00:01 John Daub: Hello everybody, welcome to the middle of Niigata. We are here. This is where they are harvesting Japanese koi, which are carp, but this is their birthplace here in Niigata. And I guess I'm going to be getting in the water too. There's Diana. She's pulling the nets along with the farmer here as we get all the koi to go to one end of the lake or pond. This is more of a simple pond here. And this is the way they've been doing it for hundreds of years, I believe.

00:50 John Daub: That's one of the things that you can do here when you come to the Japanese countryside. It's really cool to be able to try different kinds of things. And I myself am dressed in a rubber suit, which I think is melting due to the extremely high temperatures, so I'm kind of excited to get in here. But I'm not sure how much help I am holding a camera. Can you see the koi? They can escape this way, no? Haven't seen one. Aloha Michael, nice to see you. Over on the other side is Brandania.

01:32 John Daub: She's pulling the nets and she's going to grab some koi to bring back to Hawaii. Can you bring koi to Hawaii, Brandania? No? Maybe no. But I'm not afraid to get wet. I am afraid to fall into the water though. Oh, it's nice and cool in here. Oh, it's cool. Oh, no, no. Be careful. What's this?

02:13 John Daub: So from this net, essentially all of the koi have been rounded up into this one area and then it'll keep shrinking until we end up getting a chance to hold them. And that's what I'm going to end up doing. Apparently, you get to hold the baby koi in your arms. When they need to harvest them to get them and to move them from pond to pond, you can't just tell them like a dog or a cat, you know, open the door or pick them up. You have to get them out of their habitat, which is here and round them up. And then you have to pick them up because you don't want to give them stress. Again, you really want to do it in the most delicate way to reduce the amount of stress on the fish, the koi.

02:58 John Daub: They're actually pretty smart creatures. You can see in their eyes, they're very kind. And I was feeding them from my hand and yeah, they nipped my fingers, but there's no teeth, so it doesn't hurt. Just kind of a shock like what? On the surface, we have water striders, which means that we have quite clean water. You see them? These water striders. You see, Brandania is over there getting the nets around.

03:35 John Daub: The koi are already stressed, right? It's in Yoda Jedi. How do you know? Are you communicating with the koi in a way that we are not? Not sure. Cannot be for sure. Who knows? They could have maybe eaten through the net and gotten the other side just like Jaws. The rest of the group, why aren't you coming in? Jaws is, we got Mexico representing. Oh, trust me, if you fall, you, I will 100% get it. This will be the highlight of the experience.

04:25 John Daub: Underneath my feet, I'm wearing, they don't have my shoe size, so it's very small, so my toes are cramped, really, really cramped. I'm in the middle of the pond. So how deep can I go? So right now I'm about waist deep in the center. Oh, it's mucky underneath there. All that koi duty. What do they eat in here? Eh, koi, what do they eat here? Anything? Anything. But because it's a natural place, do they give food? Food. Food? Yes. Oh, every day? Every day? Every day, actually, they are self-sufficient.

05:20 John Daub: They have a machine. Oh, they have a machine. They have a machine. It's a little broken. Oh, I see. They have a machine that will do it automatically, but it's broken, so they have to do it by hand now, which is just as fine. That's cool. All right. I was curious about that. And they probably eat the bugs, too. That's what I would do. Fresh bugs, good protein.

05:50 John Daub: There's not really good signal here. The upload speed was about 3 megabits per second, so I'm sorry, it's 720p, the quality of this video is not as good as the regular HD. But we're all going to get a chance to wrangle, I guess, is the word. You ready to wrangle? In Mexico, do you do any wrangling? Really? Yeah? Oh, yeah, yeah. But now you're in Colombia, so it's different. But they must have it. They have it in Colombia. I'm sure. Some wrangling. Yes. And Brandania has wrangling skills from Hawaii, all of that wrangling the Pacific waves.

06:33 John Daub: I don't see the koi. They must have some kind of a web. There must be one. You saw one? Yeah. Kyle writes in here, excuse my ignorance, but are koi fish turtles? Koi are not turtles, Kyle. We see you commenting. Thank you, by the way, for watching. It's a good question. Yeah, water striders.

07:07 John Daub: All right, I wanna see you catch one, Diana. Let's see it then. Do it, without falling, or no, with falling. Careful, careful, careful. Nishiki goi (brocade carp) are the name of, I guess they would be technically nishiki goi, which are somewhat different than just regular carp. Oh, you saw one! I saw it too! You got it to come to the surface. So right, very slowly now, they're pulling in the nets as we get closer to wrangling in some of the nishiki goi.

07:43 John Daub: Now, this area produces the majority of the fish. Oh, there it is, they're coming down to the surface. And the water striders are getting all jumbled up as their community gets wrangled in. Look at that. Whoa, what a great. Gonna get you. I got it! Wait, I didn't see the, oh, you got one! You got a water strider. That means you have eternal good health. I don't, I just made that up. You're going, oh, you got a carp. Oh, you just petted a carp! A koi, you just pet, get him!

08:28 John Daub: He's so slippery. And like, you have to do it. Very slippery. Now, they told me, our guide told me before we started to pick it up very gently like I would pick Leo up, but they had no idea that when I pick up Leo, it's sometimes quite playful, so. Oh, they're all in that one area. Okay, let's get out one time. Oh, one, it got out. Was that the one? Is that the only one?

09:05 John Daub: Anyone wanna be a cameraman? Oh, yeah. Whoa, did you see that? It just jumped out! Yeah, basically. You can pan it left and right. You can hold it here or there. It'll, you can mess around with the joystick. Yeah, it should be able to hear me. I didn't know how high can they jump. I didn't know that they jumped. And to the land, that's how they got feet and eventually became lizards.

09:44 John Daub: Oh, there's one, two. So I see two of them here. And there's one. There's another one here, I see. So we have at least three of them. Oh yeah, now you can see. Okay, now they're coming up a little bit closer to the sea, to the coast now. Will they jump on land? Are they gonna jump into our arms? Wow! Yeah, there's one, two, three, four, five. Now you can really see them. The color is coming to the surface, that bright orange and white. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

10:29 John Daub: Oh my God, did you see that? Did you see that? He jumped right out. He went right out of the net. Look at this baby swimming pool. There's nowhere to run. Oh, he, he's slimy. He slimed me. Release, catch and release. I love you, I love you. Don't worry, I'm here. I'd let you go. Oh, look at this ant. I saved your life, ant.

11:14 John Daub: Brandy, get him. Oh, Diana had him. Did you see that? Diana had him. Brandy, get him. Don't panic, don't panic. Who said that? Were you talking to the fish or us? Just slimy. I mean, it's not a scary thing. It's just that the way they move, just suddenly, you know, it's nice and calm. You put your arms around them to cuddle them, and then they just go like this. All right, you got this, Brandy.

12:03 John Daub: Oh, good job. He's coming to me. Come here. There's a lot in here. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. I think that koi really like your Hawaiian vibe. Oh, yeah, she works for the Petco, yeah. Oh, look at this. Oh, wow. Come on, Diana. You gotta get one in your hand. All right, Diana, you catch one and pass it over here. Okay. Wow!

12:48 John Daub: I love just screaming into the mic to destroy your eardrums. I apologize. But I do feel a great sense of excitement from this experience. Oh, he's trying to get out of the net there. Oh, yeah, you got him. Oh, that was a suplex. Did you see that? Yeah, it was a suplex. It's like one of these things, like a matrix move. You have to pick it up. It's not supposed to be easy. That's why we're the selected few.

13:36 John Daub: There's a time limit, too. We didn't tell you. Oh, Brandy, wow. You get to keep what you catch, so good luck with Hawaiian customs and immigration. There more? Oh, yeah. Wow. Can you hold it like a trophy over your head? I feel sorry for the koi rights and animal chatter. Yeah, you know what? I wouldn't feel sorry. They're going to a better place, okay? So, yeah.

14:34 John Daub: There they go. So, they got some water. And this is how they transfer them to new owners, for example, or to other places. Make sure there's water and you do it quickly so there's as little stress as possible. Of course, there's going to be some stress, but this is how they do it. And this is a really amazing process to see here, into really fresh water that's shaded underneath here. Yeah, it's hard to see them in this kind of water, but they love this murky water here.

15:06 John Daub: Get over! Jumped right in from your hands over the net. Brandy almost had them. There's like three or four more in there. Wow, Brandy, you had like five of them. You're gonna win an award. Really nice smelling hands, that's your... Yeah, they're gonna hire you to... You're hired. Wow, he really... Okay, let's take a break. Let's see how the professionals do this here. Although now there's great trust in Brandy, look at this. See if we can get a better angle from the other side.

16:31 John Daub: There are bears here by the way, and just to let you know, this is reversed here, but you can see the bears have plenty of food options on this trip, so morsels of deliciousness here. Thanks to the bus. They're helping the local population of bears with their dinner. There's little Leo. Leo's awake. Leo, ohayo (good morning).

17:05 John Daub: So this area, Ojiya is really a great place for nishiki koi. Yeah, there's Yamakoshi. Yeah, so we're in Yamakoshi. I wish I had a map, but I put a link in the description of this video so you could check out exactly where we are. But those who might know a little bit more of the history of Niigata and this area. In 2004, there was a really big earthquake that happened and I remember it devastated this area all the sake companies they lost about 90-95 percent of their stock all the broken bottles here but more than that lots of landslides happened national highways were blocked off and there's about 2,000 residents in this town and they had to be evacuated by helicopter afterwards because of the earthquake and it's been almost 20 years later you can still see signs of that the landslides on the mountain sides but for the most part it's the community has really come back really vibrantly so it's nice that we could do this bus trip in this area in particular because one of the reasons why I like to come out to the countryside is it's really interesting it's a cool contrast to Tokyo but more than that I think when we do something like this we show the local areas in Japan that you know foreigners aren't like foreign tourism are interested in these experiences but you can't just talk about it you have to go out there and show it.

18:27 John Daub: I got to get mine not mine I got mine all of yours me okay hold this okay okay Diana you get the fish and I'll get you oh that's we get two and one put your hands okay he's over here from the head oh yeah yeah you can feel the muscles you can really feel the muscles. Is there one more? Yeah. Yes, I just felt him. He's in this area. Ah! I'm sorry, I just kicked you, sir. I'm walking. He's over here. OK, I see. From the head. Oh, there's two of them in here. I saw two of them. He's here. Nice and easy. He's under the boat. Hi.

20:23 John Daub: Hello. Hello. I saw your head. Wait, wait, no, I got something to say. I have something to say. There's three of them. Diana, come back. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. He doesn't look happy. Nice and, oh, look, Leo. Hi, baby. No, it's OK, it's OK. Oh, baby. Leo, it's not that easy.

21:12 John Daub: Brandy, you can go help him out. Brandy, how did you do it? OK, positive mental attitude. Come on. Come on. Cradle. That's somewhat cheating, yeah. OK, I got this. I got this. He went back towards you. Went back towards me. I see him. OK, OK. No stress. Little guy, I'm here to help you. I'm taking you to a better place, a bigger pond. You're eating my, oh, there's your friend here. It's confusing. Oh, you've gone under. OK. OK, no, no, no. No, no, no. Yeah, I did, and then he leaves.

22:28 John Daub: There's two more. Where are the other guys? Oh, there's two. I feel two. Three. I'm going to need a bigger boat. This one is really. They're all, there's three in here. Oh, here. I got you. We're going to need. Back in there. You know, the secret is to get them really tired. OK. Get them really tired. This is for you on the other side.

23:33 John Daub: Leo, you do it? Leo do it too? He's taking mom to do it. That's right. Put her in there. Oh. OK, Leo, look at the touch. OK. There you are, fresh. No, I'm good. I'm just, I'm amazed how good you are at this, Brandy. Like a natural, seriously. Leo just want a touch. He's like. OK. Chiku. Chiku. Nice.

24:58 John Daub: Kanae, why don't you try? You had Leo. It's a different kind of fish here. I know. They're really soft. The great thing about koi are that they're very docile creatures. They're very kind. You can actually look into their eyes and you can see they're thinking creatures. They're also quite hungry. They eat a lot of. It's a, which is like a food. And yeah, they grow quite large in these areas.

25:41 John Daub: You can keep them in confined spaces as well, and they'll stay small. They kind of apparently will grow into the shape of it. I've been researching this for just a few days. It's not very long. It's an interesting topic and very much part of Japanese culture. So it's something really good to learn as much about as you can. And particularly, if you're thinking about getting a koi pond, you should learn about how to raise them, the food that they eat, and how to care for them. Because they're not just fish that you would eat. They're part of your family, just like any pet. And it costs quite a lot of money too. So good job. Badani gets a standing O. Congratulations to everybody. Well done.

26:34 John Daub: Before this, we went to the Nishikigoi no Sato, which is kind of a museum where you can take a look at the koi in a pond. Yeah. It's more in an unnatural environment. But I wanted to, I thought it was a good idea to come here, which is their natural environment. And there are lots of breeders. About 90% of them that are in Niigata are in this area. And there's a good reason, because the habitat, the environment for it is just incredible. But this area, this nishikigoi spot is easily accessible by train. So you can go in there and check it out in Ojiya. You can see there's so many of them coming up to say hello. Yeah. Well, this is how you stay cool in the summer.

27:40 John Daub: Aliyah's going to touch. Aliyah, you did it. You touched it. They are quite large, aren't they? I'm going to clean up with some fresh water. Oh, there's three in there. Yeah, there's still three more in there. So how was it? It was so fun. Really? Oh, yeah. It was a lot of fun. I would do this again. Really? Yeah. You mean like as a job? Yeah, probably. Depends. Yeah. If they're paying you. It's fun. Yeah. I would do it just for fun. Really? Yeah. OK. I think they could use the help, actually. Yeah. They're talking about how the population is declining quite a bit here. And more people getting interested in this industry would be really good.

28:34 John Daub: So I'm going to wash up. Oh, this water is warm. All right, so there you go. That's the experience. I'm going to change back into my casual wear. Leo could end up working here, too. But this is what they would call koi harvesting and getting them from one habitat to the other. It's not an easy job. But someone has to do it. And today was partially my responsibility. Although Brandy won the championship. Seven of them, I think. Nobody was counting. But mostly me not counting because I didn't want to. I'm quite shy person with the fish here.

29:38 John Daub: But when you do come to Japan, I really do think it's experience and trying different things is really a good. Yeah, you should try it. I think it's kind of a cool thing to do when you come here. Make sure there's no spiders in your shoe or crickets. I just saw a cricket. There's a lot of frogs. There's lots of frogs. Yeah, we're in their home. We have to make sure that they respect us, too. Or else they're going to attack. I've seen that movie Arachnophobia. Did you ever see that one? The spiders take over, man. Because the people, they did not respect the spiders. Actually, it's been a long time since I've seen that movie. So much fun. You're good at this. I think you have like this animal horse whisper kind of a. They just trust your hands. Or you had the technique down really fast. It's hard to get out.

30:42 John Daub: I know. I tried to get in and out of this. The last one. My shoe size is a 28 centimeter. You should know what your shoes are in centimeters before you come to Japan. But I can tell you 28.5 is like a size 10 and a half in US. So that's what my foot size is. OK. Arigato gozaimashita (thank you). And that, my friends, is how you do it or not do it, depending on your point of view on my experience. But, oh, wow. I do feel like there's a leaf in my shoe. I do feel like it was worth it.

31:27 John Daub: Michael's here. The snack fund. Basically, that is for the train ride back, my friend. Yeah, we do. Despite even washing it off, we still have like a little fishy. Fish for dinner? Yeah. So let me take you up the hill a little bit and show you some of the mountains. I didn't know about this area. It's kind of deep in there. And as we were coming in on the bus, you could see where some of the landslides were from that strong earthquake. We stopped off at a center on the way. And they had this 3D projection of the land. And they had this projection mapping thing where they showed the impact of that 2004 earthquake. Wow.

32:28 John Daub: This is why you leave Tokyo. Whoa. Diana, you're on camera. Strike a pose. They have these cabins here. And they said that there are bears here in the morning that will come and wander around. Just putting that out there. But as long as you have a bell or a radio or make some noise, they pretty much will stay away from you. That is a striking. Wow. It's a beautiful landscape.

33:09 John Daub: The one thing that I've been learning from this bus trip is that it's good sometimes not to have such a rigid itinerary. Give some more time to do stuff. Try not to pack too much into one day. Gosh, I wish I could stream at 4K. Just the signal is only 3 megabits per second up. And that's all I could do for this. They're harvesting rice. September is inekari (rice harvest) time. And the golden rice fields of Niigata get harvested by machine. They don't do it by hand anymore. Not really.

33:58 John Daub: And all that rice is going to end up on my plate. This is such a delicious place for rice too because of the natural environment, the valleys, all the minerals in the water from the soil. This particular area used to be underwater in the sea thousands of years ago. And when the seas receded and this land was exposed, it left behind some really natural soil, lots of good vitamins trapped in the valley. So it doesn't erode. It stays all in here is what I've been told. And that helps with the rice and the beauty. Look at that. Yeah, Monty, thank you. Yeah, definitely click that like button.

34:49 John Daub: Just to reiterate a little bit, we're on a Only in Japan bus tour. And this is this morning from the hotel. We all got on the bus, checked out at 10 a.m. So we had a chance to eat breakfast together. It was a mix of like Japanese Western. It had some bacon and sausage in there with egg and some rice. Leo had a special kids breakfast. And the view outside the window, of course, was just absolutely stunning. See over here, everybody enjoying. Even had coffee, which was quite surprising.

35:34 John Daub: I just embarrassed Leo last night. He passed out. Despite the fact that the fireworks were exploding, he was able to find a way to still sleep, which actually is really incredible when you think about it. But the last thing I want to share with you and I say thank you. Hit the like button because this, folks, is one of the reasons why we came last night. This, you're not going to hear the sound of it, but this is the Yonshakudama, the biggest firework shell in the world. That's launched annually. 420 kilograms exploding into the air. And then it just goes wide. Look at that. Over a kilometer long, if you can believe that. The explosion, if you can't hear the volume, it really hits your gut like boom. And that was shocking. It slightly didn't launch the way we wanted it to. It didn't go up 800 meters, which is what it was supposed to do. I think it was up 300. But that's high enough to get a pretty good impact for us watching.

36:39 John Daub: Wow, look at this. I get down there. It is your words. Yes. I mean, there's some sound over there, but if you remove that, it's amazing. You can see all the way to Hakkaisan, which is the sake maker, right? Hakkaisan, very famous sake maker. Some of those mountains are beautiful. In the distance. I was here just about six months ago to do the main channel video on yukimuro (snow storehouse), which is this traditional Japanese way of refrigeration. They get all the snow, pack it in. And even in the summer months, there's still snow to keep it refrigerated until the next year when it snows. And the yukimuro, because it stays at a constant temperature, it doesn't fluctuate, stays at minus one degrees consistently. The food breaks down in an even way and makes it tastier. So they say. And refrigeration with the electricity goes on and off, on and off. So it fluctuates between like plus and minus. And that impacts the food's taste. That's the science behind it. At least they provided me scientific proof. I buy it.

38:08 John Daub: Maybe they could have done the weed whacker in five minutes. I don't know. Just saying. Just saying. I think so. Well, yeah. Someone has to do it. I could see myself staying in one of these huts. Why not? I wonder how you get the... I have to bring your own food maybe. Well, there you go. That's koi harvesting. Is that equal? Yeah, we got to go, guys. The beauty of a bus trip. Tight schedules.

38:50 John Daub: I wish we had like set up tables and had lunch here or something. Like I'm getting like new ideas. Bring the bentos here to eat. Especially if the weather's fine. Yeah. Although the air conditioning was nice there. But I think this view is nice enough. Where I would sweat a little bit for it. Just get some really cold ice water. And that was the first meal where we didn't have sake. Everywhere we go they've been giving us Japanese sake. What? There's a box of sake on the... What kind of trip is this? Niigata is very famous for the Japanese sake and they don't let you forget it.

39:31 John Daub: So we got from the Kubota, which is one of the famous makers here. And gave us like a case of Junmai Daiginjo (premium sake). And we want to say thank you to them. Thank you, Kubota, for that. That was really nice. I think everyone's going to take it back home though to drink. All right. Leo is on the way back to the bus as well. And so am I. Thanks everybody for watching. If you have any questions, you can leave them in the comments below. There's a link to the map in the description of this video. So you can check out where exactly this is. And yeah. It's really a cool experience.

40:14 John Daub: What's he doing? He's not saying bye to you either. All right. Thank you, Michael. Thanks everybody. We'll see you in another live stream. Maybe from Nagaoka Station. I don't know. We'll see where this bus trip takes us. We got a couple other stops before we go back to the station around 5 p.m. for the trip back. He just wants to run up and down the hill. Matane (see you later). He's moonwalking. Michael Jackson moonwalking. I showed him Michael Jackson's moonwalk the other day. So he's been moonwalking. All right. Bye everybody. Matane. Moonwalk. Moonwalk.