00:00:00 John Daub: It is a very windy day here in Tokyo. Right now I'm looking down at the old Tsukiji Market. That's just a vacant lot during the 2020-2021 Summer Olympic Games. This was the parking lot. And now it's the site of a proposed new stadium that's expected to be completed in 2032 or 2033. Not quite sure, but it's still a proposal. They've been wondering what to do with this land for a very long time. I think this one is going to go through.

00:29:00 John Daub: And what is so cool about this proposal and the possibility of it, you can see there's some excavators down there grooming the land, is that this multi-purpose stadium is something they've been planning for well over 10 years. It was supposed to be the site of the first Olympic stadium in the 2016 bid that Tokyo had. Tokyo came in second to Rio in that year. It was supposed to be right here. Then they decided to move it in the bid to Ariake, which is where there's a lot of Olympic arenas right now. And then eventually the new stadium is the site of the old stadium for the 2020-2021 Games.

01:11:00 John Daub: But what is super interesting about this, the pitch city, because I've been here long enough to know about the history of Tokyo. And that one is quite interesting. I'll show you what that stadium was supposed to look like. This is where I am right now. You can see that empty space. That empty lot that's been like this for years, right in the center. This is the heart of Tokyo, right on the Sumida River between the Kachidoki Bridge and the new bridge. I can't even remember what it's called. It's so new. It came in a couple of years before the Olympics in Hamarikyu Gardens. It's prime real estate, everybody. They're going to be putting in, I'm assuming, and that's the outer market. You see Tsukiji right there? That's where there's a lot of street foods and maybe one of the biggest tourist traps. Although it is not a bad thing. It's just all foreign tourists that are there.

02:04:00 John Daub: It almost looks like a baseball stadium, doesn't it? And you can see if I scroll out here, that space on the top left is the Imperial Palace where the emperor lives. It's a kind of a dark, no street light area of the city. It's a fascinating place. The stadium is set to look like this but it looks really beautiful. But what is great about the stadium is that it actually moves inside to reposition itself in the pitch to make, I think it was four or eight, different types of venues: one for baseball, it also makes a venue for concerts, one for basketball, for other sports. It's kind of exciting. There's even some pitches. This is what the site looks like now from the air. It's basically all just groomed and ready to be built upon.

03:07:00 John Daub: They were talking about putting and this goes all the way back before the current mayor of Tokyo, Yuriko Koike, wanted to do something with this land and they've been wanting to move Tsukiji Market for a very long time. They found out that the land was corrupted with poisons from the old gas plants that were there so the new mayor Koike decided to stop it because it was a very bad idea to do that and the move over there for a very long time, which is probably a smart thing. Eventually moving about four years ago, market has been to Toyosu. The old Tsukiji Market again, as I said, not a place that I think that the more I go there the more I'm like yeah I'm not really liking this place so much as a local but hey that's just me.

03:55:00 John Daub: I want to go over this news report here. They kind of laid it out. You can see there's the old Tsukiji Market where you go for the fish auction. Here that's all gonna be gone and they're gonna be putting in a stadium again it's so proposed. They just had a press conference about it a few days ago. It's supposed to look like this. It does look quite beautiful. I don't know the mock-ups doesn't seem like they're all quite right but it's not supposed to be completed for about eight or nine years if they were to start construction today I'm guessing. Everything like everything in Japan with these mega projects they're kind of delayed. That reporter I think was here yesterday on the same spot that we are like right now looking down on it. There's a map on the bottom right. See the excavators that we just saw before working hard on it. That's the old Tsukiji Market right there with that circle around it. You could walk and get your fish underneath that covered spot. Now it looks like this.

04:45:00 John Daub: I remember back in the day a friend of mine lived in the Kachidoki Plaza Tower and in the summer we'd be able to smell Tsukiji Market with the Sun beaten down on those roofs. Sometimes it was actually a really clean place. Here's the map now looking down on it. I think it's the press conference. There's a video that they show the area along the river pretty much where I am right now. It looks exciting, doesn't it? Again this arena is gonna be where they can be holding concerts. It can be changed to suit different types of arenas which is kind of cool so it's multi-purposed. The question is in their soccer as well football but the question is do they even need this 50,000 seat stadium? Is what it's going to be. 50,000 people is quite big.

05:25:00 John Daub: The original bid in '20s for the 2016 Olympics was a hundred thousand people. They quickly moved that down to 80,000 but then ten years later we're this is where we are and the questions were will the Tokyo Giants baseball team here move from the Tokyo Dome and the answer was no but there's an asterisk mark like why would they? Tokyo Dome still is really nice but it kind of feels like the 1980s and every time I go in there like the Astrodome which is no longer. You know the Tokyo Dome is still there but it kind of feels like the 1980s.

06:09:00 John Daub: And the purpose of the stadium why they need this here I think if you look at the city and this is the Tsukiji Market right now you can see it's very famous for the street food it's very famous for its fish Japanese cuisine. For Tokyo Tsukiji Market is sort of like the gourmet center. It's right next to Ginza and there's still some market vendors on the outer market here. The TV reporters taking a look and interviewing one of the guys who's discussing about how the amount of customers that came here really dropped off and maybe it's a good thing that people come in there. He's there now. This guy I've ridden my bike again this is my backyard and gone past his shop before. A lot of the makers that were dealing with fish kind of moved to either you moved away to Toyosu or you stayed here and there weren't as many customers until the tourists came in with the street food options which is not a bad thing as I said just touristy you know tourist trap prices sort of reflect that the lines certainly do.

07:00:00 John Daub: Here's a proposal they're talking about Tsukiji's outer market and the design of it I guess there's gonna be some renovations and changes going parts. If you had some property or you bought it cheap over the last five years in that area your price probably gonna pay off by waiting if this proposal does go through because it's gonna be some super prime real estate. I mean when you just look at the designs look at that big apartment building I'm sure that's gonna be million-dollar apartments looking down on the stadium. It's gonna be an exciting place I'm sure with entertainment and a lot of other stuff. Here it is super windy on here. I had to take off my hat so I don't want to lose my hat. I don't let too many of these it could go fly into the river here.

07:43:00 John Daub: But I had a friend over there you can see up here this is the Kachidoki Plaza Tower about fifteen years ago he lived up there his company put him up there on like the thirty-sixth floor thirty fifth floor and I'd hang out on his balcony beautiful views of Mount Fuji when the weather allowed for it to be as cool but he's not very fun when it's sunny. But you could smell the market in the August heat sort of wafting up here. And if the wind changed the smell would waft over to Ginza, which is just right over there. You see the cranes over there is the east side of Tokyo Station. So the city of Tokyo is undergoing some massive changes, which are gonna make it extremely exciting city on this side of the Imperial Palace. I know Shibuya Shinjuku. Everybody likes that side. How about Meiji-jingūgaien or this side's gonna hopping in the 2028 and the 2035 because of all the new buildings and construction. She's kind of new now with the changes, but it's gonna be newer and it's gonna be exciting if there's a stadium here. There's gonna be venues like Taylor Swift singing in this stadium, which is the talk when she came here. Is she gonna be singing next time in the Tokyo Dome or in this arena?

09:03:00 John Daub: I just remember the Bad News Bears playing in that in the movie playing their game at the Astrodome and it was just so cool because they had AstroTurf and so it was an iconic dome. Tokyo Dome kind of fits in that old feeling of the dome era and I'm sure this new stadium will have a lot more light. There's a lot to like about what they're doing here.

09:26:00 John Daub: All right, I want to go back down to the 2016 bid. They actually bid for the 2012 games, but London won those. I remember running the Tokyo Marathon way back when every year and you get a chance to meet Ishihara when you go to pick up your bib. He was pretty accessible at the Tokyo Marathon, which was kind of his baby. And every time the press would ask him questions he would talk about his dream of hosting the Olympics here as a way to revitalize Tokyo to bring it back and then hope the 1964 Olympics brought the city of Tokyo after World War II.

10:05:00 John Daub: The stadium looked really really amazing check this out. This is what the old the stadium was supposed to be the Tsukiji market then they moved it to the tip. Let me show you on the map where exactly this this is here. I can bring this in the media. This is what the stadium is supposed to look like it. Those are like I think they're like solar panels on the top of it. Here's where it was supposed to be. This is where the Olympic Stadium for the 2020 bid was supposed to be as well when they first pitched the stadium. They were gonna do it in the same spot as a 2016 stadium. And they were able to reaffirm that it can move up to there. Don't know they just looked at the cost and decided to move it. This doesn't make any sense to me. This is such a bureaucratic thing to move.

11:00:00 John Daub: You gotta look at this. Let's call this the Green Olympics, okay? Oh, but we're gonna put it on the site of the old Olympic Stadium. Oh, but we're just gonna tear that down because it doesn't look that great. And we wanna be a city that looks new, so we're gonna put in a stadium that looks like the future. We're gonna pay this a billion dollars. Oh, we don't like that plan because it's now controversial. Let's build it with traditional Japanese materials and hire a Japanese architect, Kengo Kuma, which is really awesome. Let's waste all this money. Oh, alright, we're not gonna make it as green as we were supposed to do because it's actually not environmentally friendly to do all of this stuff. It was just the biggest, like, misstep after misstep after misstep. Hosting the Olympics is not an easy thing in Japan. A city, a country and city that's run by the consensus, it's a very long process. There's no leadership, it's all consensus. Leaders can help people point in the right direction, but unless you have a very strong leader, you can't get anything done here. It just takes forever and the compromises, they're all half-baked that nobody wants. And you end up getting something that's just a massive waste of money. That's been my experience with these projects. The stadium is no different. They should have stuck with the original plan. Man, it would have been an amazing stadium.

12:19:00 John Daub: That would have been... I'm panning over here. You got Tokyo Tower over there. We're coming to Yoyogi Park. The stadium, if I'm panning over here, because I think the rains are gonna come in a second, would have been right there. You see where that gas, the blue building is? It would have been down there at the tip of this island. And it would have overlooked Tokyo Bay and it would have been freaking amazing. I could show you this map here. You see it on the end of the islands there on the bottom of your screen? This is where the Tsukiji Market is and where the stadium is planned to be. Don't get me wrong, it's so close to Ginza and public transportation, it makes a lot of sense. But on the top of your screen where Harumi Port is, that's where the stadium was originally supposed to be for the 2020 Olympics and was the decided place for the 2016 Olympics after Tsukiji was ruled out. So they're going back to the original plans and they finally figured it out. This is a great place for a venue. Make the most of it. They're gonna be putting high-rise apartments here, very expensive luxury places.

13:28:00 John Daub: And if I pan out here, I believe... Yeah, you can see it there. The end on those two islands, that's Harumi. And it was supposed to be right there near the Rainbow Bridge. It was supposed to be beautiful. I thought it was amazing what the stadium planned for before looked like. Again, this is like such an old photo that I've tried to sharpen up a little bit. But that was solar panels on the roof of it, 100,000 originally. Then they moved it down to 80. Right on the corner looking Tokyo Bay. Imagine all of the blimp and the drone shots. You'd be able to really see the city. That didn't happen. That didn't happen. So, that's what happens.

14:11:00 John Daub: Will this actually take place? I think so. I think it's gonna happen. I think that they just did a press conference in Chuo Ward. This is my ward. I live in this city. Tokyo is a metropolitan area with 23 wards. And each ward is considered its own city. There's a mayor of each ward. So they had a meeting, a press conference, I believe about three days ago at the Chuo Ward offices. And they talked about this. It's gonna really be great for my ward. My ward and my islands here. This is Tsukiji. This is Chuo Ward. And across the bridge which is built for the, after the Russo-Japanese War. The Kachidoki Bridge which is being renovated. I think they're about complete with that renovation. I think 1905. This is well over 100 years ago. This island is man-made. All of this on this side. Going all the way back to Harumi. There's two of them. It's been settling for a very long time. And now they're building high-rise buildings here. And most of these going for like a million dollars. I don't know where all these rich people come from. But I'm telling you right now. This is going to be the future of Tokyo on this side. Eventually public transportation is gonna come in here. It's all accessible by buses at the moment. Eventually there's gonna be more attractions, more entertainment.

15:35:00 John Daub: I think that the side with Shinjuku and Shibuya is going to, in the 2030s, the cities kind of fade away on the water side as long as it doesn't get hit by a major earthquake and then get all destroyed by tsunamis and whatever. It's gonna be... This is gonna be the face of Tokyo, not Shinjuku and Shibuya. But I'm sure you guys are still gonna go there as a tourist. And that's my 26 years of living in Japan of experience telling you that. Based on the plans and the way that they've really done the city, the Toyosu, Harumi, Kachidoki, and the Tsukiji area towards Ginza, and Tokyo Station being a hub. It's close to the airport. It's much closer and easier to get to Haneda Airport from here. So the future is... As Stig01 writes in here, the future rules. It does.

16:24:00 John Daub: Mariko Susato is here. Aloha. I've never been to Tsukiji Market. Tried looking for it when I visited years ago, but couldn't find it sadly after noontime. You couldn't find Tsukiji... Well, it's next to Kachidoki Bridge. If you come to Kachidoki Bridge, you'll... It's right there. It's hard to miss it. Back in the day, you couldn't miss it because you could smell it. The closer you got to it, the more it would smell. But never really smelled that bad.

16:49:00 John Daub: Let me walk down towards the market because I believe in 20 years, maybe in 10 years, this is going to be a historical episode. As we walk across this very modern bridge with Tokyo Tower there, panning to the right, all we see is emptiness. And in 10 years, this is going to be a very modern bridge. It's going to be an amazing, amazing stadium. Again, it's still a proposal. Anything can happen, but looks like a foregone conclusion at this moment. As trucks come in here, you guys are seeing it. You're seeing the future. And if you're watching this in 10 years from now, you're seeing the past.

17:32:00 John Daub: John Lopez, it's amazing that that bridge, the Kachidoki Bridge, is 100 years old. More than 100 years old. It survived the great Kanto earthquake. I believe it's one of those bridges that was made from the steel of battleships after treaties with the U.S. and other Western powers. Japan, don't build more battleships and be a country of peace. And we'll give you subsidies and all this other stuff on oil to help you progress. And then they reneged on that. And then World War II happened. There's a long history behind that. But they used some of that steel that was planned for battleships. You can see that in Eitaibashi. And they turned it into bridges. I don't know if that's that story for this particular bridge. But it is for a lot of the bridges along the Sumida River. But the Kachidoki Bridge has a really long history. It was built out of pride of beating the Russians. The first Asian power to beat a European power, which was Russia at the time. So a lot of really interesting history there. Japan's always been pretty formidable in that way. They just kept thumping Russia over and over again.

18:44:00 John Daub: Now I've been here in Tokyo now most of my 26 years. I moved here in 2004 into the city. And I haven't left since. I've been living here for a very long time. I've got to see a lot of changes. But that's one structure that hasn't. Except the Tokyo Tower has gotten shorter. After the great Tohoku earthquake of great Japan, East Japan earthquake. The tip was bent. And I believe it used to be one meter taller than the Eiffel Tower or something like that. I think it's now shorter. Because they had to fix it. So that tip was bent because of all the shaking back in 2011. I remember that too very clearly. My gosh, those are the worst years after. The worst year. All the aftershocks from that. My gosh, I thought I was on a boat swaying every five minutes for weeks after that earthquake. We had like magnitude fives and sixes. I had to go to Osaka just to stabilize myself. Because I felt seasick. Because my apartment building kept swaying.

20:05:00 John Daub: All right, I'm going to just go down a little bit more. And then the rain is starting to come down. And I'm going to skedaddle back home. But I thought that this was going to be a really good live stream. Because I think, you know, we only get one chance of seeing this. And like this. And this is the start of something that's going to be pretty incredible in a couple of years. You're going to see a lot of construction here. I expect this area to be loud and noisy. And dusty. You're going to see stadiums. High rise apartment buildings. Lots of lights. Laser shows. Like Disneyland. With shops. Which is what Disney is, sort of. Kind of cool. What do you guys think? Let me know in the comments below. Don't forget to hit the like button.

20:55:00 John Daub: By the way, I'll be doing some Q&A for Patreon supporters starting next Monday. If you have questions about your travel trip to Japan, I'm the one to ask. I've been here for a very long time. Lived in 60 different cities. Been to every prefecture three times. I want to say thank you. Thank you to all my Patreon supporters who have been supporting the area, many of them since 2017 when I started it. And I'm really happy to be now doing like podcasting for them over there. It's going to be really fun to have call-in shows. We now have a phone number that you can leave a message that I can play onto the show so you can catch me 24 hours a day right there. Just make sure that those messages are clean messages. And we have moderators that'll knock them out if not.

21:41:00 John Daub: Look at that! Four or five excavators going at it. Woo! Oh, and just over here to the right, we have some foremen. Or engineers. Actually, more probably engineers kind of surveying. That concrete or the hard land is what used to be the parking lot for the 2020 Olympics. They had all the buses and stuff. And then after the Olympics, it was a parking lot of Olympic cars. And they got rid of that. And now this is what you got. And what I got, which is going to be rain all over me if I don't get it. I don't get back to my bicycle and pedal back home.

22:34:00 John Daub: Tomorrow, I'll be taking you to Takayama. Why am I shouting? It's really loud with the cars going by. Maybe not for you listening on the other side. I can't monitor it, so I just assume. If I can't hear myself, you probably can't hear me too good either. But I'll be taking you to Takayama. If you've never been there before, it's one of the great country locations, like rural locations in Japan that's very well set up for tourism. The morning market. I don't know if we're going to be able to get there in time. Peso has said there's a croissant that I have to go and eat there apparently. I'm getting the car tonight. We're driving very early in the morning heading to Takayama. If you're there, you can probably catch us around 10:30 to 12 o'clock or so in Takayama. Maybe the Miyagawa market. We're going to look around for a little bit, buy a Sarubobo, and then move on over to Shirakawa-go, which is where we're going to be spending the night for a couple of nights. It's going to be a lot of fun. And we're taking you with you on this channel. So thanks for hitting that subscribe button. And joining us for some adventures as I take it every corner. It's an amazing country.

23:38:00 John Daub: Yes, you're going to see Takayama tomorrow. It's going to be pretty awesome. I'm taking my drone and cameras and the rain should be gone by then. Hopefully, we have a really nice five-hour drive from Tokyo. Again, I'm leaving at sunrise. I hope that Kanae and Leo can wake up in time because I'm ready to drive. I'm so stoked. I wake up, I jump right out of bed, and I'm going to get into that car and we're going to drive the heck out of the city. The construction. And we're going out to the mountains. And the countryside. And you're coming with us. So see you tomorrow, everybody. Stay dry. I'm going to try too. See you tomorrow.