00:03 John Daub: Hello everybody, welcome to Hayakawa. This is a small little town in Yamanashi between the hills. I'm surprised we even have cell phone service to do this live stream. Behind me is a UNESCO World Heritage cottage called Kagiya. And this place serves up all sorts of country food. I just had deer meat tomato stew with bread. That was all baked in here, and it was really darn good.

00:33 John Daub: Hello, welcome. Yeah, so in this episode, in fact for the next couple of days, we're going to be here in Yamanashi. I'm filming. There's Leo and Kanae right there, my wife and son. And we're here to film the world's oldest hotel, an episode we'll be putting up by the end of the month. I had a fascinating interview with the 53rd CEO of the company. And the history behind it is extraordinary. I don't think anyone's ever really showed it. Everybody's been to this Guinness Book of World Records hotel, but they don't actually learn about the owners and the history behind it. And that's basically like a snapshot of Japanese history in general. I was just fascinated. I sat down for two hours with the CEO just talking about stuff. And he invited me to come back for certain rituals and other festivals that they have in this area, which I totally am going to be doing.

01:34 John Daub: But today I'm going to be taking you around this little ancient town or village called Hayakawa—Hayakawa, kawa meaning river. This is the Haya River down here. I'm going to take you from here, the spot on the top, down there. There's a nice light breeze. Deer meat was pretty good, but the stew—the tomatoes were all grown here, they told us.

01:47 John Daub: Do you guys want to see? Let me show you here. This is a map of where we are exactly. You can see I've listed a lot of places that I have to go and see over the years. We are in the Japanese Alps nestled between there. This is Hayakawa. There's a river down there, and there's a little village right there. And that blue spot is where we ate lunch. Here's the food that we had. First let me show you the inside. It is a stunning little cafe. There's Kanae and Leo playing at a kotatsu (heated table). Some guests here because it's lunchtime. And here's the stew. Kanae had a white stew with chicken, right Kanae? Broccoli and carrots. And there's a little sesame in there. And mine, here's the deer stew. Some potatoes and carrots in there as well. And there's the homemade bread. Leo had already taken half of mine. That's okay. That's his lunch. It was super good. Very, very healthy.

02:53 John Daub: And they brought—the staff is so good—they brought a little wooden train set for him to play with in this 300-year-old cottage, which is awesome. So that gives you a little bit of an idea of where I am in the village here. There's also a history museum of this town as well, which you can stop into. And actually, all of the people that are eating in here are tourists. They're people who come here to investigate this small village. And they're attracted to—you really feel like you're in a really special place when you're here in a small ancient village like this. There's loads of them all around Japan, but this one is only really accessible by car. Here's the shrine. I'm just shocked that we got a signal.

04:06 John Daub: The hotel I'm staying at is called Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan. It's 1,300 years old, founded in the year 705 AD. And I did a live stream there a couple of weeks ago in the private bath that they had outside. And to make the video, it's important to take a look at the area. You can see it had snowed quite a bit a couple of weeks ago, and now it's all starting to melt, which is kind of a shame. I really wanted to see it with the white snow all around for contrast because I filmed here last month with Joe Hatab, another YouTuber, and we had similar weather. You have to have snow tires on your car because you just never know. You don't want to get stuck. It says here UNESCO Station Kagiya. And here's the sign for it. Sorry, it's a 200-year-old house. And they have tezukuri (homemade) sweets, and what I just showed you. So the menu is not very big, which is a good thing.

05:20 John Daub: Leo, let's go over here. Leo is off. You want me to carry him or he wants to walk? I carried him up. I guess carrying him down is going to be a little bit easier. Or maybe not. Leo, let's go see the deer. The deer is down here. That ate the deer, actually. All right, I got to go down. I'm taking several hundred people down. Right there, this is a good spot to just stop while Kanae catches up. Or should I say Leo catches up? You can see there's the Hayakawa, the river. It is so clean, so pretty. In fact, looks like there's a waterfall over there. Is that a waterfall? That is. That's just beautiful.

06:55 John Daub: Mama, are you okay? I gave her the car keys, too. Let's do a little walkabout real quickly. So I'm going to take you from up here down to the river. Let's see what's down by the river. Leo is at his bedtime, too. Leo-kun! Kanae, I can carry him. Okay. Leo, let's go this way. He just wants to go back and forth between there and the museum. Leo, I'm a dog. Woof, woof, woof!

07:56 John Daub: So let's take a look at the restaurant. Let's just take a look at the menu here. So those pictures are, I think they're smooshed up here. So you get a steak bacon don (rice bowl). That's awesome on rice. There's just soba (buckwheat noodles), and there's some tempura. Prices are pretty reasonable. And here's a teishoku (set meal). A teishoku is a set meal with rice and miso soup. Comes on a platter. It's about $12. That's so cool that they got restaurants up here. You can't drive up here. Only residents can. It's down at the parking lot. It's down by the river.

08:48 John Daub: Where have I heard that before? Down by the river. I think Saturday Night Live really messed that up. Can't even say down by the river anymore. What is that truck doing on the river? There's a truck on the river. It's got water. Countryside, you know. Strange stuff happening down here in the countryside. It's only strange because I don't live here. That's right, JKO Adventures in a van down by the river. Should have rented a van.

09:43 John Daub: Leo and Mom are way down there now. It is so pretty. I'm glad that the signal is holding out as well. Those that are asking, I'm using an iPhone 14 Pro. Tons of problems with the camera and the focus. And a DJI Osmo Mobile 6. I prefer the 4SE or whatever it's called now. But it'll do. And we're using Prism app, which has been really great with the HEVC encoding. So you can do 1080p.

10:37 John Daub: We want to go down to the van by the river. Trucks on the river. The road to get here, by the way—after you get off the highway, you have to go up this winding road. And it is loaded with trucks. Lots of dusty old trucks. So it could be quite a ride here. Look at that. They put here on the corner. Here's Kagiya. Fresh pasta in miso sauce. We should have gotten the pasta. Whoa. Try that for next time. There's the deer stew I had. And the coffee was also quite good. They have their own original blend of coffee.

11:28 John Daub: In this direction, I think, is also the museum. Yeah, Greg, I have microphones, but I don't know. Right now, I didn't. The wind picked up. Can't be helped, man. The ancient village. Actually, there's no daycare. This is just the iPhone. There was no wind when I started. Over here, the river. I just want to show you really quickly the color of this river, the Hayakawa River from up here. You can see it a little bit better unobstructed from this spot. Wow. I hope there's no spiders in here. You can feel the wind up here, too. All right. Sorry about that. Just look at the color. It's just absolutely stunning. It really is like an emerald blue.

13:05 John Daub: Just wanted to show you on the ledge here. Got to be careful. Leo, I saw an excavator. Leo, there's an excavator. I think they're mining diamonds. I don't know. I don't think they're mining. I think they're just digging out the river. I'm not really sure. None of you out there know. What are they doing? A dam. Okay. Looks like it's some work for the dam. Looks like a scene from Bonanza right in Peter. Did you see that blue? Yeah. Leo, do you have a message for Peter? Peter's here. Oh, Peter. Hello, Peter. Leo, say hi to Peter. No comment. He said, hi, Peter. He did. Say, hi, Peter. Hi, Peter. Oh, he said hi, Peter. Oh, my gosh. There you go, Peter.

14:14 John Daub: What is that? Daikon (radish), right? Here, let me ask. What is this? This is dried daikon. It's cold around here, so it's like koya tofu (freeze-dried tofu). It's like a frozen tofu. It's a local dish. Oh, thank you. It looks good. So that is daikon. Yeah, it's a Japanese radish that's been dried, and it gets a really crispy consistency after they've gotten the water out of it. It's really good. Have you ever eaten that before? No, not like the. But I ate takuan (pickled radish). Oh, takuan, yeah. It's a pickled food.

15:30 John Daub: And everybody who's living out here, let me tell you, there's no convenience stores within a 30-minute radius of this place. There's a few vending machines, but there isn't really much here, which makes it, to me, awesome. But to people living here, just a quiet place to reside. And if you are just driving around and you're renting a car from Tokyo, we met two lovely people from Australia at the hotel that had watched Only in Japan, and they came here because they'd seen that I had stayed here. So they knew who I was when I was interviewing the president of the hotel. That was really fun. So shout out to you guys. I hope you have a safe drive back to Tokyo. Thanks for stopping and saying hi.

16:23 John Daub: These walls here are pretty cool. Probably several hundred years old as well. The wall here, probably very old. Sometimes much older than the buildings around. Yeah. It is a beautiful, small, ancient village. You know, like something from Ghibli, right? Totoro is in the woods here. Just got copyright blocked. That's all it takes. You know, there is a pool right here. I don't know. I don't think that's a swimming pool, Kanae, is it? Because I don't think there's a lot of kids here, but that looks like a school, doesn't it right there? It does. It looks like a school. And I haven't seen one kid, so I'm guessing that the population of this town is probably less than 100 for sure. That's a pretty big looking school. Yeah. That's got to be a school that's abandoned, or maybe not abandoned. I'm not sure. People have been finding ways to utilize some of the abandoned schools in some of the areas. It just depends because even abandoned schools, if you do decide to take it on, sometimes you can get the school for free. The problem is, and it's a huge problem, you have to pay for the earthquake proofing. And guess what? That costs about $300,000. So here's your free house. Now, good luck with the renovations. It'll take you two years. It's not so much fun anymore. And then you have to do the upkeep.

18:17 John Daub: I bet you at night there's probably ghosts here. Here's a map of where we went. Kagiya is that green one up here. That's where we had lunch, where I showed you some of the food from there. And now we are where that red space is, genzai (now). So there's a lot of winding roads in this little town. But there are a bunch of these ancient little towns that you can visit. Just get a car and you drive out. And Kanae, what is this? Like, is this like little pillows on the shrine? But why they put these makura? Makura means pillow. Right. Yeah. These pillows are ema (wish plaques). Instead of making them out of wood, they've made them into little pillows. And I guess you can get them from the shrine. That is really—so you write your onegai (request) or your wish on there.

19:52 John Daub: And even, you know, when you see the main channel episode of the World's Oldest Hotel, it's like no other episode that anyone's ever made on this because, you know, I contacted and I'm so thankful to Kawano-san, who's the president of the company, to sit down and run down the history and share some of the old photos. And what and how they became a Guinness Book of World Records. They didn't actually apply for it until 2011 and they got it. But they weren't the ones that applied for the Guinness Book of World Records. Somebody else did on their behalf. And after vetting it, they all of a sudden got this certificate in the mail. It's just such a crazy story because there's another hotel called Hoshi, which is an awesome ryokan (inn) in Ishikawa Prefecture, where Kanazawa is. And they were the first to discover this one, which everybody knew about, but nobody they hadn't put in the claim. So the Guinness Book of World Records switched from...

21:36 John Daub: All right, here's our car for the day. It's a Yaris Cross. I couldn't get the Prius. It's a good car. It's got four-wheel drive and it's good for the snow, but there's actually no snow here. Leo's sleepy. Yeah, it's a pretty good car. I'm gonna fly the drone here after this live stream and get some shots for the main channel episode. It's just interesting. Here, you have to. Let me go and show you the river. I'm gonna show everybody the river and then we'll go back to the hotel. Sorry for the wind, everybody. The wind adds motion to the audio. Look at the bright side.

22:43 John Daub: Look at this wall. I can kind of. There's like a break in the wall here. This is, I guess this is part of Minami Alps (Southern Alps), the southern alps of Japan. There's a city called Southern Alps. This is the police box, which is closed, but I guess we have a little break in the wall. We can kind of carefully. A little babbling stream with some ice down there. All of it's melting because of the warm weather we have now. It's bizarrely warm. Actually, there are monkeys in the area. We saw some driving here a few weeks ago. The river, of course, is down. All that rain is actually snow, but if you go down. I guess there's a little service road or something. Beyond here, there's a trickle of a stream. But the dam has also done a pretty good job. They did a good job of controlling the water. They generated a little bit of power from that.

23:55 John Daub: But you can see this is the road. This is the main road that goes through the village. It's not massive. In fact, there's no cars coming through here like once every couple of minutes. But it's an ancient town that has 4G LTE probably up there. So there's other things that could be possibly. I guess they have flash. There's a possibility of flash flooding and all sorts of things. The dam sort of takes care of that. Here's Yamanashi. Is this the Southern Alps or Yamanashi Prefecture? I can't remember the shape of Yamanashi. It looks like the Southern Alps here. And we're up here on the top. So these are the towns. Okay, I get it. The towns that make up the Southern Alps. And this is Nishiyama. And Nishiyama Onsen, which is the onsen (hot spring) we're staying at. It's part of Keiunkan, the hotel we're at. That's this section of it, which is just basically a valley. It really is just a valley. It looks like this at sunset. Not much here. There's a ton of thermal water. In fact, this is all melting water, I'm pretty sure. But they have onsen water all over the place. There's an onsen here in this town as well. Wherever you go in this area, they have this water coming out.

25:31 John Daub: And again, the hotel that we stayed at, the onsen, the hot spring, is 1300 years old or more. And the story is just really quickly: 1300 years ago, there was a family that saw the water. And they said that we can build a business out of this because travelers are going through here. So he claimed it. I claim this water, this land. And they built a hotel over time. First, it was just a little shack, I guess they were building. People would come in just like 1300 years ago. We're traveling on foot from one place to another. And they would cut through this area. They would come and rest at the hot spring. Pay a little bit of money. And then continue on their way. Then he started to put a place where people could stay. And then he sold food. And then it became a ryokan. So the story, the evolution of the hotel is just fascinating. How a business started 1300 years ago. It's the second oldest business. The oldest one is called Kongo Gumi, which builds temples. Of course, there's no shortage of temples over the last 1500 years. Think about it. Wrap your head around that. How do they keep a business going for. How do they keep the purpose? I mean, usually things from 1500 years ago don't even exist today. But they still build temples. It's awesome, right?

26:55 John Daub: Is there a rock? He threw a rock down there? Dude. That big one? That rock's going to be there for 1500 years. If you come to visit, there's Leo's rock in the gutter. No, no. It's dangerous. Don't throw your rocks, Leo. Especially at mom and dad. You can just throw a small one. There you go.

27:23 John Daub: Thanks so much for joining us. This is just a short stream. I wanted to take you around the ancient village of Hayakawa here going up the hill. If you are driving around the area, this is absolutely worth a stop for an hour to walk around, stretch your feet. But more than that, have some lunch. Try that curry or stew up there. It's really good. The hospitality is excellent. And you can feel that, I don't know, like that ancient mountain spirit from Hayakawa. It's like a thousand years ago is continuing on today. There's actually a tree. I don't know if a tree is an attraction for you, but for me, a tree is an attraction. There's a 1300-year-old tree that dates back to the start of this hotel that we're going to go and see tomorrow. So maybe I'll live stream a tree. Raise your hand if you'd like me to live stream a tree. I know you do. So let me know. I'll see you tomorrow. Or maybe later today. If we can find something to eat. If we can find something at the hotel that's worth streaming because I'll be filming for the main channel. Hello, Hayato. I just heard of Toby. I think we'll be safe. See you guys.