00:00:00 John Daub: I'm with Matt Alt, author of Pure Invention and guest on this episode. This is the postcard for Patreon supporters. This is Japanese toys from 1954 to 2000. We went up to Hokkaido to meet my friend Wakaki-san who has one of the best private collections of toys that I've ever seen. All of it featured in his museum.

00:00:28 John Daub: He called it his own private Smithsonian. We're going to be talking about that. Also, we're going to be talking about the moon landing. In fact, this is brand new news. It happened after midnight Japan time yesterday. JAXA, Japan's version of NASA, landed a probe on the moon. They're the fifth nation in all of human history.

00:00:57 Matt Alt: They're the first nation ever to successfully land something on the moon. Not only that, they're the first nation ever to land a toy on the moon. This is perfect timing for our going up to Hokkaido and everything.

00:01:13 John Daub: Wait, let me just wake up from that. You said a toy? Is it like a Gundam or something?

00:01:18 Matt Alt: Actually, close. On board that probe was a lander called Sora-Q. It looks like a little ball, but when it hits the lunar surface, it cracks open and turns into this little rolling vehicle and takes video and pictures. It was designed by Takara Tomy, who makes all of the Transformers toys.

00:01:43 John Daub: So this is the first time ever that somebody's landed a Transformer on the moon outside of the Transformers movie series and cartoon.

00:01:52 Matt Alt: Only in Japan on the moon. What a world we live in. There's so much negativity out there, but there's also really cool positive stuff like this. I just really love stories like this.

00:02:07 John Daub: Yeah, this is definitely part for Pure Invention book number two. Fantasy becoming reality.

00:02:16 Matt Alt: Yeah, we're now in the reality. Science fiction no longer. Toys are now out there. That means artificial intelligence in 10 years can make their own toys to send to space in our name without us knowing about it.

00:02:28 John Daub: Sounds like Terminator, like a new Terminator movie when you put it that way. Skylink goes active and takes over the world indeed. This is big news. Is there any other information about this that you know? Because to me, I kind of knew about it, but it was just made headlines. It didn't really go deep into it.

00:02:47 Matt Alt: JAXA. I love them, but they're really bad at promoting themselves. So they haven't really talked about this big time. They launched this probe like four months ago. It took all this time to get there because Japan doesn't have the giant rockets that America and Russia do. So they had to slingshot around the earth a bunch of times. It finally arrived four months later, which was yesterday. And yeah, it's a new technology designed to let lunar probes land without humans taking over at the last minute. So it's really a cool AI-based landing system. And that was what Japan was testing and it worked. Unfortunately, the way it landed, the sunlight isn't hitting the solar panels. So the battery ran out really quick, but it landed successfully. Good job, Japan.

00:03:49 John Daub: Hey, well, no landed. I'm just kind of laughing internally because you keep saying probe.

00:03:57 Matt Alt: Maybe it's a Beavis and Butthead thing.

00:04:00 John Daub: Well, it's not a spaceship. What do you call it? Lunar lander? Let's call it a lunar lander. That way you don't get the double entendre. Moon toy. Like Japan's lunar toys.

00:04:17 Matt Alt: No, you know what it is? I've written about this a lot. And you know how in writing and composition, you can't say the same word over and over again. You can't be like lander lander.

00:04:26 John Daub: You said probe like 12 times.

00:04:41 Matt Alt: This is the episode on the main channel. This is my other channel, Only in Japan.

00:04:41 John Daub: I know a little bit about toys because every one of us watching our kids, right? We've all had toys growing up. But we're most of us watching here are Westerners. And we don't know exactly what was happening. In particular, there was no internet back in the 1970s, 80s, 90s. So the toys from the age before us are kind of new to many of us like the Ultra Hand. We can start there with Nintendo because I think a lot of people, we get the most comments from that. First of all, this Ultra Hand doesn't have any relationship to what the Ultra Hand is in the Zelda game that's out right now. So most people who encounter the Ultra Hand as an accessory in the game don't realize it was literally Nintendo's first toy. Until that point, they'd been a playing card company. They made cards and also Western-style playing cards. The Ultra Hand was their first toy, that big accordion thing that we played with in Hokkaido. There's no video of that online. It's so amazing that we managed to not only find it but play with it. I was like a kid in a toy store, which we were.

00:06:08 Matt Alt: That was really crazy. And I kind of remember when you pulled it out in that video. I didn't know what the hell it was. I saw your eyes and you were like, oh my god. Okay, here's a piece of old plastic from the 1960s. No, it's more than that. This is the Ultra Hand. Do you understand? This is the first toy ever from Nintendo. I was a little excited, yes. Slightly. But how did you even find that thing? This is like a major historical footnote, this toy, and it's hidden in the back under a pile of stuff. Where did you get this?

00:06:46 John Daub: I have a lot of experience spelunking in weird warehouses like this. So it was born out of much experience. Like I just knew we were only touching the surface there. Because we kind of parachuted in. We only had a limited time for running through. I guarantee we could do another run through there and probably find totally different stuff. But yeah, there's other treasures slumbering in the corners like underneath piles of other stuff.

00:07:22 John Daub: Holy smokes. We didn't even, we only had what, a one day? And a lot of people don't understand this. If you do watch the video, we're freaking freezing in there. It doesn't have any heat. We're in Hokkaido. It's like six degrees inside there. There's no heat. It's maybe even colder just because there's no sunlight coming in there.

00:07:43 Matt Alt: Well, you know, I wore my nice sweater and stuff for when I do my TV appearances. I do my TV a lot here in Japan too. And then we have to wear these bulky parkas the entire time. You and I look like we're on an Arctic research mission or something like that. It was freezing even with that down. That was like a North Face down jacket. It's like a serious mountain climbing slash skiing outdoor sports in the winter kind of thing. And I was still chilled to the bone. It was really great that he had that little room where he was running heaters in it. We were going back and forth between that hot room and then going back up into the freezing toy room. But what can you say? He's like what, 80 and he's fine because he's smoking a cigarette and he's got this internal heat from the tobacco in there. Born and bred, born and raised in Hokkaido.

00:08:49 John Daub: Well, I loved it. It was my first time in Obihiro Betsu. And I don't mean this in a disparaging way. It was like a real one-horse town. Like the streets just get, no building is taller than two stories. The streets are very wide. And like, I remember when we woke up the next morning, like it had snowed and it was way early for it to snow from a Tokyo standpoint. And quiet. I could imagine some gunslinger coming down the, this town's not big enough for two toy collectors kind of type coming down the main boulevard. It was a really amazing experience. It was really cool. You brought me up with you.

00:09:24 Matt Alt: Yeah, I have it actually on the screen right now. For those that are watching, this is the episode. And you can just see a little bit of it right there. We had all these toys. There's Wakaki-san, my friend there, the Game Boy, which is something people were talking a lot about. They wanted, why was it discolored like that? Can you actually clean it?

00:09:51 John Daub: You can. There's actually a method using hydrogen peroxide. You have to disassemble it. And this is a system that's been made by people. The problem with plastic toys is that they discolor. They're just, they weren't made to, they're made to be played with for like a couple years. That's like, nobody designs a toy to last 20, 30, 50 years. So when the sunlight hits them, they get discolored. And there's really usually nothing you can do about it. But there is a way that people have developed using hydrogen peroxide. You put it in a bag and you have to put it in the sun and then that re-bleaches it. But it's a pretty involved process using chemicals and stuff that. If you look online, like plastic sun bleaching fix, you'll find YouTube tutorials and stuff. I've never done it. I actually find the kind of yellowing to be a sign of, you know, it's like a veteran of the childhood toy wars kind of thing. But yeah. I had a Game Boy as well. I don't know where it is, which is a shame, but I don't think there's any mint condition. Is there? It's really hard to find. Well, the screens also deteriorate. The screens really deteriorate.

00:11:13 Matt Alt: When I was writing Pure Invention, I actually bought, I re-bought a Game Boy. I had one in '89, '90 when they first came out in the States. And it, like I had to get the screen refurbished. I actually had to pay a bunch to get it fixed up. The plastic was fine, but the screens go bad. And so, you know, it's a great system. Like it doesn't have a backlight or anything, but the games still really hold up. No, I remember they used to have this attachment that came out like a year later with an LED, with lights that you could, so you could be in your bedroom underneath your sheets playing your Game Boy. And then eventually the backlit ones came, the green ones, and then the color with the color TV. And now a portable game system looks every bit as good as one hooked up to your TV. Back in time, they had to make all sorts of compromises. Famously the guy who invented the Game Boy, his name is Gunpei Yokoi. And he's the same guy who invented the Ultra Hand, by the way, just to show you how long this guy was. He was so stressed out over the Game Boy's development because the screen, they were having a hard time with it. He actually had to get hospitalized for malnutrition at one point. Like sick working on it. But that's how dedicated these Japanese craftspeople are. Like it's just a toy quote unquote, but they take it very seriously and that's why we take it seriously.

00:12:41 John Daub: I think so. Well, there's this, when we talk about the work ethic, cause we're getting a little bit off of toys up here, but I think that I've changed quite a bit by being here for half my life. I think when I make these episodes, I have this perfectionist in me that is definitely something that would not have come if I had not lived here. So that ability to just work at that highest level, so many Japanese workers do that. I feel that as well. Sometimes I just get into the zone. I forget to eat and you're just doing stuff like this. We live in a multitasking world, right? Everybody multitasks, but Japanese craftspeople tend to hyper-focus on one thing traditionally anyway. Maybe that's why we love their toys so much.

00:13:21 Matt Alt: By the way, speaking of which I just sent you a link in your email to the New Yorker article I wrote on that Sora-Q transforming robot lander. So you can actually see, and also if you go to my Twitter feed, Matt underscore Alt on Twitter, you can actually see a video I posted of it. I shot a video of it transforming. Maybe that's even better on Twitter of the transformer that JAXA just landed on the moon. It's one of the most recent posts I made. That's the New Yorker piece. And you can see the picture of it. Moon rover.

00:14:01 John Daub: It's not a probe, Matt. It's a rover.

00:14:03 Matt Alt: It's a rover. Sorry. So sorry. If you angle down, you can see a picture of what it looks like. It's like the size of a baseball and it's made of some kind of aerospace grade material and it cracks open. Those hemispheres turn into wheels and that's Sora-Q and it is really cool. Takara Tomy is selling them now. You can actually buy one just like the one they launched into space. It's like 30,000 yen or something like that but you can remote control it and drive it around or use it as a webcam or whatever.

00:14:50 John Daub: That's right, let's launch some more crap into space. We have drones buzzing around all over the place now, let's do it in space exactly.

00:14:56 Matt Alt: Here, I'll send you the link to the video because this is something that's really fun. Oh it's really cool. The article is a lot more thorough than what I got on the headline news. I've been chasing this story for two years. I heard about it through Japanology Plus which was the show that I was doing for NHK for many years and they actually took me to Takara Tomy to see it for the first time. That's where I learned wow and then I used that connection to pitch an article about it to the New Yorker and the article ran in like 2022 because there was an earlier attempt to launch it that failed. But I sent you a link to the video. Look at this, this is it, this is the transformation sequence. That's what it looks like rolling and if you let the video scroll through you'll see it actually like what it looks like when it lands. Like it's shot out from the lunar lander like a ball and when it hits the surface it transforms into this rolling configuration. That's the idea. I didn't use the word probe, I used lander. See, lander rover. Whoa there you go. I hope that thing has image stabilization. Look at that camera moving. I don't think you can stabilize that, it's like putting it on a duck. Well it works just like a duck on the other hand when you think about it. It's going to be rolling in like one quarter earth's gravity, one third. So maybe the movement is totally different. That's the one thing they can't test, what it's going to be like in actual microgravity.

00:16:35 Matt Alt: So we should try to visit Takara Tomy. It's a really fun place. They have a great museum full of toys and they're really cool people. The Transformers guys are there, the Zoids. Do you remember those? Lots of different toy companies come out of there. They make the Licca-chan dolls, you know, Barbie. Yeah, Barbie's Japanese.

00:17:02 John Daub: I wanted to talk to you about that as well. I used to live in Fukushima and I remember the Licca-chan castle. There's a castle up there no foreign tourist knows about. The place looks deserted, like it's abandoned. It hasn't been renovated since the 1980s which just makes it awesome. Yeah it just, Licca-chan's got like, Japan's not having any kids pretty much so no one's buying these dolls except for collectors. So we got to make a trip up there ASAP because I'm always worried that they're teeter-tottering on like going out of business or staying in business. I don't know for sure. But you know I think I'm a toy expert and I've never, I didn't even know. I knew about the Sanrio land but I didn't know. Sanrio land, I can't even imagine.

00:17:50 Matt Alt: I mean she's, being a guy I focus mainly on boys toys you know like Transformers and robots and things like that but the girls stuff is really interesting too like Barbie like Licca-chan like Hello Kitty. And was that girls or boys because when I was a kid I went that's so cool and I actually had Hello Kitty stuff when I was like eight. I love Hello Kitty. Here look here's my house but then it disappeared. Hello Kitty was out for a few years like in the early 80s and it disappeared for a while and then it came back. Yeah like stuff like this like little plastic books and it's cool. Sanrio was like they were trying to introduce new characters like every season you know so like Hello Kitty wasn't even their first hit. There was another one called Patty & Jimmy who were two human characters then after this there was Little Twin Stars and like in the West there's like Badtz-Maru you know there's a lot of those and now there's even more modern ones like Gudetama the depressed egg yolk and Aggretsuko the red panda that sings death metal music.

00:19:03 John Daub: Now you're talking in tongues right now I can't find. You know I just know this okay I remember in American shopping malls and that was the place to be no longer do people go there. They had a Sanrio or Hello Kitty store in the American shopping malls in the early 80s then they went away right but there was about two or three years where all the kids are like wait what is this and I don't think there was another toy maker that had like we had Kay Bee Toys like little toy stores that they would sell in the shopping malls but nothing like where a maker had their own shop in the shopping malls. Gift Gate like the first one opened in Shinjuku I think in the 70s and they were all over.

00:19:43 Matt Alt: There's an interesting thing. Hello Kitty was the biggest thing in the 70s and 80s and then it kind of crashed. The reason that Hello Kitty made a huge comeback was because in the 1990s Japanese schoolgirls and office ladies started carrying around Hello Kitty stuff ironically as like oh I'm cool I can carry around I can be a big girl and carry around Hello Kitty stuff too. And that kind of kicked off a boom for Hello Kitty among adults and I honestly think Hello Kitty is bigger among grown women and probably men than it is around little girls these days. But Sanrio is doing great they're still around the stores are still they just renovated the Shinjuku store so we should go there.

00:20:27 John Daub: Absolutely. I'm really curious I like the private collections of Hello Kitty as well. Let's get into the Hello Kitty for just a second with Wakaki-san.

00:21:10 Matt Alt: But you know, I actually think the Game Boy is and I write about this in Pure Invention, the Game Boy is the most pivotal fantasy delivery device, the object that transformed the way the world sees Japan. Like more than the Walkman, more than the karaoke, more even than anime. Like the Game Boy was like a mainlining Japanese pop culture in your bedroom. You know, like it was like a digital drug and it just transformed. You can play games on the toilet. Everybody was doing that. This is before the smartphone. This got people. But you could take your game everywhere because you couldn't take your TV anywhere. And this was the toy to have when it came out for like two, three years. And those little cartridges in those games were the things that mothers and it was just huge. And that game transformed everything. The NES was really amazing. But Game Boy, man, nobody. I don't think all the other makers didn't see this coming. Well yeah totally. In my mind and I think you can really make this argument. I kind of do in my book that Walkman plus Game Boy equals iPhone. Like I think Steve Jobs got the idea for this like to combine these things together in a really cool way from Sony. And also I think from Nintendo. I mean the naming of these things like Walkman, Game Boy, they're like very they feel like your friends. They don't feel like technology. And Astro Boy. Ultraman. They're taking the future.

00:22:50 John Daub: A lot of people don't know that Nintendo started doing with paper. And that was something that really fascinated me. Like that company is quite old. And they were doing trading cards. 1889 I think it's when they were founded. Holy macaroni. That's like the same as my university. It's like 100 and 40 years old. It's crazy. And they're the most popular. You know there's other 140 year old companies out there like Mitsukoshi or something like that. No, Mitsukoshi is 300 years old last year. And I know in Europe there's like hundreds of year old companies and brands. I like Nintendo is 140 years old. That's like cutting edge. It's insane. The image is not what we see today. And that's really cool. Maybe we'll have to dig into that as well. There's so much with toys.

00:23:45 John Daub: I wanted to go back to Hello Kitty for a minute. I know that Wakaki-san didn't have a lot of Hello Kitty in his store. And we didn't want to talk about this purposely because it's such a big part of Japanese toy history. We didn't talk about this purposely because it's kind of a sad story I thought. But yeah, the one thing I think with toy owners and private collectors are toy collectors. Toys are things that we love. Appreciate giving toys to Leo, my son. He's three. I love it when his eyes get big. My eyes sort of do get big when I get new toys, which is cameras and gimbals and things like this. Big boy toys. Computers. But I guess the one thing is like he didn't really have a lot of love for the resellers, did he?

00:24:40 Matt Alt: Yeah.

00:24:43 John Daub: And that's the big company. Oh, did we lose Matt here? There's a reseller in Nakano and in Shibuya as well now. Mandarake I think it is. There's nothing wrong with them, but they get their toys from somewhere. And sometimes maybe they don't pay the collectors the price that they're actually worth or something. I don't know.

00:25:13 Matt Alt: Can you hear me?

00:25:15 John Daub: I can hear you, but we can't see you. Anyways, this is going to be. There'll be a part two to this. We are going to do this as an OBS proper live stream. But I have all the equipment. I don't know if you can see in my studio here. I have all the equipment set out here to do it. But we just couldn't. I just couldn't get it up in time because Matt has to go in about a minute.

00:25:40 Matt Alt: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me though. I really appreciated this.

00:25:46 John Daub: You're welcome. I'm glad that you could join in and we could try out this format because I'd never done anything like this as well. If you're just joining us for the first time, Matt joined me on this episode called Japanese Toys That Changed Our World or something like that. And from 1954 to 2000. I don't know what title it is.

00:26:05 Matt Alt: You don't even remember your own title.

00:26:06 John Daub: I changed it. I was like oh yeah, Japanese Toys That Changed the Game. It was an amazing experience. Thank you for those who are posting links to my book in the chat. I think that's really awesome. Please by all means check it out if you like Japanese toys or even if you don't. And let's do this again. It's just too much fun. Absolutely. Well we'll get in here. Maybe come on over into the studio. Well it might be better. Yeah whatever. It's all good. But I appreciate the time to go up to Hokkaido to make this episode a reality. And your feedback and expertise was amazing to make this one of the best episodes that we've had. Amazing stuff. Thank you. More to come. Yes. Well let's do it again.

00:26:49 Matt Alt: I'm going to sign out. But thank you so much for having me.

00:26:52 John Daub: You're welcome. Bye bye, Matt.

00:26:58 John Daub: So it's just me now. And I don't know how this format worked. This is the first time that I've tried this new YouTube feature that they have where we can split the screens and then we can have a guest on. I think it's really cool. But live streaming on mobile devices. I'm using the iPhone right now. It's still in its infancy. I was doing this in 2017. And to do something like this I couldn't even imagine. And now here we are where I can bring in guests just on the iPhone. Now there's other software that probably can allow me to do this. This is natively on the iPhone app. But we'll try to get Matt back on which we wanted to do on the widescreen on the big cameras and really focus in on more of the toys. I had clips. He actually has his own private collection that he was going to show us which is kind of a shame. But we'll be back with Matt and talk more about the toys. I just want to make sure that you are all interested in this topic. So make sure you subscribe. Make sure you let me know in the comments below or in the chat. And I'll take some questions here if you want to see more from us. Now on the main channel episode we do intend to make another toy episode. And it's not just for you. We just have a lot of fun when we're traveling around and getting out of what we normally do. To take on a topic for me going and doing toys is really special. But I think for Matt just getting into a car and driving off to a location and doing something that's different from what he does with Japanology a show that he used to be on. And I think that's really kind of special for the channel as well.

00:28:30 John Daub: Yeah I'm getting Matt's like I got to make sure. I think Matt had gotten a notification from somebody and that turned off his camera. So we got to turn off all the notifications and stuff like that when you start this on smartphones. That's something I have to remember as well. I'm going to take some questions here. If you have it you could do it in the live chat just for a couple of minutes before we sign off here. I saw that Jason is sharing the link to Matt's book. It's a fantastic book. Matt is 100% American like me. However both of us have lived half our lives in Japan. So that makes us half Japanese in a way. I think if you ask us where our hearts lie it's probably going to be here because this is where our friends our family and our expertise is. But the one thing is you cannot separate the American in us because Japan lets us know that we're not Japanese as well. And we don't want to be Japanese because then for me I would lose my connection to what my value to Japan is that I can connect with all of you in English from an American point of view. So from that I'm not half Japanese and neither is Matt. We're American but we've been here for so long. We probably our hearts are here too. So maybe we are in that way so to speak. I remember I interviewed the Indian curry guy in Higashi Ginza. Amazing curry. Nilesan is his name. And I asked Nilesan you've been here all your life. Your father came here from India in the 1930s fleeing from there because he was something of an activist. And you mostly know Japan over India but you look Indian. I said where is your heart? And he goes Japan. And I could really respect that. I kind of knew that he would say that but he doesn't look Japanese. So his Japanese is incredible. I hope he's doing well. I haven't talked to him in a very long time.

00:30:34 John Daub: If you were able to have a stream while talking with guests through Discord it would maybe more practical. Yeah. I can't live stream Discord onto YouTube yet. I think Discord has a lot of possibility to do stuff like this. But what I wanted to do today was to connect Discord into a chat. And have people could call in on Discord and be able to ask Matt questions like a call-in show which would be pretty awesome. After we did our spiel for about 15, 20 minutes we'd be able to take questions from you about toys and things like this. So with the podcast that I'm doing and one of the reasons why I love the fact that we can build up our Discord I think we have like 16,000 17,000 people there is that I want to build it up as a community where we can use this for our podcasting platform. And our moderators can kind of screen the calls. Because I don't want to get some people that are sometimes drunk or we cannot understand what they're saying or they don't know what they're going to ask and they just go crazy because they're live on the show and stuff like this. Maybe not the best for creating a show that normal people want to watch. It's always lively. But I think we want to put this into the podcast format. And with all the people that I know and Matt knows and all the friends people that are listening and all the people that are watching I really appreciate the good work that you're doing with our podcast. I really appreciate it. I think we all need to be an audience. And if there's anyone that would just like to share that with us. And I know everyone out there is kind of going through that at the same time. And I want to thank you for that. Thanks David. I like the fact that my friends the people that I know the expats or some of them are now full Japanese have just amazing stories to tell themselves. So unlike other YouTubers here in Japan that are doing podcasts I'll probably draw on the expertise of my friends as well as my own. Being here for 26 years this year is you know I've been everywhere like four times now. I think just maybe Saga Prefecture down in Kyushu I haven't been there for a fourth time. That's between Nagasaki and Fukuoka. I've been everywhere almost everywhere. I still get stumped a little bit.

00:33:04 John Daub: Well thank you for the super chat here. Great job. The toys were my introduction to Japan as well as the early animated shows. Yes. What's your favorite toy or media? It's got to be the Game Boy for me. It just changed everything. I didn't think of it as being Japanese at the time though. I don't know why. It just like was everywhere in America. But I think Speed Racer and Star Blazers. There were anime that were running in the 1980s on TV as a kid and they were so radically different and so much more fun to watch than the Smurfs. And I thought that that probably left the biggest impact. But I never got into it enough where I became a fanboy on Japanese anime and manga back in the early 80s. But I knew that it existed. Speed Racer was amazing. Like just the angles the shots. It was so cinematic. And so the storylines were much deeper than cartoons just for kids. And I thought I really appreciated that as a kid. You know one thing that kids don't like is when you talk down to them because they're a kid. Kids want to be talked to like they're adults. And I felt like those kinds of anime they did that to me. And I respected that. So that was my gateway in. And the toys that I had of course there were Transformers. I didn't get into it. I was playing sports mostly. So I'd be happy with a simple football. Unlike Ralphie in A Christmas Story I would have been happy with a baseball or you know a Nerf ball. I remember getting those Nerf balls. You'd throw them and they'd whistle like whoa things like this. Those rockets with water that you would pump and then you go and the rocket would shoot maybe like 100 feet into the sky. Sometimes it would just explode. Toys like that were a lot of fun when I was a kid. Bicycles. I remember getting a banana seat bicycle in 1982 or 83 and riding that around. I think it was a Schwinn a yellow bicycle seat. I mean it was a banana seat that actually had a banana colored seat. It was sort of geeky. It wasn't the color that I wanted Dad but it was nice. I don't think I knew what I wanted anyways.

00:35:14 John Daub: Lawn darts right? Yeah there are tons of toys here. Kamen Rider Sailor Moon Cowboy Bebop. There were a lot of anime that at the time it just never broke through to mainstream at least not in the early 1980s. But I came to Japan in '98 and I didn't know too much about anime or manga. I didn't come here for that. I came here because of the job and it would let me earn money so I could backpack and travel around more. Because I'd backpacked and traveled Europe and been to India once and I wanted to see more of Asia. My roommate was a Japanese major and he was kind of a weird guy. He had a futon at Ohio State University sleeping on the floor and a futon. I'm like what? Like why are you sleeping on the floor? It looked like a dog pad. I don't understand it. You know you're in America. Like he'd have Playboy but it was the Japanese version. That kind of a guy which is respectable but he was like way out there. And he got me to come to Japan for the first time. And like he spoke Japanese fairly good cause he majored in it. And now it's funny because now I speak Japanese way better than he does and read and write more than he does. And that was his thing. Now he's I don't know what he's doing now. I got to find out and catch up to him but a lot of funny stories. This is like '98 '99. I think he went back in 2003 and I haven't heard from him much since for like 20 years.

00:36:48 John Daub: Nicholas Boothman writes in here. Thank you John. Showing the Showa era of Tokyo. You're welcome. And the cop manga. That's that statue. That was Kamen Rider. I love that little town. In fact I just showed you just the tip of it. So you can go and find them yourself. There are 14 statues in Kamiya-cho. And it's worth traveling out there just for that. You can get something to eat and then just travel back to Tokyo on the Joban line which isn't too far away. I'll get some fan art with Udameshi and Kuwabara being cuffed by him. Yeah. That show was like Tokyo cops or something. Tokyo cop beat I think it was named in English. It didn't quite fit but it was definitely an iconic manga on Shonen Jump here for 30 years. It's a pretty long time. Thanks for that. I'm not sure if I'm a fan of the vertical format but it's interesting to try out new things and we'll keep doing this with this channel. Programming note tomorrow. I'll do another live stream in the morning. I think walking around. Oh and I'm going to be releasing the Wakaki-san interview. It's like 40 minutes long I think where he's just talking about his history about the toys and me and Matt are probing him like asking questions. And I have to be honest with you. Matt's Japanese is way better than mine. He's way smarter than me as well. But like I'm understanding like about 85% of everything that he's saying. I think maybe it was just the toy talk on the manga and anime and stuff that I just couldn't wrap my head around. And some of the materials that they use. I couldn't understand that in Japanese but we I think pretty much get the picture but I think we asked pretty good questions in the interview. I know I had to keep him on target because we had a limited amount of time. We had a flight to catch. So it's not like we could sit there and ask questions because his stories when he started the stories they would go on and on which is great but I would have to interrupt just based on time. So just keep that in mind. I'm there as a reporter as somebody with limited time. And I have to get Matt home as well because Matt's a busy person too. So I'm thinking about that. So as much as fun as we're having just talking and shooting the breeze we had to film this and I'm filming an A7S and that camera overheats. So I knew I had to stop it and start it every now and then to let it cool down. So there's lots of elements going on in my mind when I'm filming this stuff that maybe you don't realize. It's not just asking the questions but just like 17 dimensions here. I got to get on a flight to get home. I have to get the rental car make sure I return that on time. It might even snow. So I have to beat the snow out. I gotta make sure that Matt's okay. I have to get the car packed down the camera gear away in time. I have to make sure the camera doesn't overheat. I have to make sure that I ask all the questions that I need before we leave. So there's a ton of things going on in my mind. I have to make sure the audio is actually being recorded because if it doesn't gosh I'd have to come back and do it again. So there's always a bunch of things going on in my head as I'm on location filming this stuff that maybe you don't realize.

00:39:53 John Daub: I think StreamYard will allow you to have up to 10 people on a screen. I think so but I learned that StreamYard does not work well with mobile live streaming. And this is the biggest problem with StreamYard. Like I couldn't change the cameras. This is why I use the PrISM instead of the StreamYard to be able to use the iPhone. It had too many limitations with their software to pay for it. It's good as a studio one over OBS but you can do 10 people in OBS too. You just have to link it up in the scenes and stuff but StreamYard did not. I have a good mobile streaming app yet and it was paid. So you'd have to pay for something that wasn't as good as something that was free which is crazy. So you know I'll probably go back to StreamYard later on. I'm not sure how PrISM is working but it would be fun to have guests and walk around. But as I said I'm going to turn more to the podcasting format. I've got mics lights everything now soon we'll have a background and this will be easier to approach new stories as they happen. I can just go live and bring you in a moment's notice information about Japan in a more watchable format which is this camera which looks better than this camera. I want to say thank you to Matt Alt. Pure Invention is his book. He's got a bunch of books out there. He's a writing machine. He also does columns. He does so much for print media. I'm trying to get him into YouTube. And I think a lot of you that are toy lovers will appreciate it. His knowledge is incredible. And to be on this platform YouTube I would love to see him here. You'd have a million subscribers in no time just based on how much information it is. But this goes to the core of what I like to do as a creator. I like to make sure that I get experts people who really know what they're talking about because I might know a lot of things but they know a lot more and that's the value of subscribing to this channel. So I appreciate it very much. And to our Patreon supporters thanks for making this possible. This should be coming. There's a picture of me and Matt on the back there. Do you see that? With Wakaki-san. This helps us support the channel and I appreciate it. You also have dime your boxes. We'll send you goods from Japan. I reopened the normal dime your tier. So that really does help too. I appreciate it all very much. I'll see you again tomorrow. Maybe in the morning I'll let you know when we have a live stream to do it and we'll try another I'll try a studio podcast test maybe with Conny or something. Just try this format sometime next week but I'm working on a video right now. So I get it back to editing. See everybody.

00:42:25 John Daub: I didn't was there any questions? Like it's going by so quick. I've already by the way asked if moderators could highlight questions that were good to put on the top. Any plans to cover video games or old arcades and work depots. I actually did one on the old channel. Don't watch it while you could. It's up to you but I probably would if I can find some more video game arcades. I know it's a dying thing but it's not a new thing. So let's see. I can do with that in 2024. There's lots of things that I want to approach but you know the retro stuff I have a feeling like a lot of the Showa era stuff is now leaving us. So there's a limited amount of time. This isn't just things it's also people. So last year and this year I kind of want to try to focus on the stories of the generation that we're now losing that survived through World War II as well as the games and the items and the houses and the structures and things that. I think in a hundred years people are gonna be watching Only in Japan going wow. This is where we can really learn about the soul of Japan because no longer in an earthquake prone country one major earthquake and you could lose so many of these older buildings that are just hanging on by a thread. I gotta get around and film even more of that. I appreciate the question and asking about that.

00:43:51 John Daub: All right guys Nicholas writes in here. My first anime was the American version of Macross Robotech group watching war movies like Eastwood and Burton Where Eagles Dare. Absolutely. Yeah me too. Back in the some of the best movies came in the 70s and 80s. But then there was like this 80s period where they went to VHS too much. I'm not talking about adult videos. I'm just saying the quality of the videos in the 80s probably was not the greatest once VHS came out. But there was the film stuff in the 70s and early 80s and the Spielberg stuff was just so darn good. Because I think you had a budget and you had to nail it. You had to nail the story. So there weren't too many flops when you had a big budget. Not too many. But nowadays it's so easy to make these videos that people will get these movies out before they're probably done. And the risk financially is too high which is why we get all these superhero movies and sequel after sequel after sequel because the risk is lower. So I hope that the artistry of movies and cinema of Hollywood come back. Because the lack of creativity is not there. Thank goodness for YouTube. Thank you YouTube. You can find everything here. Betamax! Don't even get me started there! Betamax is far superior to VHS. Why it failed? I don't know. Sony wasn't always on the top of its game. Betamax it was smaller too. I don't know. I guess VHS just took over because of you know what it was? I think it could have been greed. It could have been straight out greed is why Betamax. Betamax everything was just way too expensive. And VHS opened up the platform like open source. And every maker was making VHS stuff. It just was more accessible to more people. And Betamax just ate itself out. And I think that's what happened. Maybe same with LaserDisc. Japanese corporations though sometimes are way too greedy. And don't see the fact that in order for new tech to be adopted you have to have it at a price point that people could afford. Like microwave ovens in the 1980s were not cheap. Now you can get them for like 80 75 70 bucks or something. They used to be 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000 dollars back in the 70s and 80s. So you know not until the tech becomes cheap enough then the cheaper tech will get adopted by more people. Then it becomes a standard. That's I think how VHS won. If I remember correctly anyways. Beta had 480 lines of resolution compared to VHS's 240. But VHS was better marketed. And cheaper. And that's what people wanted. You could get a VHS player for like a third of what a Betamax was. So people didn't really care about the quality when you could just see the image. It was hard to see anyways because the TVs really weren't that much better. But now you can tell the difference. But Betamax is far superior if I remember correctly. It's just they were too expensive. Sony lost that battle. They lost a lot of battles until they won with PlayStation I remember. They were losing a lot of battles. But you know they turned it around. Now Sony is pretty big with a lot of stuff. They have pretty much a movie. Sony Pictures is massive. And they combine that with their cameras and their gear and stuff. They're very good. But I think Sony is more seen in Japan interestingly enough as more of a North American company than a Japanese company in a way. Because they market more in the U.S. than they do in Japan. And I'll talk to Matt about this more. But the history of Sony is fascinating. All right guys. I got to go. I don't even know if this is the mic that's working. Thanks for watching.