00:00:01 John Daub: Hello everybody, welcome to Tokyo. This is the Hato Bus. They do a lot of day trips and half-day trips, and some of my Patreon supporters and viewers have been asking for a long time. There goes one right there—that's the open bus tour. Let's go run down there and take a look. I've been asked what are some of the tours and what are the most popular ones. I actually have that information—we're going to go through that in about two or three minutes. There goes one of the Hato Bus guides.

00:00:38 John Daub: There's several platforms—this is number five. Gives you an idea what they're doing. Wow, look at this. So let me just show you the open bus one here—this is kind of cool. This is the one I think you're going to see Kanae, Leo, and I take this bus tour maybe in the next few weeks. I've been dying to take the Hato Bus because during the pandemic they were off limits. They were using these buses for shuttling people to vaccination sites, which was good because the city kept them in business. We wouldn't want to lose the bus tour companies.

00:01:21 John Daub: This is the Tokyo City Tour with the Panoramic Drive—about 2000 yen a person, and it will take you around the city. Nice day—it's so awesome to sit up there. You can see the roof is open—maybe not so nice on a rainy day, but today is perfect. They do have some pamphlets in English, and we're going to look at that right now. So it looks pretty much just like an open bus—a double-decker bus you might find in the UK or something. Very cool—and it's crowded too. They have their own cafe here. On the menu: cafe latte, matcha latte, German hot dog, cheese German hot dog, melon soda—no alcohol, which is probably a good thing.

00:02:34 John Daub: All right, I got the brochures—they gave it to me in English. Let's go through and see what exactly these day trips and half-day trips are that they have. Hato Bus pretty much owns this entire side of Tokyo Station—this is where I am right now. You can see on the map—I'm leaving from yesterday's live stream in Roppongi and taking it out of Tokyo Station just down there. I'm actually in between the buildings, right there on the side where the train tracks are on the right. We're going to pivot around the Marunouchi side of Tokyo Station, and then you'll see me right down there. You can tell because you see these Google Maps 3D images of buses, and you can see the yellow one looks like it was in an accident—don't think it rendered quite the way Google wanted it to. Here's my bike, and here is the information. So I went inside and asked about it.

00:03:43 John Daub: What's really cool is they actually have this Fuji-san tozan course—Fuji tozan (Mt. Fuji climbing), which means mountain climbing. That's the kanji for it up there, and they actually will take you on a two-day, one-night trip where you get to climb Mount Fuji, leaving from Shinjuku. Let's look back at this information first—go over the stuff that's in English. This is the brochure they gave me—they have it in English for those available. They change this up—I guess this is the July to November one, so it just came out. They'll change it up again in the fall.

00:04:27 John Daub: These are the three most popular tours—I know that because they wrote "top three most popular tours." City Rama Tokyo morning—this is a half-day tour, 5600 yen, that includes tax and everything—per person. If you've got kids from 6 to 11, it's 3630 yen, and if they're younger than 6, they don't require a seat—I believe they're free, but if they need a seat, there's often a small charge, which is respectable. There comes a bus right over me. This one leaves Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays—half-day trip around the city, leaves from here at 8:30 a.m., and you get back at 11:00 in the exact same spot. You visit Shinjuku skyscrapers—whoa, that would be so cool. If it's an open bus, that would be so cool because then you're going across through Shinjuku with all of these tall buildings around you. I'd be down for trying this—I think the last one I show you might be more popular.

00:05:48 John Daub: Meiji Shrine, the National Stadium—this is where the Olympics were held. The Imperial Palace, which is not too far away from here. I guess it comes back and goes to Asakusa and the Nakamise-dori (shopping street). Then Kabukiza Theater drive-by, and then Ginza drive-through. You can always walk over there—from here, it's only about 10 minutes to walk from Ginza to the side of Tokyo Station and then back. It's with English-speaking tour guide—that is pretty amazing. No meals, and that's a pretty good price. So that's one that I could see myself doing, but there's a full-day trip and this one has a meal, so the price is higher—13,000 yen. It says "full day" on the top in yellow. There's little pictures of what the food looks like—I'm getting an idea. Tokyo Tower.

00:06:44 John Daub: Let's look at the itinerary again—this also leaves Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday. And this one goes to, besides the last one, Tokyo Tower main observation deck, Rainbow Bridge, excuse me, drive over Odaiba, and then the Toyosu fish market—which is what used to be Tsukiji fish market. But all the fish stuff is now over there, and then Hamarikyu Gardens—you get 50 minutes there. They kind of lay it out: 30 minutes at Meiji Shrine, 30 minutes at the Imperial Palace, and 50 minutes to shop and walk around Asakusa. This is great—if you have only one day and you want to see a lot of stuff, it's better than riding the subway, and you get lunch included, which is also vegetarian if you ask. English-speaking guide, and you need at least one person. The lunch is chicken or vegetable tomato pasta, which sounds pretty boring. It's a bus tour that just let out right next to my bike—you're going to get the service, a lady in a really nice Hato uniform with a cute hat. It's going to show you a lot of respect.

00:08:01 John Daub: So then we have here the Tokyo half-day tour—6000 yen. You see the child price there. This one is on Monday, Wednesday, Friday morning and afternoon—so twice a day on these days, English-speaking guides. I'm guessing it's the same person. And it leaves from Shinjuku, not from here, but that Shinjuku bus will also make a stop here. This is fascinating because I live here—it's not something that I would know a lot about. It'll take you to the Imperial Palace, the National Diet Building, Tokyo Tower main observatory with the guide going with you—by the way—the Asakusa and Nakamise-dori shopping street, and Kabukiza drive-by. Unless you have a camera, then you're back by 12:40. And the afternoon one is to 6 p.m. So you can get this from either Shinjuku or here at Tokyo Station—that's pretty cool. 6000 yen—what is that, like $46, $45? Not bad.

00:09:01 John Daub: Now in the back they have one more trip—this is the one I think I might do with Kanae and Leo in the next couple of weeks. This is the Panorama Tokyo Drive, and you see the open bus on the top—2000 yen for adults, kids with seats under 6 or 600 yen. I probably get that for Leo—I think he would want his own seat. I don't think Kanae or I want him on our lap anymore at age two and a half. And it departs like every 30 minutes—that's really cool. So the panorama tour—is it just an hour? Yeah, it's pretty quick. There's two buses that do it—they leave every 30 minutes and come back an hour later, and it's actually quite a lot of stuff: Akihabara, National Diet Building to that, Omotesando Hills, Tokyo Tower, Rainbow Bridge—that is cool with the open-top car. Rainbow Bridge with the open bus would be cool. Odaiba, Toyosu, Kachidoki-bashi—that's I've shown you guys on the tour—Tsukiji Market, Kabukiza Theater which is renovated but still pretty cool, looks old, and Ginza drive-by. This is not a hop-on hop-off tour—you're literally on the bus going for an hour just driving around, and that's kind of cool because you got the air coming up, especially if we could sit up on the top. Yeah, there's a guide system in all these languages that you can listen to, which is cool, and the departure spots are both at Shinjuku and Tokyo Station—so they do this from both spots. That is really cool.

00:10:52 John Daub: The last thing is something that I've seen some other YouTubers doing recently, especially ones that don't have a lot of time—this is the Mount Fuji tour that they do at 16,000 yen. This isn't the climbing one though—this is the Mount Fuji one, and this has an English guide. It has a kaiseki lunch included—16,000 yen is like a hundred and twenty dollars or something, maybe even less. This one will take you to Shinjuku East—leaves from Shinjuku East and Tokyo Station first. You stop there, then you go to the Fujisan 5th Station, which is at elevation—I think that's like 2300 meters up or something. You get to have lunch at one of the resorts—I think I've been here, pretty good lunch. Oishi Park, which has a shrine that's really nice to see with the view of Mount Fuji—I think that's in Fujinomiya, right? And then you're back in Shinjuku at 6:20 p.m.—about 10 hours that trip. That's really fast—you get Mount Fuji, you can feel it, you're on the base of it. Then you get a nice view of it from Fujinomiya and come back—could be wrong there. And there's the lunch—so this is a pretty cool trip if you just want to go and see Mount Fuji. I think Randy did this—my friend Randy Santel, he's a competitive eater. So those are probably, according to what they said, the most popular bus tours that they have.

00:12:25 John Daub: I'm going to show you there's a schedule right there—so you're going to walk over to that schedule. But first I want to show you this, and if you have any questions, you can write it into the chat here because this is a live stream. If you're watching the playback, you can open up the chat and see what other people are saying. This information came out July 9th—so it's pretty recent. But this is the climb Mount Fuji, and it departs from Shinjuku—not from here. And what it is, it's two days one night, and the one night is climbing—you can see with the guide, but it's all in Japanese. So I think this is really important, and I don't think it's a big deal—I bet you the guide speaks a little bit of English. I don't think it's a big deal that it's not an English-speaking guide—who knows, the guide might speak a little bit of English, right? They take you up from the fifth station up to the summit, which is 3776 meters up. The fifth station is 2300 meters—oh, it's much higher than I thought, so you actually don't have to climb as far as I thought you did. And here's the shrine down—I think it in. Oh yes, see, this is the one with the waterfall—this is a beautiful shrine. Kanae and I did drive by here during the pandemic—I don't know if we were allowed to, but we did that. Anyways, they said don't leave the prefecture—we didn't know that. You get this—they have a reservation for you at a hut, and this is important.

00:14:01 John Daub: Because if you are climbing Mount Fuji, people do something called bullet climbing, and I highly recommend you don't do that because I did that my first time—massive headache, felt really bad for the next three days trying to get over it. This schedule gives you the dates that they actually have this on and the price associated with it due to peak periods. So if you're going on a weekend, for example, it's going to be 32,000 yen—like 250 dollars, which is a really darn good price for everything that's included: transportation, the hut to stay in, guide, and probably cool group of people. On the blue days, which is mostly weekdays, it's 30,000 yen—like $200. The yellow days are even cheaper—these are special days at the end of August, 26,000 yen, like a hundred and eighty dollars. And then yeah, it looks like it goes into September just a bit. So these are the climbing schedules for this and the prices associated with it. Do you have to book these in advance? Yes, you can try to book when you get here and say I want to take a trip in a week from now and see if they have availability—and if they don't, you can just try to do it yourself. But it's worth trying because having a guide and people to climb with is a lot more fun—unless you're a sportsman and you do want to bullet climb. But you also want to make sure you don't get sick and take responsibility for yourself.

00:15:34 John Daub: And I want to tell you guys, Mount Fuji is cold even in August when it's 100 degrees in Tokyo—up on Mount Fuji has snow on the top, which is a little bit crazy. So you need to get a jacket—you can get that at Montbell, which is within walking distance from here, or Uniqlo usually has some winter stuff up on the fifth floor—I believe they still stock some of it in Ginza, which is their superstore, the biggest Uniqlo in the world. They call it, but you're going to want to bring a backpack—there's a checklist of stuff here. So if you do sign up, maybe the guide will go over some of the stuff that you need in English, and you should be prepared. I highly recommend hiking boots—sneakers, I don't know, you're putting a lot of pressure on your feet—they could rip or break, and then you're trapped up there. You want a raincoat because up on Mount Fuji it could rain at any time—it's good to have a hat as well, and you can't really have an umbrella, so you're going to get wet. So make sure you have a poncho or raincoat and rain pants and hiking boots that are waterproof—I think you're going to be glad I told you that. The toilets cost 200 to 300 yen by the way, because they got to bring that stuff down—so some take credit cards, but try to bring cash, a bunch of coins. Yeah, and then I think you have a really good time.

00:16:58 John Daub: So if you're—the thing with the website is they didn't do a great job with it. Let me see—it's a hot dog place, and this is not a sponsored commercial or anything. But I think this is information that my viewers want—there's a QR code. If you're watching on your TV, you can scan this here. No, you can try scanning this on your TV and maybe it'll take you to it—anyways, I think it's kind of an option for people who've been asking me, "John, where's the best place to take a day trip?" I said just take the Hato Bus—it's simple, and I don't want to see them go out of business because they've been doing this for a very long time. They're smooth operators—they know what they're doing, and I haven't heard of anybody that had a bad experience taking them, which is actually kind of interesting. Let's go—let me take you to the actual schedule. The website—I didn't like it that much. Another reason why I just came here in person.

00:18:39 John Daub: So they start the tours—this is the Mount Fuji one that leaves at platform number five. So the yellow is the platform, and you can see very clearly the platform number right there, number five. You can see the morning city tour—tours start from here 8:30 in the morning, platform five, and then it goes down here. They have, you know, for Japanese without the English-speaking guides—they got a ton of other tours. This is a Yokohama Bayside tour, story of Yokohama, but it's in Japanese, leaves at 9:40 from platform five. They've got a bunch of other stuff—the Toyosu Shijo Skytree tour, which I think is really cool—that's platform six. Tokyo short trip—that's platform three. So they have a bunch of options—they go from 7:30 in the morning to 6:50 at night, and you have to be here 10 minutes in advance. And I believe they have Wi-Fi on board—yeah, you can get tickets in here as well if you don't want to get them online.

00:20:05 John Daub: I'm a purveyor of information. All right, now for the next couple of minutes, I will take your questions—shoot, and don't ask me something not relevant to the Hato Bus like what color socks I'm wearing—none, I'm wearing Birkenstocks. Some tours don't have English—that's true, the five that I showed you do, and that's kind of like 70% of the trips.

00:21:01 John Daub: Can you book tickets at their hotel? Depends on your hotel—I don't know. All right, here comes a bus—Lily's tourists. I should do that—Jerry Seinfeld pretend and Kramer pretend like you're getting mugged. The German tourists saw Kramer mugging Jerry—that freaked them out, like oh, there's a real New York mugging—remember that episode? We should do that here. Welcome back—you have an hour where Kramer's like stick 'em up and Jerry puts up his hands and they pretend like he's getting mugged. Then the tourists at the end of the episode discover Kramer and they all attack him—so it's a classic, this would be the best place to do that. I have one day in my trip that needs to be filled and that one-day Fuji trip is perfect—keep in mind that you probably won't see Mount Fuji in the summer unless you actually go there, and even then there's a high probability that you won't see it—just keep that in mind. The best times to go to see Mount Fuji is in the winter when the skies are clear, no humidity, and it's got the snow peaks—so this one-day trip is really good in particular from like November to early March, skies are clear—of course not when it's raining.

00:22:35 John Daub: Is there any equivalent of this from Osaka? Most likely, I would believe so—I think. The Kansai though is very well connected. The great thing about Tokyo is that everything—this is the main hub. Osaka is kind of spread out—you got Nara, Osaka, Kyoto, Himeji—so either one of those places make a pretty good hub or base. I would not pick Kyoto—it's just too crowded. I would pick Osaka to be honest, or find somewhere in between. Can you guess I'm not a fan? I'm not a huge fan of Kyoto. Hato Bus owns a hotel that can book the tickets and will shuttle you to where you want to catch it—yeah, I believe so. They own their Hato Bus, and Hato means pigeon—just so you know. So you'll see pigeons which look like doves—or can a Hato be a dove? I don't know—a pigeon is a kind of dove. For a long time I thought the pigeons were the males and the doves were the females, and the pigeons and doves would, you know, and then they'd hatch and half were pigeons and half were doves—I guess I was wrong.

00:23:53 John Daub: Thanks for the questions everybody—you can leave them in the comments below. I'm going to try to do more live streams to help you with information, to give you an insight into it that's not on the website. I think there's value in coming to the location, getting to know what it looks like, seeing the platforms. And if you go across the street in the area, there's a bunch of restaurants in the Shin-Marunouchi Building right inside there—the higher you go, where the green trees are, they're actually really nice, very fancy restaurants where you can spend about $40 a person. And then in the one next door, if you go there, you have a Kua'aina burger, which is Hawaiian cheeseburgers. And then the internet—this is the post office where I'm going next. And then across the street, here's a waiting room. The dove is also a Hato—a lot of people go across the street. Oh, there's one of those hydrogen fuel cell buses—so that French cafe in the red right there, bakery stuff. Come on, you darn hydrogen bus—you're blocking the view. Don't tase me, bro—it's a double block, I'm double blocked. Dinkin' bus. All right, there you go—so right there, there's a red one called Viron, it's a French cafe. The windows are open, tables outside—you can sit there and drink a coffee, but it gets crowded at certain times, so sometimes you have to wait 30 minutes for a table. But they've got amazing mille-feuilles and croissants and coffee—it's basically the same as France, I don't see any difference—although I'm probably sure people in France might disagree.

00:26:02 John Daub: All right, there you go, everybody—Tokyo Station's right there, Marunouchi side, and I am out of here. You can also get an umbrella at a convenience store here—wait a second, let's pop ourselves. Oh, they got an omiyage shop—so you can get snacks for the bus, umbrellas if you need them, even rain gear inside there. All right, so they got you covered one way or another. That's it—this is another reason why you need to stream on location—you need someone who's on the inside working for you, and that would be me.

00:26:37 John Daub: Just to shout out this, everybody—we are 30% full, we need some more sign-ups. If you're going to be in Japan on September 9th, 10th, and 11th, I believe, please consider signing up for our bus tour from Nagaoka to Katakai. We have tickets, hotel, two meals—maybe three, I don't know—a hoppy. So you remember the trip and where it's at the festival, and you could book this tour really soon—Nightbot just shared the link. It's ideya.jp/en/katakai. Once again, that's ideya.jp/en for English/katakai—K-A-T-A-K-A-I. And you can get the information to sign up, and we will send you the information because we will not accept money until we are at least half full. The deadline for this is, by the way, like August 12th—so you have about three weeks left to sign up, but first come, first served. When it's full, it's full—if it's booked, it's booked. And if we can't sell half, then we're going to have to cancel it—but I don't want to do that, so please sign up. It's going to be a lot of fun—might do some karaoke on the bus or not if that's not what people want. All right, everybody—thanks for the questions, leave them in the comments below. See you in a live stream tomorrow.