00:00:00 John Daub: Hello everybody, welcome to Daisen-Oki National Park. This is Hiruzen and we are here to talk about a unique experience that kind of scared the crap out of me. But I feel pretty relaxed. This is Dean Newcomb joining me from Runaway and we've been here now for four? Yes, fourth day. Fourth day here in the snow and we tried a new activity that we'd never tried before called forest therapy. What do you know about this?

00:00:45 Dean Newcomb: Actually, I didn't know so much but obviously hearing forest therapy I had a different idea from actually what we got. So expect some, oh here comes something interesting, expect some excitement. It was almost bordering on extreme sports at times. So yeah, half therapy and half a lot of fun.

00:01:30 John Daub: I think that the therapy comes from just forgetting everything else. That's to come in a second. I think you forget everything else in your life, everything else in the world. You just focus outside and you just focus on what's around you. And the guide that we had was really, really good, really friendly and open. It was a lot of fun, yeah. And it's just a beautiful area, isn't it? Especially right now it's got all the snow on the ground. It can. It's actually kind of cold out here. It was about minus four, wasn't it, when we were driving over here?

00:02:15 Dean Newcomb: Minus four. The roads were icy. We had to switch to another car. Anyways, without further ado, there was no signal up there so we took this video. We wanted to share with you. Our experience of forest therapy in Hiruzen. We'll put a link in the description a little bit later if you're interested in this. First, here's a map. Let me just show you where we are. There's Tokyo there. If you come in, Hiruzen is in Okayama Prefecture. There's Kyoto and Osaka. If you just go up towards the Sea of Japan side, there's Mount Daisen. Hiruzen is a plateau just on the base of it, on the bottom side of it. And you can see the river going through it. This is just such a beautiful area to be in, don't you think?

00:03:00 John Daub: Absolutely. Yeah. And this is, we're just outside of Hiruzen in a place called Shinjō. Shinjō! It's a very beautiful village, which we'll see later. And for now, we're enjoying the rural part of Shinjō. After this livestream, we're going to do another one. We're talking about moving out to the countryside from the city. It's going to be a very interesting discussion. You're not going to want to miss that. But let's get into it. This is our experience. There's the... This is our experience with forest therapy. Enjoy. We'll be talking in the background, if you can hear us. In the big truck. Off we go. In the big truck. Here we go. Yeah, this is... Just looking out the window for me was really amazing. I think you see all the snow and the beautiful landscape. There's no city around here, right?

00:04:00 Dean Newcomb: Not at all. In the states, no. And look how well the roads are maintained, even in the snowy road out here. It's the sun, right?

00:04:45 John Daub: Right. Snowshoes! I think I haven't done this for 15 years. It's the river. It's the water. It's the water. It's the water. It's the water. It's the water. Yeah, you had really thick boots on so they had to get special snow shoes. There's me with my snow shoes. Let's go, let's go. Let's go. The team that we met at the woodworking place. So we had some familiar faces join us. Motoi-san, yeah. Motoi-san and his family from the woodworking live stream we did just three days ago. And he brought his kids along, which made it a lot more fun, didn't it? Thank you, Suzie. Yeah, there's Motoi-san's daughter there. Oh, it's photo. Is it photo? Yeah. I want to take a picture. I think when they were saying forest therapy, maybe that's not today. I think it's like work for fun.

00:06:00 Dean Newcomb: Yeah, I thought it was going to be really serene, right? Very quiet walking in the trees. It's hard to understand. Yeah, there's a lot of foot involved. What does forest therapy mean, right? An adrenaline sport. This is better than morning coffee.

00:06:45 John Daub: Yeah, so there's a lot of stress now, right? And the guy that started this, he wanted a way for people to be able to release their stress by just being out in this natural environment. And getting the snow, all the snow that's been going on in the mountains, it's starting to get better. And doing the kid again, right? This is what we were doing. Relieve stress. That's what it's all about. This is a flag race. Oh, no! So kids do this in Japanese schools. It's a classic game of catch the flag. And you have to start laying down on your butt. And then when the whistle goes, you jump up onto your feet and you run and catch the flag as fast as possible. And this is a world first. Apparently we're involved in some sort of race for snacks. Alright, I'm leaving the bag here. Alright, it's on. Go! I got it! I got it! I got something. Where did you get that power, Dean?

00:08:30 Dean Newcomb: What? You really wanted that prize. I don't know what it is, but it looks big.

00:09:15 John Daub: Yeah, black thunder. We gotta go this down here. Very steep. First we're gonna call a band. Wait, what? Yeah. Let me join you. Sun. Hunt! Yeah! Yeah! Oh, you can hear the echo, yeah! Come on, bear! What did you say? Oh, yahoo is Japanese yahoo, kind of meaning yahoo, yahoo. Look through the valley. If it echoes back enough times, turns into a どういたしまして. Oh, really?

00:10:30 Dean Newcomb: Yeah, I guess I could. Thank you. Thank you. Doesn't sound the same. Ah! You got applause. No, really? Really? You're gonna... What? This is crazy. Look how... Look how steep this is. This cannot be... 本当？Wait, what? That is really steep. I can't do that. It's fun. Bum slide down? Bum sliding, yeah. That was too steep. Okay. You have to bum slide. There was a crack invasion going on. Ready? 帆掛け山。帆掛け山。帆掛け山。Yeah? Yeah. It's all melted and go... Ready? Here we go. Are you going reverse? Yes. 滑ったところをお尻で。寒い。

00:12:00 John Daub: I might break. All this snow went up the jacket, down my pants, into the crevices. I wasn't prepared. I got a cold bum. I'm sorry I'm going to take a nap. That's okay. This is what a dog does to wipe himself. Dean, you going up for more? Dean's on the... How do you feel?

00:13:00 Dean Newcomb: Good. It's pretty scary. It's a lot harder. Without the snowshoes, right? You don't realize how much they're working for you until you don't have them. I did a smaller one. 3, 2, 1. Go!

00:14:00 John Daub: Am I on fire? You managed to hit the only tree. Only two little trees there. How was it? That's pretty fast. I won again. Wait. What? Is that over? I feel very relaxed. Forest therapy. Mission complete. Nice. I had to carry you all home. That's so relaxing. You look at peace, Dean.

00:15:30 Dean Newcomb: Alright. So there you go. I feel... During that whole session, I had a lot of stuff on my mind. Like, you know, I had to edit the video and things to do here before we leave today. I forgot all about that.

00:16:15 John Daub: Good. I guess that's what it's all about. Yeah, so it worked, didn't it? That's the therapy, right? It's just our image of what the therapy was going to be was a little bit different. Yeah. Sometimes just being a kid again and having a lot of fun is the best way to relax, right? I didn't understand it at first. Like, what are we doing here? Yeah, but I think when you go into something like this, you have to have an open mind. And you have to have a lot of fun. You have to... I think when you arrive in Japan, you have to open up. Yeah, you have to have open mind when you arrive in Japan. But the idea is to just clear your head. And for a lot of us, I think we forget to do that sometimes. We take everything with us, like luggage. And coming out to a place like this, doing something like that, that you just saw, it's mentally refreshingly delicious for the brain. You have to think about that. Now, there's more to this, though. We have signal in this area because the server is right there. How do we say that? The... Yeah. It's right there, literally, for Docomo. So we're going to... He asked if we wanted to do mochi, right? Do you want to show the bikes?

00:18:30 Dean Newcomb: Yeah, while we walk over there, I want to show you one more thing that we did here. Shall we show you? So yesterday, we did something called fat bike... Exactly. It's fat bike therapy. Fat bike therapy. It's another way to enjoy snow, you know? This is something that I think it's better to do in the summer, right? But we did it in the winter. They have a whole cycling course all around Hiruzen. So if you're on road bikes, you can go a 30-kilometer route all the way around the town or the city. So it's nice. But yeah, fat bikes work too, don't they? Even if it snows, you can still get out on the bike. It's good to try different things. This is certainly something new. Do you remember the name of the CEO?

00:20:00 John Daub: No. He was a character. I really liked him. Here he is right here. And this is his company. He's been doing this for a few years now, I think. But he had quite a lot of bicycles. And he brought out these fat bikes. I'd never ridden anything like this before. Look how big it is. It's almost like a motorcycle. And there's Dean's bike over there. It's the same. Yeah, yeah. All right, let's go. You know, here I am trying it with the 360 camera. You get some pretty unique angles with this. It's just a different experience, isn't it? To be on a different site. This bike is not as orthodox as I would expect. It's a very modern bike. And what about this one? This one, too, is just a bit wet. Let's just move it to the other side. See how wet it is? Look at the paint on that bike. This is just such a joke. No one's going to like you. You're in Tokyo. I'm in Tokyo, and Tokyo's so cell-free. So you can just ride your bike anywhere. You've got a little bit of a different atmosphere there. Now, this is one of my favorite places. This one looks like a very popular place. then he's like let's go down let's go down a hill i'm like what so then we went down all of these fat bikes again it's really challenging i don't want to fall well nobody wants to fall but you know sometimes that you do you do yeah and i wasn't happy i actually had the this is the drone tracking us so i tried to hit the drone and i don't think the drone liked it here we are this is sort of the i think we're going a little bit slower than normal because of the drone but you can get an idea of what it's like uh just to fat fat biking is easier in the snow than the thin wheel bikes i think but we had to let out the tire air in order to get better traction and that made it a little bit tougher yeah right i think you can't grasp quite how hard it is to ride on the snow even with the fat bikes right i mean it doesn't look like the snow is deep here right even the smallest amount of snow is very very difficult to ride on because the back wheel

00:27:23 John Daub: [End of Transcript]