36 John Daub: Can you get that? Can you get the sweetness? I guess that's why it's hard because there's a little bit of everything. I smell saltiness and I smell sweetness. I think it's the beni shoga (pickled red ginger) as well. There's the cabbage that's grilling up there, the noodles, the meat. It's just so many different amazing flavors. I can only describe it as one thing, yakisoba. This is a food that's very popular at festivals as well.

04:03 John Daub: Is this enough cabbage? Is this enough cabbage?

04:17 Staff: She put all of that cabbage in there.

04:20 John Daub: That's amazing. She put so much cabbage in there. That's enough cabbage. She says, do you want...

04:27 Dean Newcomb: I thought you were saying that with the mouth.

04:29 John Daub: Do you want extra? Why not? Oi means a lot. I want extra. You want a lot, baby. Please. That's awesome.

04:37 Staff: Is this enough?

04:42 John Daub: Because it's a big dish. Yeah, that's cabbage is also in there. And moyashi (bean sprouts). Sometimes you'll see that in yakisoba which is also quite good grilled. Moyashi is such a cheap vegetable. It's like 19 yen for a pack which is what? 15 cents. And it goes with everything. It takes the taste of the sauce but it adds some fiber and some vitamins in there.

05:12 John Daub: Let's get up close and personal. It's basically noodles pan fried with cabbage. I guess we could say it except that you can choose the meat, sometimes pork, sometimes chicken, sometimes horumon which are the innards that have a different consistency to it. But each... Different regions of Japan have different variations of it and this is the Hiruzen variation. Hiruzen is a place in between Tottori and Okayama prefecture. This is Okayama prefecture and they have some amazing food out here in the countryside.

05:46 Staff: It's almost done. Oh, it's done.

05:49 John Daub: What's special about Hiruzen yakisoba? What's different?

05:58 Staff: It's a little thick, right? The noodles are thick.

06:06 John Daub: And the taste of the sauce is... It has miso in it. Miso, soy sauce, sake, and a lot of other things. Oh, so they got miso in the sauce.

06:17 Staff: First, we'll cook the miso and the sake.

06:20 John Daub: She can't tell there's more than that otherwise... The rest is a secret. And then there's a... There's secret spices and things in there, I'm sure. Oh my gosh, that's a lot of soba. I ordered... And I ordered that size, I think.

06:37 Dean Newcomb: You got the regular size, right?

06:39 Staff: Yes.

06:40 John Daub: It's sort of a secret sauce. Oh, this is so amazing. Thanks guys for joining us in this live stream. Ah, beni shoga. Beni, here we go. Wow! What a portion. Thank you, because it's a lot. I ordered a big size. Yeah, the beni shoga is the icing on the cake. It is the icing on the cake. The ingredient that's almost like a secret ingredient, it just adds in so much flavor. It explodes with all the other ones. The shoga hits the other side of the tongue, the palate. Oh gosh, it's so delicious. I can't tell you, my mouth is watering. And then there's the egg on top right there. Do you see that? Oh my gosh, that's so awesome.

07:50 Dean Newcomb: Look at it steaming on the counter. Was that ours too?

07:54 John Daub: That's not ours. Oh, nice try. You got your eyes on someone else's dish. Oh, that wasn't somebody, this is ours. This apparently is a two and a half portion. Oh, two and a half, because I got the larger size. Here comes the ginger. Here comes the ginger loaded up. I asked for extra of everything. Oh my gosh, that is oi. Thank you. Oh my gosh, I'm so excited. The smell is heavenly.

09:14 Staff: Once you add the egg.

09:15 John Daub: This is here. Oh, it's out now? No, wait, it's not out yet, it's back in there. We are supposed to wait until you add the eggs. So you are going to start frying it? Alright, here it is. Okay, here it is. Thank you. It looks great, right?

09:29 Dean Newcomb: Yes, it does. I love the colour.

09:30 John Daub: It's really pink and yellow. Yellow, pink, green, brown, there are so many different colours. It's beautiful, doesn't it? It looks like the sun. Look at it. It's so beautiful. That's what I'm talking about!

10:17 John Daub: Let's start cooking! Is this a big omori (large serving)? Yes it is! It's a big size omori! You smell it right? This is the omori. I'm going to put it in a box. Thank you! Wow! Here you go! Thank you! Wow! Look at that! Do you see this? This is amazing! I'm so excited! I can smell them cooking this from the car park. The moment we arrived and opened the door. Right from the parking lot! We pulled in here and you could smell it! It's hard to describe isn't it? I'll put a link in the description to this restaurant for Google Maps so you guys can take a look at it. This shop is called...

11:27 John Daub: Can you tell me the name of this shop? Please tell me the name! What is the name of this shop?

11:37 Staff: Yamana Shokudo!

11:39 John Daub: Yamana Shokudo! Show me the card! This is Yamana Shokudo. There's a QR code so you can screenshot that right there. That's the exterior of it! That's awesome! Thank you!

11:52 Dean Newcomb: John, did you know that they're all a family?

11:55 John Daub: Are they all family?

11:57 Staff: Yes they are! That's my son.

12:01 John Daub: That's your son! This is my daughter.

12:04 Staff: Daughter! Son and daughter! This is the left side. Oh the left side! And then the rest are the people who work here. Yes! They work here. Sometimes.

12:23 John Daub: How many years ago did you start this restaurant?

12:25 Staff: 16 or 17 years ago.

12:27 John Daub: Oh 17 years! In Heisei 16...

12:32 Staff: I came here in Heisei 10. About 4 years?

12:37 John Daub: I see. Why did you want to make yakisoba at that time?

12:44 Staff: Well... The reason is... When I got married... I came here to get married. And then... I started farming. I started thinking about when I was 60. Until you were 60. When I was 60... You became 60 years old. I couldn't farm. You can't work in the farm when you're that old. I thought about what I could do to change it. What can we do? I was thinking about it. Yakisoba! So I started a soba and meat restaurant. Wonderful! Yeah! So the meat and yakisoba restaurant.

13:41 John Daub: And you can see they have horumon and chicken. So I started with yakisoba and soba. At first they made a yakisoba and meat restaurant. And then it changed. Yakisoba. When I started... The people here were the main customers. Yes. They were the main customers. So... That's how I started. But then when people started coming. They took away the soba. And now it's a yakisoba restaurant. Yeah... The yakisoba would be more... By popular demand. The yakisoba wins over the soba. So they just focused on yakisoba. That's a great story! It's very popular now. This restaurant. Thanks to you. Yeah. It's amazing. The restaurant is all Hiruzen. The eggs and everything. All local ingredients. Family run business. I love it. I love it. Thank you very much.

14:51 Staff: Thank you.

15:01 John Daub: Do you want to try it? Because it's small.

15:05 Dean Newcomb: Sure. May I?

15:08 Staff: Please.

15:11 John Daub: Which do want to try first? You as well. Would you like to try first?

15:40 Dean Newcomb: I'm going to try the ginger.

15:40 Staff: I don't think it's a flavor that suits you guys.

15:48 Dean Newcomb: It does! It's good!

15:52 John Daub: I've lived in Japan for a long time. Oh really? Not everybody might like this flavor but to me, we love it. The ginger is really good. We had a little bit of ginger at first but that's not a complaint. The meat is good, the sauce is really good. The noodles are not too soft or too hard. A little bit firm. The noodles are very chewy. We made them in-house. The noodles are not too soft or too hard. It's just right in the middle which I love. If it's too soft, it's not good. But the sauce is really good.

16:39 John Daub: She was worried that you wouldn't be able to eat this or enjoy this as a foreigner. But I think this is a really easy thing for foreigners to try.

16:46 Staff: But you can also make it into miso.

16:49 John Daub: Miso. You know? For foreigners, I think it's a sauce with salt and pepper. Miso! You got it? I feel like I can taste that.

17:06 Staff: Please give it a try. And then I'll come back later.

17:11 John Daub: Thank you so much! I'll be waiting for you. Thank you.

17:15 John Daub: So she's leaving to give us time to eat. That's really nice. And she wants us to make sure we eat it when it's hot. Which makes a lot of sense. The sauce has miso in it but I think when you have a lot of ginger my first reaction wasn't miso it was ginger. I just got it on my second bite. The first time you get it on the second but if you eat the ginger yeah it's pretty strong the ginger. You get more sometimes more sometimes less is better but I can love beni shoga which is the pink ginger I love egg right I love everything what can I say I'm really hungry.

17:52 John Daub: But you can see though like when it comes to Japanese cuisine it's so varied it's so much more than just sushi. You have wagyu steak of course but it's more than that you have teppanyaki and that's more than just grilled beef you could have noodles on it teppanyaki being that big grill fry pan that they had on there. And you know you'll see this at festivals you'll see it at places. I love it at festivals but when you see it in a kitchen setting and that is the main thing and the restaurant just focuses on yakisoba they hit that sweet spot it's just so darn good.

18:30 Dean Newcomb: Isn't it oh my gosh can you believe I have years I think I can't even remember the last time even I live here oh really so like you say it's something you would like a go-to food at a festival or you know it's there's so many Japanese food right that yeah somehow it's not been in my life for so long but welcome back noodles.

18:54 John Daub: It's so simple and so delicious and uh this would be like I don't know if this this can be considered a meal if you have a lot of it but a lot of people some people might consider it a snack. It just depends you can get this almost instant as well there's different varieties but when you have it fresh it's like having ramen you have instant ramen and then you have ramen from a restaurant and that ramen for the restaurant is so good if they specialize in ramen. Festival portion would be much smaller wouldn't it but this is definitely a meal right oh gosh that's a Japanese portions are small I wouldn't say that that's small that's a meal and that's a monster meal I consider this to be a meal yeah yeah I consider this to be a meal.

19:34 John Daub: So this way we can put this down and then we can talk a little bit about yeah bring this chair out over here you guys can see us and hopefully hear us this this has a little bit of here we go we can pull that up and you can see us a little bit better here we share some lunch together. For me Japanese cuisine is so so much more than sushi and stuff. I think it can be really intimidating to try a restaurant like this if you can't speak Japanese right but if you know from Google Maps or Google reviews and other food sites what the cuisine is and you know the menu in advance you know what to order this is pretty easy it's just yakisoba and the toppings and the other things that you can add in there are customizable and that's what makes it fun.

20:34 John Daub: You can have beef you can have chicken you can have ginger you can have no egg you can uh there's a menu of different toppings that you can add they've done a pretty good job of making the menu pretty easy to read even if you don't understand the language right you've got the little diagrams this is the most famous one this chicken dish but you can also have it with the beef pork or the intestine of the beef or the pork and then over here you can choose to have egg you go that way sugar or if it's us we pick everything and we say give me a combination of all of this.

21:10 Dean Newcomb: So I actually don't read Japanese but I get by okay people are very friendly and welcoming and that's most important.

21:30 John Daub: One of the great things with getting off the tourist beaten path is that people are friendly and they're so happy to see you most people just take your time and be patient and you're going to have an incredible experience and I know a lot of you that have written to me and told me about your experiences visiting Japan of the kindness of strangers especially outside of the cities like Tokyo tourist centers people are fascinated when they see people from abroad. Eventually you do learn a little bit more Japanese when you come out to places like this you don't have to know it but it you do pick it up when you are immersed in it and if you just have a smile and a good vibe around you it's amazing how many doors and ventures open up as a result of it like when I hitchhiked I hitchhiked across Japan which is a fantastic experience. And Dean's got a ton of stories like that as well.

22:23 John Daub: To tell us a little bit about your experience here in the Daisen-Oki National Park what's it been like and this is not your first time right.

22:36 Dean Newcomb: It's not it's I think it's my third fourth maybe even fifth time to Daisen and looking at the park and every time that we've been here we've had a very different experience somewhere yeah we've been before and Daisen-Oki where it's been focused more on the shrine and Shintoism and things like that and uh we really want to go out to the Oki Islands next don't we.

23:01 John Daub: See I made him talk so I could eat I didn't give you a very long window though did I. No he's been stuck for like two minutes yeah it's the Daisen-Oki National Park you can visit in all seasons that we're obviously here in the winter and uh we can try snowshoeing and they have ski and snowboard resorts here obviously spring is lovely because of all of the sakura blooms uh summer is fantastic because it's so hot everywhere else and when you come to Hiruzen it's a bit higher altitude so you can come and cool down and see lots of green uh you can rent a bike and cycle around here.

23:45 John Daub: All right let me see some of the questions that you might have here um Kate writes in here when I visited Japan so many Japanese people approached me simply because they wanted to practice their English that's interesting that happens yeah yeah even Japanese to them that happens all the time.

24:09 Dean Newcomb: At the hotel we were speaking Japanese at the check-in at the hotel and this lady was so insisting on speaking English to us it was almost uncomfortable.

24:23 John Daub: Yeah but yeah it happens all the time you'll go up to people and speak to them in Japanese and they'll say I'm sorry I don't understand English you know it's just a default if they see your face they almost expect that it has to be English coming out of your mouth so it's you would say thank you to everything that we said no matter what um yeah we'd like to check in thank you anyway you know can I get you could you please do this paper thank you like it was so polite English but it get a little bit too much after a couple of minutes of that and you're like oh it was cute at first and then it was like let's just go back to Japanese now.

25:02 Dean Newcomb: But then she went back to English which um sometimes we will then start when we can't have we'll start to get more complicated with our English and maybe pick up the speed a little bit to natural and then she'll revert back to Japanese.

25:21 John Daub: Which is a something if you want to speak Japanese then start speaking English really fast and then use complicated vocabulary and then we'll go back to Japanese that's how I get around it because sometimes it can be hard to learn Japanese if you're not finding people who want to speak English yeah that's right.

25:41 John Daub: What else have we got going on it's Jesus day out there is it our last day it is not our last day is it no we have tomorrow and we have two live streams planned for tomorrow um out in the snow so today is food again and then tomorrow we're doing um a forest healing hiking tour I've never done anything like that your forest therapy is what it's called and we're going to give it a try with snowshoes and walking across there and we're going to try to live stream from a little town with all the snow in the middle of nowhere Japan um in Hiruzen which is beautiful and then we're going to do a live stream in a small town and a very interesting topic on Japan's effort to try to get people to move from the cities out to the countryside it's something that hit the news recently where the cities are paying residents to move out what a crazy concept.

26:36 John Daub: It's a crazy concept and we're going to talk about that in a small town that we could possibly live in tomorrow and then I go to the city of Tokyo and then I fly back to Tokyo which is another topic that I could talk about when is appropriate to fly and when is it appropriate to take a shinkansen and there are advantages to shinkansen versus flying um at the JR Rail Pass and that's something that I might discuss tomorrow in a third live stream I'm not sure but first we have yakisoba yakisoba to eat.

27:04 John Daub: Thanks so much for watching everybody um again I'll put a link in the description of this video you can check this place out yourself but I highly recommend that you go to the link in the description and get off of the beaten path and take a look at some of the more regional areas around Japan it doesn't have to be in particular this spot but one of the reasons I'm live streaming here is to introduce to you new places that other people aren't really introducing to you I think and this is an opportunity for us not just to do it live and to see some of the things that you're writing again I love the live streams because I can't see your comments I can't get the feedback afterwards but also because like I want you to have a very Japanese experience adventure and you can't do that if you're just doing what all the other tourists are doing.

27:45 John Daub: You have to come to a place like this to feel the hospitality of the residents of the people in each regional area and as I said in another live stream every single area of Japan has its own regionality its own culture its own dialect its own food right it's just such a unique thing. I made a little map here you can see the map here you can see the map of the area you can take a look at where exactly we are right now you can see Tokyo's on the right side where that heart is there's Nagoya and then we're here between Okayama and Tottori in the center just to the east of Daisen-Oki National Park and then we're at restaurant Yamana which is on this road which as you can see there's just fields around right there's just fields around the restaurant so this is kind of I guess you could say the middle of a farm field we are right now yeah yeah definitely the countryside here yeah sometimes you forget that you're like pretty much in a national park.

28:49 John Daub: That was quite loud this is this is them cooking before a video of it I'll just if you want to see this go back to the beginning of the video and you can go and check that out sorry if you were having headphones in there I didn't think it was going to play.

29:04 Dean Newcomb: But Dean any last comments well if you visit Japan definitely think about yakisoba and yeah if you can get off the beaten track then Daisen-Oki National Park and uh Hiruzen definitely a place to come and see no matter the season.

29:24 John Daub: Well said waiting for you here well said and uh thank you to the ladies back there thank you very much it was delicious I'm still eating though the live stream is over. I'm so happy to see all the foreigners watching please write in where you're watching from and I can read out to her yeah I can read out to her from America, Europe, Africa and other countries yeah welcome yeah that's what they say when you enter in here thank you everybody we'll see you in the next live stream.

30:05 Staff: She's like she's like you better finish that plate yeah bye everybody.