00:00:00 John Daub: This is really incredible. It's been about a year, a little more than that since I was here. This is the old Olympic Village from 2020, 2021. If you remember, the Olympics were delayed because of that era with a lot of the panic that was happening in 2020. The Olympic Games for 2020 was kind of a wash. I lived through them. I even have a video about it if you want to check it out right here. This is called the Tokyo Olympic Experience Outside the Bubble, 2021 story. Not a lot of people saw it, but it was a documentation of what life was like here in Tokyo during that era where nobody was coming in here.

00:00:40 John Daub: This village was off limits. They had it cordoned off with police presence. Olympic athletes could not leave the compound and visitors like me could not come in except for today now. I can come in here. The times have changed. I've been here since the Olympics have ended. There was no people around, but now there are residents in the buildings here. It's really cool to see it back to life. In this episode, I'm going to take you around, give you an idea, and just out of curiosity, what is here? How is it doing after three years from those games in 2021?

00:01:19 John Daub: It's a stark contrast. However, I'm looking around and there sure is a lot of construction. Check it out. Check out the map here. Just to give you an overview of what it is here, we have the town map. There's a Sun Village, a Port Village, a Park Village. It's separated into quadrants here. We're going to take you to number four. There's a park over there, which is great for kids as long as the Olympic rings, I think, are over there. Some things to remember those games. Then the parks, which are closed off. That Sea Village was no access at the time. Now you have access, which is really cool. Surrounded by the water, we're going to get a look. You have a chance to look at Tokyo Bay and the Rainbow Bridge and a lot of other things that took place at that time. Without further ado, let's get started.

00:02:01 John Daub: Behind me is actually a junior high school. This is so exciting for me. A lot of these buildings, I think they were designed by Kengo Kuma. You can see there's some bamboo-looking parts in that structure. This is a junior high school and an elementary school. I don't think it's opened up yet, but there sure is a lot of green. The track and the playground made, I guess, of the fake AstroTurf. There's a shopping mall at the end, which was, I believe, where the cafeteria was, where the athletes ate. We're going to walk towards there right now. You can also see the uniforms. This is a brand new school. I'm going to think that this is going to be state of the art, all the stuff inside of there. That's pretty exciting, I think.

00:02:54 John Daub: Check it out. Here's the school uniforms for the kids going to this Harumi area that I'm in right now. Look at the neckties. I think it's a little bit washed out from the sun, but I think it's a navy blue. The skirts and the slacks, somewhat similar. You can see here, I'll pull back. It's not bad. I like the neckties. Kind of that light blue with a little bit of pink in there. Pretty cute. And they have some pins, blazer buttons. That's funny. They show the blazer buttons right there, which is the jacket, the backpacks, all kind of standard. And then there's the physical education. This is the summer uniforms. That's nice. Look at that. The summer uniforms look really good.

00:03:40 John Daub: I don't know. This is really off the beaten path, I think, for the center of Tokyo. There's no subway line. The closest is Kachidoki, and that's a 17-minute walk from here. So that's quite a ways. But it's interesting because I'm going to show you the Google map. This was just a blank space for the longest time. Now it's the Chuo City, which is the city I live in within Tokyo, the Harumi Junior High School and Elementary School. Very cool. And look at all the green that they have in there. Very nice. Across the street is Lalaport, which has a lot of shopping malls, one in Toyosu, which isn't very far away from here, which is massive. They've got a lot of new shops in there, and they make it a pretty cool place.

00:04:31 John Daub: So that's the Google shopping experience. On the ground floor, which you see right there with that blinking light, that, I believe, if I can zoom in, is the Team Japan 2020 Village. They sell food that they made during the Olympics for the athletes. The Japanese cuisine was renowned. Some of the athletes sharing it on social media looked really good at the time. You can get some of those recipes inside of there. I did go inside of the shopping mall just a little bit. I guess I can show you some of the images I took in there. Check it out. The first floor is a supermarket, and the second floor, there's a Daiso, which is a 100 yen shop. There's some restaurants in there that look pretty good. And you get somewhat of a bird's eye view. Well, it's an elevated view of the Olympic Village in there. There's a Matsumoto Kiyoshi, things that you would need for everyday life. So it's for the residents that are going to be moving in here or are in here.

00:05:35 John Daub: They finally have facilities. You don't have to take a taxi or a bus to go anywhere to get the stuff. You can get it all inside of here, which is brand new, clean. It smells clean. It looks clean. It is clean. It's so clean that they're not done with it. It's a clean construction zone. You can see they're lowering cranes, and they're still building it. These two skyscrapers were not here during the Olympics. The Olympics were shorter buildings, and now these are going up. It's a mega apartment complex. It's million-dollar apartments, I believe. And I've seen the architecture for this building. There's several in the Tsukishima, Tsukuda area. And you can see they're basic condominium apartments, probably about a million dollars to buy it for each one. The issues with living in this area is that it's just not...

00:06:38 John Daub: And we're going to end the live stream here. I want to take you around a little bit. Let's take a look-see. As I walk back the way we came, let me show you the map of the area, which we could talk a little bit about. And I'll have my eye on the chat here. This is where we are in the city of Tokyo. It's a man-made island. They were doing this from the Meiji Restoration all the way to just about before World War II. So this land has been settling for a long time now, being built. That chimney there, I think that's for burning garbage. That was the only tall structure on this island for the longest time. And now, you can see, that's where the school is, that spot on the right side. And I'm on the corner where that shopping mall is. And you can see the two spots where those big skyscraper apartment complexes are being built. There's the end of it, which is a park for kids.

00:07:30 John Daub: The International Ferry Terminal has been torn down there, and now it's become something else. I think they have a new terminal or something. See the teamLab and Tsukiji Market on that Tsukiji Market. The Toyosu Fish Market, the new one on the right side. And you can see, you know, it's a nice area. You know, I'm going to pause it here for a second. The end there, do you see that triangle end in the center of your screen? That was supposed to be the first spot for the Olympic Stadium. They eventually renovated, not renovated, but used the spot of the 1964 stadium. But the 2020 stadium was supposed to be built there. And I think that would have been the cornerstone of the city of Tokyo. It would have been a beautiful venue for concerts and whatnot. You would have had laser shows and things like this. Making Tokyo Bay very bright, vibrant. But they decided not to do that.

00:08:26 John Daub: I think that maybe it was 2016 because Tokyo was vying for the Olympics back then. But I saw the plans for what they were proposing. And that's where it was supposed to be. Right across from Hamarikyu Gardens, space boat makes its way under the Rainbow Bridge to the left side to get to Odaiba. That's also a very good ride. And there's Tsukiji right there on the right side now. Chuo City, which is my city. This is my backyard, I guess you could say. Olympic Stadium today, which is sort of a ghost town. Not a lot of stuff going on there. I think there's some soccer games. I think they made a big mistake. They should have just kept, they shouldn't have designed a stadium at all. A lot of scandal behind it. But Kengo Kuma's design is beautiful. And if you, I believe you could take tours inside of there. But I don't know. It's just history now.

00:09:15 John Daub: Let's take a look here. This is the center of the neighborhood now. It's called Harumi Flag, which is a big project on this entire island, which is right here. This whole island here we would say is Harumi. And Toyosu, the Lalaport is there. There's another one. This is the fish market. I take Leo to this point all the time to watch the boats go by. It's such a beautiful place. There's a place where you can eat bento. There's some barbecue areas here. This is Odaiba. You can see this is where the Gundam statue, where yesterday's livestream, or the day before yesterday, I took Leo here. And this is the Diver City. So that's where we are in the city. It's nice. You get some digital signage. This was gated off even after the Olympics because they were renovating it, getting it ready for residents to move in, I guess. And now that they are, these are all fairly expensive. I think they're all about a million dollars per unit.

00:10:20 John Daub: I don't know who's going to live in there. It's not like the Japanese economy is booming right now. I can't afford it. But these are all apartments for those that were in the Olympics. Let's take a look at what it looked like back then. This is some clips from the video on YouTube. You can go check it out. Please do. Not a lot of people did. But I kind of presented to you what was going on here. This is the Olympic Residence Nihonbashi. This is the area, what it looked like during the Olympics. You can see that was as tall as the buildings got back then. They did finish it in time to house the Olympic athletes. And on the team members, all the teams had their flags and colors out on the balcony. I thought that was really cool back then. Mongolia, Malaysia, Croatia. I think we had Puerto Rico. I didn't know they had their own team as well. Turkey, Ukraine, Kuwait. There's Korea.

00:11:19 John Daub: Of course the city was, had the colors of the Olympics as well. But the thing is, like, this is all shut off from the residents. This is all shut off. I'll put the link in the description of the video. All you have to do is search Only in Japan, Tokyo 2020 or 2021. I think comes up. We were cut off from the Olympics and we paid for it with our tax dollars because of that era that we were in. And it was a huge disappointment for everybody here. Actually made us all pretty darn mad, especially. It was hard to get tickets. If you did get tickets, they canceled it. And then you had to go reapply for the tickets. A lot of people were volunteering, but volunteering was really not easy because of all of the protocols in place. Again, this was locked down everybody. It was like a prison inside of here. Nobody could get in and out without security clearance. It was overdone.

00:12:27 John Daub: And if you watch that video, you'll see just how overdone, because I take you to the gates, what it looked like with Japanese Self-Defense Force was there like with guns and stuff. So you couldn't get in and out. It was pretty serious. That's the title of the video in case anybody wants to see it here. This is interesting. There's some signage here. This information signage is being actually used in the athletes village during the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic games. It remains here as an athlete's village legacy for the memory of the place, which accommodated the athletes who shared the dreams and impressions of the world. And they did through social media. But it wasn't the way we wanted to. This is actually, yeah, this was the sign that was in the village. The signage is marking this one here. So you can see it's colored with the colors of the Olympics, red, black, blue, yellow, and green.

00:13:25 John Daub: It doesn't actually point to anything that's here, I think. But it's just a reminder. There's the multifunction complex transport. Mall main dining hall. Oh, right. Now remember, they did have some sort of building here, which was a dining hall. So they ate here and they destroyed it and put in the school there. Interesting. I haven't been here yet. Because this was not open to the public for the longest time. I think it opened up earlier this year. The walkway where the athletes were able to go they had the Olympic rings here. So I was always across the river at Toyosu taking video from that side. That is the Toyosu Fish Market over there. And it's funny to me as someone who's lived through that era and the Olympics here to finally be on the other side.

00:14:36 John Daub: You will understand. It's kind of neat. This has all been redeveloped. There's a La Vista hotel which has the best breakfast in Japan for hotels, I would say. The one in Hakodate is an amazing breakfast at the La Vista Hakodate Bay location. Kanae and I have stayed there a couple of times. And that's where that what do you call they have a tourist attraction that looks like old Edo over there. I can't even remember the name of it. Some new buildings and hotels have been going up there. I think there was a JAL hotel in that area. But it's a nice little place. And then the Toyosu Fish Market across the way. Beautiful brick path that you can walk down. If you have a family and you want to just take a break from it all, this is the place to come. There's the Olympic Village right there. And you can see some people have laundry out on the balcony. That's really interesting to see.

00:15:28 John Daub: There's some apartments that have trees. And we're going to walk. Let's walk as far as we can around here. I don't know if we can get through. But they took out the International Ferry Terminal which used to be right over here. It was a pretty big building. In live streams that I did from the last three years, I was on the steps there and now it no longer exists. So things are moving really quickly here in Tokyo. Now we're starting to see the Rainbow Bridge. This is really nice. I like all the trees, the nature right here. Again, this is manmade land that was reclaimed from the Meiji era to just before the start of World War II, they finished it and have been settling. And now it's here. I think we can walk around the point. Just keep going. Most of it is open now to the public because we paid for it with our tax yen.

00:16:49 John Daub: On Tokyo Bay, helicopters are always taking tours around. So it's something that you'll hear a lot. Here's the walkway for it. The Harumi Greenery. You can see there is a sort of a running path that will take you around. No skateboarding. They're pretty serious about it too. So that's where the International Ferry Terminal was. You can see it's gone. Rainbow Bridge over there. There was a building there for decades. I think it went in in 1980 or something. Now they moved the ferry terminal to another place that is more accessible. The best thing buses sort of still come around, do a roundabout here. But I have to be honest, nobody really came to this corner. And yeah, of course, that's Odaiba. There's the Fuji TV building in the distance.

00:18:02 John Daub: Wow, it's funny to see things on the balcony. There's sort of like a security guard here on the end. That's funny. Bus is coming. So he's there to help people, help facilitate the crossing so nobody gets hit by a bus. That's pretty smart. It's been raining. I would have done this live stream about an hour or two earlier, but the rain was coming down pretty hard this morning. It cleared up, and now we've got a nice opportunity to do that. Let's go right through the middle of it. This was all like walled off. I feel like it's still there because I've been here several times since the Olympics ended walking through here to see the changes, but now I can actually go through the center of the village. So let's do that here.

00:19:20 John Daub: Here's the map. So this is going from the Park Village to the Sun Village. So we're going from park to sun village right now. Urban exploration. Yes, this is an urban village exploration. They do call it the Olympic Village. This feels like a university campus, doesn't it? They look like dormitories. Really stylish million-dollar dormitories, but it looks like it could be like the plaza or square in front of the library at a university or something. It's interesting. I don't know what was here during the Olympics and what wasn't because I wasn't in here. You'd have to be an athlete and share your experience. If you're not going to the Paris Olympics and you're watching this and have time, please do chime in on the chat or in the comments and let us know what your experience was. And how it's changed.

00:20:30 John Daub: I do like it. There's some water here. There's a little pond. Kids can jump in there in the summer, maybe. Fascinating. There's a little playground over there at the end. Let's keep walking through the heart of this. It's a little eerie with no one around. It is. There are residents that have moved in here. Again, there's like things on the balcony. Do you see? So there are residents here. There's a supermarket that's open. It's got a bakery inside there. It smells really good. There's a lounge. I can imagine athletes here checking out. They weren't allowed to interact with one another, but it seems like a really comfortable first floor lounge to get work done. But now it's the residents of the apartment in a kind of a shared area. Beautiful.

00:21:43 John Daub: Let's go to the street here and make a left and head towards the park. Which was opened up about two years ago. They opened it up in 2022. And I took Leo there when he was about nine months old, 10 months old to run around. So I know that took a long time to open up. These buildings didn't exist. And you can see this is going to be a really nice apartment complex when it does finish. Probably in six months from now. Well, there's a lot of children's stuff. There's a lot of kids. Of course the elementary and junior high school, which I showed you in the beginning. There's a post office across the street there. But this is also the showing of some of the drawings from a children's school. Oh, it's a convenience store. FamilyMart. There's a convenience store here now. How cool I did not know that. So yeah, this place does have everything. Restaurants, convenience stores, post office, office. There's a fire department on the corner as well. Bicycle parking.

00:23:08 John Daub: Hey John, ready for the new Karate Kid movie starring Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan in December? Really? That's news to me. And no, they didn't ask me to star in it. I would have said yes, even if it means being a stunt double. I could have done it. I could pull it off and get hit in the face a couple of times. I think Jackie Chan's pretty good control. That would have been a lot of fun. Yeah, I don't know. I'll check out the movie if it comes here. I'll give you a full report in December. Again, this roadway was all closed. It's still not really at 100% vacancy, so it does feel a lot of noise from the construction, but it does feel sort of still like a ghost town. And I don't know what it's going to look like when it is finished. I mean, by that I mean like how it feels, because we do see what it looks like, of course, but how is it going to feel with all the people that are moved into these units? I just don't know. I can't anticipate it.

00:24:24 John Daub: One thing I do know and remember is that it's very hard. Here's some signage and maps and information. It's really hard to live stream in this area. So I'm going to have to do a little bit of a test. I'm going to just kind of skirt it. So we're going to walk pretty closely, just enough that I can show you what the playground looks like. There's a large green area that Leo and I come and kick a soccer ball around a couple of times a year. There's a sign that tells you that it was a 2020 Olympic Park on the corner, and this is the end of it. I could show you on this map again where the blue spot is, just so you get an idea of where we are. We're at the end where that boat is on the top. That's where we are right now.

00:25:35 John Daub: A lot of buses rolling through here. So the public transportation, I know that the city is trying to do their best to get people to want to live in here. I don't know if they've sold all of the units yet. It would be interesting to see more news on it. But across there, Leo and I have gone down that slide several times. Do you see it? Hold on. That's a pirate ship, everybody. I remember seeing this playground being built before it opened from the International Ferry Terminal that's no longer there. There's a kid walking up to the third deck. And then there's this slide, a roller slide. That's really cool. Leo was really brave. He went down that slide when he was one year old. Didn't cry. Amazing. You can see here what it looks like. Gosh, look at those corner windows. You're going to have an amazing view, aren't you, from these corner windows. Looking out the other side, you would get Mount Fuji.

00:26:45 John Daub: At the end of the street is the fire department. So if you do get in trouble, there are some mega fire trucks and fire boats as well chasing right in here. Pirate ship complete with slide. It would be funny if they had a deck. But then that wouldn't be very child-friendly if it didn't lead to the water. But if it did, I guess you'd need one of those. Not a deck, but a plank. Right? Walk the plank. I'm going to take you now. We're going to go around towards the shopping mall with restaurants. And maybe we can get a quick peek inside. And I'm going to see if we can see the menu of the Olympic Village restaurant. And that would be a good place to end right there. So we're going to cross the street here and take a right.

00:27:45 John Daub: Make the kids walk the plank. Now that's something they should do for discipline at school. Have the plank. The teachers will make them walk the plank. Okay. All right, little Johnny, you've been a bad boy. Time to walk the plank. No, okay, I'll change my tune. Just want anything but that. Yeah, you may do. It's over. Oh, here it is. Site of the 2020 Olympics. That's kind of cool. Nice view of the entire harbor from there. There's a post office guy walking his bike. Very comfortable. I guess we can go. We could call it the pirate school. A lot of people would enroll. Very few would graduate. Arr. All right, let's see what we can see. I'm going deep into the jungles between the buildings here.

00:29:02 John Daub: Michael writes in here, all that walking, think you need to grab a snack? I do. I'm going to have to grab a sandwich or something, Michael, because we got, well, yesterday I told you it was our sixth anniversary. And tonight we're going to go eat at the place where we had the wedding reception. We couldn't get reservations on Sunday, but we got it for Monday. We're taking Leo out of his school early. So we're going to go over to that site. It's near Shinagawa and have dinner over there. Thanks to Michael for the present that you gave us through Brandy. We really appreciate it. Six years went by so fast. So today is our official unofficial anniversary day because we couldn't do much yesterday on Sunday because Kanae had work and we were quite busy. So we're making today the special day. And while Leo and Kanae is doing some work and while Leo is at school, I'm taking a break from editing and other stuff to do this because it stopped raining. It has been raining all day.

00:30:13 John Daub: That's interesting. So what is that? What exactly is this? Well, we're going to have to investigate. It looks like it's just a little deck. Which is so cool. If you're a resident walking or living here, you're having the entire Olympic Village experience too with me. So we have to explore. Oh, that's kind of neat. Look at that. There's a tree in the middle. Yeah, kind of like a platform. Right. Let's go to the end here. This would be fun. I could see kids running around here exploring. It does look like a suburban. We're in the center of Tokyo and it looks like a suburban area. It's a little bit of a city. We're in Tokyo with all the trees and green grass between the buildings. Thank you, Carrie. Thank you, Christian. It's very nice. There's some water down there. They put a lot of thought into this.

00:31:24 John Daub: As you can see, the units apparently have different prices attached to them so it's not a... I just heard they were all multi-million, million-dollar apartments. A lot of the new buildings that are going up here, totally overpriced for what the market is. But I guess it's foreign residents, foreigners, internationals that are coming and moving into these apartment buildings. Because I don't know a lot of people in Japan that have the moolah, the cash, to afford some of them. I'm not there yet. But I don't think this is the kind of area that I'd want to live anyways. You're kind of locked in. Oh, this is soft, this isn't concrete. This is like a soft rubber that I'm on. And this is kind of cool, a little playground area for kids to explore. All right, let's go over to the supermarket.

00:32:36 John Daub: I think I'll have to put in a chapter list for people so that you can skip to parts. That might be a little boring. I don't know how interesting it is for you to walk through here. Rainbow node, bird's nest. Bird forest. What's that? Dots Plaza. All right, let's go for the bird's forest. Hey, Ramsey Silent's here. Get half dozen flowers for your anniversary because I was never here. You got it. There's a place right across the street from us. We're going to pick up some flowers, and I'll send you a picture of them. Thank you for thinking of us, Ramsey Silent. That's so nice of you. This building looks kind of like an outlier. It just looks different. This is the Sun Village, according to the map. They don't all look the same. I guess if they did, it wouldn't be very exciting, would it? It would be kind of a boring place. So there is differences in the architecture and the designs of the buildings, for sure.

00:34:01 John Daub: We're walking over to the bird forest. There's a little bridge over here that goes over some water. Oh, this is the apartments where the Korean team was during the Olympics. I'm trying to remember. It would have been cool. It's cool. This place is, it really is surreal. It really feels surreal because this is all locked under walls and, you know, lock and key for a long time, like a prison, and now here we are walking around freely. I like that. The Aussies had to quarantine for two weeks when they got back home. That is awful. Imagine you had to quarantine, get here two weeks in advance, you compete in a place that was like a prison, and then you had to go back home and quarantine for another two weeks, and then we learn that it probably would have been okay if we just let it go. I don't know. But seems, I think it was just a little bit overdone. The fear factor. Those Olympics will go down as a reminder of the era in which we all lived through.

00:36:12 John Daub: There's an elevator going up. That's kind of cool. How many floors is that? That's a lot, and they're not done yet. This is, this looks really nice. These are, I believe, smaller apartments. I can't remember, but they had these bamboo attachments to it. I'm not, I don't really like this style too much. Maybe some of you might. I think the bamboo just kind of gets in the way. It's too dark. I would just want the glass. I'd want more to make it feel more open, but it's interesting. This is as close as I've gotten to this apartment. It is pretty. I'm not sure if that's my style, though. Right, it's kind of cool. And this is one of the canals here. If you do come here, you'll see the fire department often does like a, there's a boat in there right now. The fire department does drills and training in here, so you see them with scuba dive equipment and stuff for disaster training. It's kind of neat to walk, like this bike path was open for the longest time.

00:37:49 John Daub: The buses come here now, right in front of the Lalaport Shopping Mall. There's somebody doing some engineering, window cleaning. Well, they've been around for about seven, eight years, those apartment buildings over there, and the amount of construction, as I said, like, million dollar apartments. How many millionaires, I guess, multi-millionaires are there in Tokyo, in Japan? Not that many. CEOs don't make as much money as the ones in the west. So, to me, I don't see how they fill these apartments with, you know, Japanese. I just don't know how, how many wealthy people want to come and live here. They also probably are already settling in the Roppongi area and some of the other areas. So it makes me wonder who's actually moving into this. Yamino Game, the bamboo looks weird. It does, sort of. Doesn't it? It's sort of, I don't know, kind of looks like it gets in the way of the view. I would just want to rip them off if I could. It's not my cup of tea, but...

00:39:19 John Daub: Alright, let's cross the street. We're going to go to the Lalaport there, which is Lalaport Terrace is what it's called. That's where my bicycle is. There's a parking lot inside of there. And we'll just get a quick look-see here as I cross the street. A couple of kids actually live here. It doesn't look like Japan here. It's too wide open. When you see them with their Lands' End backpacks, it's too wide open here. This is the Matsumoto Kiyoshi drugstore. The second floor has a Daiso in there, so there's a 100 yen shop. Right there. A Royal Host. There's a bunch of restaurants here. This is a Chinese restaurant that looks really interesting. A burger place. So there's places to eat inside there. That's kind of neat. There's also a gym up here on the third floor. There's a nursery school. There's a studio. I think it was like photography. I can't remember. I walked around there a little bit before here. And here's a supermarket. And we're going to go in through this gate and see if we can see the menu. There's a Baskin Robbins in there too.

00:40:52 John Daub: It does feel very sterile. That's a good way to say it. Very sterile environment. When I was backpacking back in 1996, 1997, years ago before I moved here to Japan, I met some friends in Prague, which was in itself a really unique experience. After the wall came down in 1991, everything on the east side, including Prague, opened up and it became a really big tourist place. Although everything was like a dollar or less. A liter of beer in Prague back then was about 25 cents. I stayed for one dollar a night inside of a university dormitory in the summer. And I made three good friends from the Netherlands, from Almere. Almere is this sterile town and these reclaimed lands. And where all the trees are in a line, all the buildings kind of look alike. It's really beautiful, but could drive you crazy because of the symmetry of everything. You need chaos in life. And Almere wasn't one of those places. But I did love going to visit them all the time. And I would crash on their floor. They were pretty close to Amsterdam. And I could take the train in and go to the attractions there, which included the Heineken Brewery and the Anne Frank House and just the canals and nighttime trips to the Red Light District. Just to walk around there.

00:42:43 John Daub: I really want to see if I can sneak in there and see the menu. Hold on a second. Okay. So you have to go in through here and the entrance is over there. All right, let's go see really quickly. Oh, wow. Here's the Olympic torch. Check it out. Wow. I remember the design on this and everything. I remember when they were running through the streets going around Tokyo, taking all the precautions to do that. It's kind of neat here. Oh, you can see what the village looked like back then in Miraitowa. Okay. So we can see the menu here. A drip coffee for large sizes, 430. You can get some homemade scones. Oh, there's what the medals look like. I'd like to see a menu. I'm sure it's on the website somewhere. I don't want to bother them. I don't have a permit to film here. So you don't want to be a bother. But that's pretty cool. And the supermarket, again, is brand new. So it smells new. That's really cool. The restaurant. That's cool to see Miraitowa, the mascot. Mirai meaning future. It's pretty fascinating.

00:45:51 John Daub: Yeah, the music was Italian because they want you to feel like you're in a completely different world when you go in there. And for Japanese, it would be being not in Japan. You want to be in a completely different world. So from the second floor here, I think we're going to get a pretty nice bird's eye view of the Olympic Village. Well, it's not. It's from three and a half meters up, about 12 feet. So what do you guys think? Where are you watching from? What part of the world are you watching the series from? Let me know in the comments below. It's really exciting to walk around and see an area of my city. This is Chuo City. Start to finally open up to the public after years of being a construction site. It sort of still is. But now we're starting to see getting a glimpse of it and be able to walk around it, for me, is just incredible.

00:46:33 John Daub: The school has let out, check it out. So this elementary school, brand new, you can see the AstroTurf, very nice grass infield over there. It looks like it's going to be a beautiful place to live. And for the people who are moving into the Harumi area, I'm a little bit jealous. I know that it's not really easy to get around here, but there's no public transport. The closest subway station is far away, connected by buses quite a bit. But it's nice to, I think if I moved out here I'd have a pretty good life. I think it would be pretty good living. It's relaxed, because there's so much, you feel like there's so much open space here. It feels a lot more relaxed. Alright everybody, see you in the next live stream tomorrow as I take you around every area of Tokyo and Japan. Tonight it's time for anniversary dinner, so I gotta get home and get ready for that. See ya. Matane.