00:04 John Daub: This is the Toyokawa Inari Betsuin (豊川稲荷別院), a branch of the Toyokawa Inari near Toyohashi in Aichi. It's one of the places where you can see the Inari foxes with those red capes on, and there are lots of them. They're quite unique. I used to live near Toyokawa Inari and saw they had this in Tokyo, so I thought I'd stop in. You have to be very respectful when you're in here. You're allowed to film the foxes but not the areas of prayer, so just be careful about that. It's a really unique place, and we'll talk a little bit about Inari and the shrine. Sorry, it's a shrine. I get that a little confused.

01:05 John Daub: This plastic one looks a little out of place, to be honest. It's brought to you by the association. You can see they have these prayer blocks that we can leave something behind. I think they're about 500 yen. So I'm just going to walk around a little bit and then I'll show you some of the history of this place. Some of this stuff is in English here. The god of happiness, which is very good.

02:00 John Daub: That's just beautiful. And it's so peaceful in here with the red torii gates. It's very peaceful. How you doing everybody? I thought today that I would do this. I have a little prayer for all of you as well. It was raining all day yesterday and finally the weather's nice here in Tokyo and I thought I'd go for a walk around the Akasaka area. This is really close to Omotesando, Shibuya and Akasaka. I would say Akasaka Station is maybe the closest, but from Omotesando it's about a 20-minute walk.

02:45 John Daub: Let's go to the front entrance here. Look at the fox on the side of the vending machine. There's a big one up here. This really is like a little paradise in the center of the city. It's so tranquil. There's a lot of traffic going by on the main road, Route 246, cutting through Tokyo. This is like a slice of paradise. All right, let's go out the main entrance and I'll show you where exactly I am here.

04:03 John Daub: This is where you buy the prayer blocks and other omamori (protection charms) at the front office. I like the touchscreen. Well done. You can see on the map of Tokyo, here's the Imperial Palace and we are here. This is right next to the Akasaka Estate, where the emperor has his offices, like literally right next to it. Have to be respectful when you go into temples and shrines. The website here also in English. I'll put a link in the description. There's a map here, so you can go and check it out yourself.

04:49 John Daub: Now, this place is part of the Toyokawa Inari. Toyokawa being near Nagoya, near Toyohashi, Okazaki, where I live. But this shrine here, let's go in here and just take a look at the map. We're gonna zoom in. There's the Imperial Palace right in the center of the city. You see Shibuya, Shinjuku, the Olympic Stadium. This is all pretty much in walking distance here. The heart of it is Akasaka. And this is a little slice of paradise in the middle of Akasaka. It's not very big either. It's right on the corner of the Imperial Akasaka Estate. You see, it's a lot of greenery. And a lot of people don't realize how green Tokyo really is. It's such a beautiful city in that sense if you compare it to other places. Lots of parks, lots of trees.

05:42 John Daub: Now, I think maybe that might have come about after World War II. A lot of the city was flattened. And during that time and during reconstruction, it wasn't just about slapping up concrete buildings mostly. But they also made sure that they had parks and were able to plan out Tokyo quite well after that. But the main shrine is here near Nagoya. And this, if you've never been to Toyokawa Inari, I highly recommend it if you are near Nagoya. This is one, it's much, much bigger than what I just showed you here. I used to live in Toyohashi. So it's a place I would take people all the time who visited me, other English teachers. I lived in Okazaki nearby.

06:25 John Daub: This is where, it's much bigger than it looks right here. And inside there you have sites like this. There are, like, it seems like there are tens of thousands of the Inari foxes wearing those pretty red capes. It's so striking with the green moss and the subtle light coming in, especially in the afternoon. It's also a little creepy if you're the only one there. And there aren't as many visitors. I guess the visitors have gone up, but when I was there 25 years ago, there really weren't a lot of visitors around. And the Toyokawa Inari is quite famous with Japanese. And I think with foreign tourists, it's probably gonna pick up, become one of the more popular sites. It's just kind of off the beaten path. Toyohashi isn't exactly on everybody's itinerary. But it's one of those places near Nagoya.

07:20 John Daub: Nagoya, not a lot of people, unless you're going to Legoland, there's not a lot of reasons to stop in Nagoya. It's a very livable city near Toyota, which is where the manufacturing plants are. I used to live there, so I knew it quite well. It's a very livable place. I keep saying that because it really is. It's the manufacturing hub of Japan. But this is a small piece of that shrine here in Tokyo. I'd been in there maybe once, but I don't know if I've ever been there. I can't remember. I've been living in the city of Tokyo for a very long time. And you can see it's right off of the highway. In this direction is Omotesando and Shibuya, which is about a 25, 30 minute walk to Shibuya from this place.

08:07 John Daub: And very close to here, which is where I'm gonna take you right now, is Akasaka and the Imperial Palace, if you go straight and eventually Ginza. This is how, during the Olympics, I was, I didn't take public transportation because we had the pandemic and you're supposed to stay in your neighborhood. This is sort of my neighborhood. I live kind of downtown. But I would ride my bicycle back and forth to get to Shibuya. It would, you gotta get exercise somehow. And if you're riding your bicycle, it's fairly safe. Was able to do that quite a bit up and down this hill of a road. And now we don't need to do that kind of stuff anymore. But it reminds me of it because during the opening ceremony of the Olympics, you wouldn't know this, but this entire road was filled with buses and they were busing the athletes that came in for the Olympic opening ceremony into this quarantine type of bus situation. And then they couldn't get out. The buses would come pick them up at the stadium and take them right back to their quarantine bubble hotel area, which they're having trouble now selling those apartments right now. So it kind of reminds me of those days, just three years ago from today.

09:25 John Daub: But if you've never been to the Akasaka area, a lot of people who stay here, there are a lot of hotels, swear by it. They love it. They say that this is the best place for nightlife. Everybody to their own, it's kind of a neat area. It's a salaryman area, business people. That's what you're going to see walking around here. It's also a place not too far away from where I'm very interested in. You guys might know this one here, check it out. The new Otani Hotel, which was Osato Chemicals in the You Only Live Twice movie. Some of you might recognize it from Sean Connery making his getaway. I think it's really cool. Of course, it still retains that 1964 vibe from the first Olympics. That's here near Akasaka. It's about a five, 10 minute walk from this Toyokawa Inari Betsuin. It's a pretty neat hotel, but that's where he jumped in the convertible with Aki and they made their way to the Hibiya Line where he met Tiger. I think a lot of you might know the movie quite well.

10:48 John Daub: All right, let's walk across the street, go to Akasaka here. Tokyo's set up really well. This road cutting through from the Imperial Palace to Shibuya, and it's also a hill. So we're going uphill. I'm going to swing the camera around. You can see the Toyokawa Inari right there. That's where we went in. A lot of people are off on lunch right now. You can see the Emperor's residence is massive. It's a lot of green space. Imagine how many houses you could build there for workers. I don't think the Emperor's going to give up his space.

12:22 John Daub: There it is. Everybody's looking for photo ops and photos to take home that define Japan. And this is one of those places. At least I would think. All right, sorry for the buffering. Welcome back everybody. I guess all the tall buildings around here, perhaps the signal isn't so great in this part of the city. Akasaka, the alleys here. Let's make a right, just walk down here just a little bit. Give you a vibe.

12:59 John Daub: Akasaka's nightlife is quite famous. There's a lot of business people when they get off of work around 5:30, 6 o'clock, the places start to open and the lights start to come on. It can be quite a vibrant place. There's a lot of places that I don't know. I don't explore this area too much. But at lunchtime, there are a lot of people out and there are some pretty good deals for lunch and some pretty good restaurants as well. Because the American embassy is not too far away, this area, I'd say maybe about a kilometer down the road. There's more Western type of food. And I think it was in this area that when President Trump came to Japan, Prime Minister Abe took him to eat a burger, which is near here. And Trump really liked that. He said, burger. It's very easy to please, I think.

14:00 John Daub: When President Obama came to Japan, I remember the Prime Minister took him to Jiro Sushi at Tsukiji near Ginza. That was a little bit more complicated than Trump's burger. But it's always fun when you see presidents come for official visits to Japan, where they take them. There's a restaurant that Koizumi took President Bush back in 2002 when I was here. I remember the news reporting about it. He took him to an izakaya (pub). And I'm sure that the staff of the, you can see the chef cooking tonkatsu (breaded pork cutlet) there. That's kind of neat. You can see them doing it. And the rack of pork on the top, and the refrigerated window. And you can see what the meals look like right there. That is a good looking cut of pork right there. Wow. And the menu looks really affordable too. 300 grams, that's a big size for what is that, $9 for this? Are you kidding me? $9 for that? That's a virtual steal.

15:42 John Daub: Wow, okay. It's a kura-ji. Marked down on my map. And you can see him taking the cutlet out of the oil right there. Oh my. [inaudible] in here. It smells really good. Again, you have some really amazing restaurants in this area. Getting back to the presidents who visit Japan, it doesn't matter what party you're in. It's all about the person when they come to visit Japan and finding a good restaurant. And it was funny when Koizumi took President Bush back in 2002 to the Kill Bill restaurant. That is a beautiful looking ribeye katsudon set for $6.50. That is a steal. How did they make money on that? And that's a lot of soba. Wow. That looks great. That smells good. The Kill Bill restaurant is called Gonpachi. It's still there.

16:51 John Daub: I took my friend Scotty from Strange Parts came and he was visiting, he was a guest appearing on a show where they run around trying to hide and catch each other and I took out that team to the Kill Bill restaurant when they came to visit Japan. Really cool people. I think the channel is called Jetlag and we had a really nice dinner at the Kill Bill restaurant. What is that? Oh we're gonna have to check that out. Hey Eric, EricSurf6, have you eaten at this one? I've seen in the Akasaka area some really unique, this is a 400 gram crab 3,500 yen. It's packaged. Of course you have to cook it yourself but you could take this home. Wow.

18:14 John Daub: I guess Eric would need to bring his own microwave. Eric should totally do that. They have these Makita microwaves that run on battery power. Buy one of those and start eating using your microwave. You can heat the stuff up or get one of those batteries and you can bring in a toaster oven and we can make a meal out of it. I think that'd be pretty funny. But what I think what makes this really a cool place to eat for travelers, especially solo travelers, is that there's a lot of small local feeling shops. Peepee Islands Thai restaurant. Interesting. I say that as I walk past the Burger King. But it's true. There's a lot of small businesses or local shops here in Akasaka. You can go down the alleys.

19:07 John Daub: This is the way I walk in that direction over there when I go to TBS to appear on TV for Japanese TV news programs here. They used to send a VIP car but now they ask me to come by train. Which is just as fine. The car usually gets stuck in traffic. The first time they sent it like this VIP car, a black car with the driver with a black suit and gloves and a hat. It's one of these you send to celebrities I guess. And it was in front of my mansion. Very humble place. I remember the neighbors going, what the heck is that? And I answered. I told them I was on the TV show and they were pretty shocked at that. But they'd never seen that in my neighborhood. Like such a VIP kind of car with a driver like that. That was nice though that they did that. I think there was booze in the car. Probably not a good thing before you get on to a live TV show.

20:04 John Daub: Oh, I remember coming to some sort of otaku event in here way back in the day like DJ anime DJs. I made an episode on the old channel. But I think you get the vibe here. Akasaka is kind of cool. Lots of little restaurants. I'm getting a thousand smells from all this. Different kinds of foods. There's falafel. Guys waving me over. No thanks. Sorry. This looks like unagi (eel) on the menu there. And then it looks like they have Kobe beef and shabu-shabu (hot pot). So it looks like a beef restaurant. There's a bunch of good burger places. I wonder if I should get one. Bring it back to Kanae. Yeah, Joey, no smell-o-vision. I can try to describe the smells to you.

21:27 John Daub: You get the at the tonkatsu place, it was the deep fried pork. You could smell that. But that sweet sauce that they put on top of it, that Worcestershire sweet savory sauce was wafting out the window as well. Now I smell fresh bread being baked. And some tonkotsu ramen (pork bone ramen) I smell. This is kind of a new thing to the planet. So the street's really have an interesting smell. These Picasso, you see these small Don Quixotes called Picasso. And they have the same stuff, usually the tourist stuff that people can take back home. They also, this is right next to the Akasaka-mitsuke station. They had a Cafe 8 which is where one of the NHK directors of the show I worked on used to always take us to eat Peking duck, which is his favorite. So you get a full duck for 4000 yen or 30 dollars or something like that. He'd get two of them and we'd chow down. Those are pretty good.

22:46 John Daub: Here's another vending machine corner. Let's check it out. It's a pretty day here. Ohotsu. This is the very north of Hokkaido. That's interesting. Monbetsu. Wow. These are places that Peter von Gomm and I drove through on our trip to East Hokkaido. That's funny to find this kind of vending machine so you can pick it up. It's frozen stuff and take it home with you. Let's go in this direction here. Beautiful day, isn't it?

23:51 John Daub: I'll be heading back to Kawaguchiko to Mount Fuji in a couple of days. The city is going to contact me when they decide the day and time of the press conference about that black tarp, the wall covering the Fuji Lawsons. I'm going to go there as media to see if I can get some comments and talk about their solution. I think this is one of the issues that's on in every single town now. They're seeing what's happening in Kawaguchiko and it's becoming a part of the Japanese thought process with their push towards tourism that if their place does get popular, and that's a big if, how are they going to be able to deal with the crowds in light of the dangers of crossing? That is so cheap. You can get that steak for 1200 yen. I think Akasaka is the capital of discounts. Lunch steak is more than half off.

24:57 John Daub: Hello. This is called the Public Red. This looks like a really stylish place. I can see myself sitting outside enjoying a steak for 1200 yen. There's a pizza place, or a ramen place across the street. I'm getting conflicting smells. It's all kind of wafting at me. Some good restaurants. This is a lunch place. I think they make most of their money at dinner, so they just want to get people to come in for lunch. The lunch rush, once it's over, they really have to work hard to attract people to get in there after that 11:30 to 1 o'clock time zone. If they can get in some more customers, they're going to make some more money.

25:47 John Daub: Is this a Matsusaka beef place? I see the Matsusaka sukiyaki. You probably get some good yakiniku (grilled meat) in the Akasaka area because you're getting some of the best stuff. Oh, somebody took me here to eat a burger back in the day. This old looking building here. A lot of the businesses also have a very high turnover rate, so they don't stick around too long. Not a lot of places that have a pedigree. Our restaurant has been here for six generations. You don't see that too often around here. You have to be really good and really cheap and really flexible and nice. You have to know the people and build up a clientele. This is the backside of that restaurant. You have to build up a clientele of regulars at a place like Akasaka, I think. You can't rely on tourism because most of the foot traffic is regulars. Not a lot of tourists walking around here. To build up regulars takes a lot of time.

27:15 John Daub: Are we going to make a right here? There's the Okura Hotel in the distance, that white tall building. Quite neat. We're walking now towards Akasaka-mitsuke. Oh, this is the Cafe 8. This is where the Peking duck is. Do they still have it on the menu? They have the lunch menu out. This is maybe the best, cheapest restaurant for Chinese in Tokyo. It is a chain, but it's quite good and it's fun in there. And the director, he knew his Chinese cuisine quite well. So I'm going to have to say, if he says it's the best, it probably is the best. There's a lot of pubs here. This looks like a free house. This is the Mermaid, a pub where you can get some draft beers. And I think that around 5 o'clock, there'll be people standing outside with pints of brew enjoying it. You can see on the menu on the wall, Asahi. They sell it in pints, 1000 yen. There's Stella, Hoegaarden, some mass beers. We're a little bit early.

28:52 John Daub: But I've been having a pretty good time. It's been a pretty good week so far. Leo and I have been sick. We traveled to Takayama and Shirakawa-go. I don't know if you guys saw those livestreams. Really, really interesting place. But I've been chasing down this over-tourism story, and I think it's going to get bigger and bigger. It's interesting the kind of ideas that they come up for that. The two-tier system, if you read, I think we had 450 comments on that in the first day. The two-tier pricing system is probably not going to happen, but people were so passionate about it, calling discrimination and racism and all this other stuff. Let me put it to you like this. They've had that JR Rail Pass, which I cannot get for foreign tourists. Foreign tourists have had a lot of discounts compared to locals for a very long time. If those cards did flip because of the exchange rate, I think, first of all, that's a dangerous game to play, because what if the exchange rate flips back, which it always does if everything is kind of cyclical, then you're going to change everything again?

30:05 John Daub: This is where the burger place was. It seems like it's out of business now. Yeah, restaurants change pretty quickly. I wonder where the Trump Burger was. I wonder if they're still in business. Hello, Dusty Gold. How you doing? Hello, everybody out there. This is the part where you can write in where you're watching from if you want to in the live chat. Thanks for spending your evening or your day with me here in Akasaka a little bit, kind of checking out the vibe on this part of Tokyo. And also, there's another katsudon, the Fuji Soba across the street. That might be the food of choice for this area.

31:08 John Daub: The whole purpose of this was to show you that fox shrine, which is really cool. But if you come to this area, you also have Akasaka to kind of check out, which is what I wanted to do before I go home. Just a note, though, across the street, this building is under construction. This is where the first Hooters in Japan was. That's where I met Kevin Riley, right there. But that Hooters is gone. I don't know what they're doing with this building, but it is under renovation and it is gone. I think the Ninja restaurant was here as well. It's all being renovated or covered up. And I once was working, when I was working with Shueisha, I was also working with one of the clients, which was TOEIC. TOEIC is the language shop. It's a Japanese accreditation company that tests all the Japanese on their English. And their offices were in there. I remember pitching them and telling them my ideas for shows. That was interesting. That seems like a lifetime ago. Yeah, I had to wear a suit, go in with the executives, talk about how our pitch for them, for them advertising the magazine for English content. It was a pretty cool job. Boy, did I learn a lot in that one.

32:29 John Daub: This is the big camera on the left side. And then we have Akasaka Station, Akasaka-mitsuke station, which is also Nagatacho. They're all kind of connected. And I believe at this corner, they used to have a sign with the history of Akasaka. But again, everything in this area seems like it's under renovation. There used to be over in here in the distance, the Prince Hotel, an older hotel, and they took it down floor by floor. That was maybe the most interesting site because they took down that, I think it was the Prince Hotel. But when I was coming here for to meet with TOEIC and they were one of the clients, they knocked it down floor by floor like Jenga. It was like this new demolition way without creating a lot of dust and stuff. It's probably way more expensive, but they knocked it. And you could see the hotel that they were knocking down, going down. Oh, this is my floor getting smaller. And this was maybe 15 years ago here in Tokyo. I remember that. That was really interesting. And now I guess that building right there is in its place.

33:47 John Daub: Oh, here it is. Here's the history of Akasaka in the corner here. It's all covered up. The origins of old town names in Akasaka area. Look, it's like all covered. Nobody would be able to see this. And they have the old signs from the Edo period. It's all covered up. Okay, I can read this for you really quickly. Akasaka Tamachi. The town area was marshy in old times. It was named Tamachi, literally Paddy Field Town after paddy fields cultivated in the area. Around 1635, the area was used to keep soil for construction. However, it was given as a reward to the three persons who had resided in the Minami Denmachō and had been diligently engaged in post-horse services since the Tokugawa Ieyasu entered Edo City. And a part of it developed into the town after three years, 1638, where tradesmen began to reside. At the end of the Meiji period, the town began to flourish as foreign-style barbers, photo studios, etc. newly appeared with the adaptation of Western culture and thought. While it was also well known as the world of the geisha in Akasaka area.

35:08 John Daub: It's interesting. So there's a ton of history, a lot of it starting when Tokugawa came and by the end of the Meiji period, this was geisha town to Tokyo. You can still see a geisha every now and then in those alleys that we walk through. Small shops, locally run, probably in the hands of families for a very long time, but I don't know too many restaurants that have been around for this long. It's an ever-changing place where style is always evolving. Akasaka's got a very long history, but used to be where they stored the soil for construction. A marshy land. It makes a lot of sense because they're sort of in a pit in the valley here.

35:55 John Daub: Oh, they closed my getaway plan! I gotta go back to that crosswalk. Interesting. Oh, you know what I'm gonna do? All right, I'm gonna take you across the street to share with you one last thing. If you click that like button, I really appreciate it. I don't mind. You gotta ask sometimes. I haven't done that in a while. This is one of the only traffic lights in Tokyo that still plays the music. And the music is, like, I don't even, I can't remember the name of the song. I've been told it a couple of times. That song lets, this one has the bird chirping, but on the other side, they still play the music. And the song lets people who are visually impaired know which side is walking, like east, west, north, south. So the song determines which light has changed for those that are visually impaired or are using the yellow tactile roadway. Oh, you can hear it. You almost only hear that in the countryside now. So it's kind of neat to still hear that in the Akasaka area. I haven't heard other traffic lights in Japan, or in Tokyo, with that, and they're sort of phasing them out. But for me, when I came here 25 years ago, they were everywhere. And now, I don't know why, I wish they kind of maintained that song traffic crossing, which is kind of cool.

38:07 John Daub: All right, thanks everybody for watching. I hope you enjoyed the walk around Akasaka area and the trip to the Toyokawa Inari Betsuin, Tokyo's smaller version of that main shrine in Toyokawa. It's kind of fun, neat. If you're staying in this area, it's definitely worth a visit. See you.