00:00 John Daub: I just lost my umbrella. It's okay, it's okay. We want to forget the typhoons. I don't know why you Westerners want to remember them.

01:21 John Daub: You want to forget the typhoons. It's fine. Actually the winds are not that strong. It's just basically like a spring afternoon. But the typhoon winds, you have to check the weather forecast. It can be quite dangerous depending on the typhoon. Not all typhoons are created equal. Here's a rain map and this is what it looks like right now. It's more like a tropical depression with a lot of wind. That's Tokyo where all of the storm is coming in. See the red on the right side? That's going through Chiba. The weather forecast has shown that eastern Chiba is really going to get nailed with it. But Tokyo is not too bad. It's not something that you want to be in if you're traveling.

02:07 John Daub: It's cooler. My hat's on there pretty good and if it does, that's fine. This hat does not smell the way it did when I bought it. So it'd be fine if it went flying into another area. Maybe it'll come back smelling better. The wind has picked up quite a bit here. This is what it looks like from the sky. The satellite imagery from the Japan Meteorological Agency shows that it's pretty much a direct hit into Tokyo. But again, not all typhoons are created equal. This is more like a tropical depression. It's just going to be passing and go right past us. Tomorrow we're going to have really sunny weather. It's going to be beautiful. And Sunday for our bus trip, we're going to have really good weather for us.

03:08 John Daub: For me, you can see the Tokyo Skytree just barely on my ear. This ear. I'll show it to you in a second. Typhoon season usually lasts between the beginning. I would say it can hit in May as early as that. But probably around July, August, September, October. Those four months, you get quite impactful typhoons that hit. When you get into November, that's on the fringe. And we've had really big typhoons in the first 10 days of November. And we've had typhoons all the way up to December historically. And we've had typhoons as early as April. They can happen almost any time of the year.

03:47 John Daub: Brandy, who's on a plane. Let's see if we can see the sky. Oh, an umbrella here. The Skytree is just engulfed in clouds and storm. That might be kind of neat to be up there right now.

04:23 John Daub: Local, I'm about a minute walk from my house. The thing is, though, I'm a little bit disappointed because today was the day that there's a brick oven pizza guy in the neighborhood. Ow, and he just canceled. I found out about it. Check it out. He puts a brick oven pizza in a truck. You see that there? So we can play it. And they cook pizza inside of that truck. And there's a chimney where the smoke comes out. It smells so good. He canceled today. And he only comes like once or twice a month here. So what a disappointment.

05:07 John Daub: There's also the tacos guy who's on CNN. He's a Japanese guy who does authentic Mexican tacos. Used to live in Mexico. I believe that he's still going on tonight. But the food truck life is... It's kind of fun. Here it is. Check it out. This is Uncle Ken. Google search him. Uncle Ken Japanese... Japan brick oven pizza truck, I guess. I don't know what you search. But he's inside of a truck. He's making brick oven pizzas. This is the coolest thing ever. And he canceled because of a little typhoon. Pizza Romana. Oh, this is so good. Little sardine action going on there. Oh. It's really good.

05:58 John Daub: This umbrella has seen better days. But what's more crazy is like the shell of the umbrella right here. I think maybe I can repair it if I go home. I might be able to repair it. What do you guys think? It's kind of dangerous the way it is though. You know what was fun? What was not fun but really nice? Did you see the lady when we started the live stream? Actually, she has a raincoat like me, but she wanted to give me her umbrella. She saw it happen. The whole thing just disintegrated. A little bit of wind. It's like a little bit of a storm. The wind gets into it and these cheap umbrellas just boom. It's beyond repair.

06:47 John Daub: I don't know what we'll need for lunch. I'm going to have to cook at home. Chicken again. But yeah, this is just part of Tokyo now. Here's what the scale of it from the Japan Meteorological Association. It pretty much started just a few days ago. And then it comes up. Luckily, it didn't hit Okinawa. They've been getting nailed with typhoons over the last couple of months. So this is good for them, I guess. But it's not great for Tokyo. But you know what? It's rain. So I can't complain. Let's fill up the reservoirs. Get some nice flowers out of this. It's autumn coming. Get some nice dead trees out of this. This is the wrong time of year. But yeah, you know, it's always good to have extra water. Clean the streets off. You know, there was an incident in Kyoto.

07:37 John Daub: Michael Sassano, Umbrella Fun. Thank you for that. The Umbrella Fun. This can go into a museum. It looks like it's been through a battle. The wind is picked up quite a bit. It's always interesting to see the sky as well. It's moving quite quickly. But you can see, if you track this storm, it's going to rake the east side of Japan, go up towards Sendai, and then back out to sea. Of course, it could alter. The tide is going to be a little bit more gentle. People took one look at Mount Fuji and go, uh-uh. And it just went away from Shizuoka and started to go up towards Tohoku. And it's going to hit all the areas. And I think this is just going to be like a weak tropical storm like it is right now. It's not too, too bad.

08:34 John Daub: You can see here's a closer image. It did make landfall. You can see right there, it made landfall like right before Fuji-san. And it saw Fuji and it's like, uh-uh. And then it curved right. Uh-uh. And then it started curving north, which is kind of funny. And the path of it will lead up towards Sendai. And that is Fukushima, Utsunomiya, and Miyagi will go up there. And then eventually to Morioka and then out to sea. Maybe hit Nemuro. My friends up there, be safe. I think this is going to be a little bit of wind and a lot of rain. All right. Fuji deflected it. It did.

09:24 John Daub: You know, Mount Daisen in Tottori Prefecture, they say that they get less typhoons because the Mount Daisen deflects. Is that the space boat? What is that boat coming? Dude, that guy's really crazy. Imagine seeing space boat coming through here. I can't even keep the gimbal straight. Elta's cat writes in Umbrella Fun. Greenwich, Ohio. Oh, ha! Thanks for the umbrella fun. That's funny. Hey. Afternoon with you today. I had another plan besides ruining my umbrella here that's hilarious.

10:14 John Daub: I had other plans for a live stream today, but that got cancelled, of course. It's just dependent on the weather. I interviewed Kevin Reilly down at Osaka. FaceTime can't be quite, liquid has been detected in the microphone. I'm going to try to seek some shelter. I'm going to go down this way because this is the supermarket. Ready? I got the umbrella skin here. It's not that strong. Look at the trees. Okay, maybe it looks worse than it really is. It's not that bad. It's like when Rocky was getting pounded by Clubber Lang. It sounds pretty bad.

11:51 John Daub: Is there water in the mic? It says that there's water in the iPhone, so I don't know. Anyways, that's the situation for today. That's today's weather. It's not glamorous. It's somewhat nasty. You can see her umbrella's in much better shape than mine, but it's sometimes fun to see somebody's umbrella blow away because the winds swirl. I'd hate to see that. This is Chuo Ohashi. This is a nice area. I always say come and buy a bento or get a bento. Get a food truck and sit out by the river and enjoy it there.

12:46 John Daub: I told you all on September 1st, the humidity really starts to die down. It was a little bit humid on September 1st. I don't know what it is. It's Mother Nature. 25 years of living here, once September hits, you start to feel the humidity take a really sharp nosedive. You can sense it around October 26th, August 26th, but the humidity was fine yesterday, like really normal. It's not that bad. It's normal. It's starting to go down and today, it's not even hot. It feels like autumn. It smells like Halloween. I think it's my hat. I gotta wash this thing.

13:24 John Daub: We did hear about Burning Man here in Japan just a little bit. It made the news. It's kind of crazy. Gotta keep your eye on the weather report. Yeah. This Sunday, we have 17 viewers, and I want to say thank you to each and every one of you who signed up for the Only in Japan first bus trip. So we got more than half full, which is incredible with Leo, Kanae and myself and Ide-san and Hayashi-san. I think we're gonna have almost a full bus, but it's gonna be really interesting. And you guys are coming with me on a bus tour to Niigata. I'm putting my money where my mouth is. I always tell everybody go out to the countryside. Now I'm gonna start to help to do that. And I think this is the first step.

14:14 John Daub: Brandy's flying in from Hawaii. So I'm really excited to see Brandy again. And Diana is coming from Singapore. And there's people who are coming from other parts of the world to be a part of the first one. We've got Happi Coats. I've got only a few left. I think Satrio and Matsumi and a couple others might have already taken dibs. Michael might have one for you as well. We only could make 30 of them because they said that if we needed more, it would take two months. And we didn't have that kind of time. So we could only make 30 in the color that we wanted because the other ones are like nuclear orange. I wasn't up for that. So we took blue. And even so, it's still kind of like a light blue.

14:58 John Daub: So you're coming and we'll see if we can do a Shinkansen run. And I want to show you, do an episode about the luggage space on the Shinkansen. And then maybe an ekiben on Sunday morning. And then the bus trip. I want to show you all the bus. So I'm going to do the live streams as they happen. So we'll have a ton of live streams on Sunday, Monday. And bring you with us on the bus tour as much as possible. Because if it's successful and it's something people are interested in, I want to do more of it. It would be fun to be a guide. I like what Kevin Reilly is doing with Osaka. But I think it's kind of fun if you're in a bus too with a lot of other people that have all connected with the show. And then we all go out to dinner and stuff and we all can go to the sites. I think that's just kind of fun.

15:46 John Daub: John Lopez writes in here, I like how fast is the Shinkansen. It is quite fast. Tomorrow's Shinkansen will go pretty speedily to Niigata, to Nagaoka as we're getting off. It's going to be almost as fast as the typhoon winds up here. It kind of comes in gusts, like bands will hit. When is the bus trip happening? On Sunday, Monday. So just a few days from now. Today's Friday. So two days from now we started. If you are watching, I made a Vimeo video that I shared on the Discord server. I pinned it at the top of the general chat, I think. Or an email message went out to everybody and you have access to that video as well. And it tells you the meeting spot in Tokyo Station as well as the ultimate meeting spot in Nagaoka, which is 10:05 AM at Nagaoka Station. Don't be late. You missed the bus. You have to take a taxi to catch up with the bus. Throw rocks at our window and we'll stop for you. Or something like that. The hare and the rabbit. I was going to say the turtle and the hare. That's a story. We're going to be like the turtle. We're going to go really slow if anybody misses it.

16:54 John Daub: We might do another bus tour, James. I don't know. This is the first one. It's a learning experience and I'll talk a little bit about it, what we learned on the Tuesday. After the bus tour. Because we're going to come back on Monday and then on Tuesday we'll do a live stream to talk about what we learned about the bus tour, some of the challenges and possibly times and things that we'll do another one with in the future. It's really cool. I want to try to get more attention to the countryside and off the beaten path and this is a different way to do it. So I don't think it's going to be next month though. Carry on bag traveling.

17:38 John Daub: Traveler, sir. Had a customer today who had a burning man veteran. He said it was intense but very burning man. I don't know. Well, let's just say the burning man was not like this, thankfully, because it is a typhoon and that would have brought high winds and swirling flames. Just the other day, if you all remember, I was talking about, by the way, there was some copyrighted material that I didn't know about and the last live stream did not get many views or suggested. You might want to check it out because it is a very historical live stream that I took you to. Yo, I can't remember the name of it. Yo, yo, and Ryounkaku in Asakusa and Ryounkaku was the biggest building in Tokyo until the 1923 earthquake. It was 12 stories high, not that tall, but it was back then had the first electric elevator. It was an elevator in Japan. Crazy. And it was a date spot where everybody went. Asakusa, which is known for the cultural and the historical center of Tokyo back in 1923 and before was the advanced high tech part of Tokyo. That's crazy, right?

19:11 John Daub: So imagine it's just everything was flipped on its tail after that great Kanto earthquake and that live stream I took you to where the Ryounkaku tower was and you can still see a lot of the history around there. It was an amazing looking structure very historic made out of brick, had a wooden frame. They reinforced it with steel after an earthquake in 1923, but it's still burned down and kind of was leaning after the 1923 earthquake. Interesting history changes the way you see Asakusa if you go to stay there. You can take a look at it. It's near the Don Quixote. So it's only like a couple hundred meters away so it might be something interesting to go and check out.

19:48 John Daub: There's a Natural Lawson's here. I did not know that. Interesting. What's different? I think they just sell vegetables and they have a better sign. I went in there before I thought it was a normal Lawson's. I've been in here before. There's a guy from I think it was Sri Lanka in there and he's really nice but he's not there now. Yeah. I like how they bring in workers from India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal now. It's kind of neat to see a little bit of diversity in Japan. Not that they have a choice.

20:28 John Daub: Alright everybody I'm gonna take you one more time to the river just to show you what the typhoon is like. This is typhoon number 13. It's coming in pretty strong. Actually that's the wrong way to look at it. It's coming in more like a just a rainstorm. It's not too bad but if you're in a typhoon it's not always that bad. It's not always great to be outside. That's why you need to pay attention to the weather and I know that this is a very docile one. Just a little bit of wind. It's a Skytree engulfed in clouds. The tree was constructed to withstand hurricanes. The worst hurricane winds for a hundred years they said. That's what they said. It's crazy. As well as a typhoon and an earthquake at the same time of magnitude like nine or something. It could withstand which is you know right underneath there that's quite a structure.

21:55 John Daub: Alright everybody yeah it's not too windy in the buildings here that's sort of the great things with Tokyo you know buildings will knock it down so you don't feel it but when you go out to the bridges do hold on your hat and your umbrella which is now toast guys thanks for the umbrella fund I will have to buy a new one it's clean off the skeleton it's the the shell and that's how we started the live stream so make sure you watch the playback that's crazy I'm gonna go to the supermarket there's the food truck today and then head back home a lot of editing going on here a lot of stuff behind the scenes take care I'll see you another live stream probably tomorrow hopefully with sunny skies and that might even be the story sunny skies see everybody.