00:00:01 John Daub: This is it. This is the 7-Eleven Japan smoothie. I actually drank half of it because it just was melting and it's just too good. Only 102 calories. This isn't a sponsored video or anything. Oh, there's yogurt in there? Okay, this is a blueberry yogurt smoothie. And I went inside here. This is the 7-Eleven right there. I'm in Tokyo.

00:00:26 John Daub: You know, Peter von Gomm, a buddy of mine, introduced me. He said, have you had the new 7-Eleven smoothies? I was like, no. So I wanted to go in here and check it out. And I was pretty blown away. I went inside the freezer section here. Check it out here. Let me show you the experience. You've got to get this at the freezer. Usually it's in the back of the store. And by the way, not all the 7-Elevens have this. You can see there's three different kinds, or is there five? There's five different kinds of smoothie here. There's a mango papaya. A blueberry yogurt. This one's like a pineapple melon with kale or something. Banana with some blueberries in there, I guess. But I got the blueberry yogurt one. That looks pretty darn interesting, doesn't it? I love the fact that it's a see-through cup in there.

00:01:29 John Daub: I don't know, is 7-Eleven doing this in other countries? You buy it and then you take it to this machine. It's sort of similar to the coffee. Don't remove the lid. First you have to scan the QR code. I didn't do that. So I had to go into the trash and get it. Luckily it was right on the top there. Overflowing, my gosh. You scan it on the bottom there and it knows which flavor you picked, I guess. Because each one is blended differently. It's like weird. Look at it, and it's weird and it's curious and it's cool. And I'd never seen anything like this. So you put it in this machine. It's kind of steamed up, but there was a place on the side where I could do it. Okay, push okay. And it gets to work. I was wondering if I was going to be able to see it, but on the corner there, you got to push the okay button again. And it goes inside. And then look at this. It drops in some water. So it fills it up to there. I mean, this is like flash frozen.

00:02:31 John Daub: And then fruits to keep it as fresh as possible. It's still frozen, but smoothies are supposed to be frozen. So it's not too bad. And then the blender starts to do this and this, and then it just goes crazy, which is what a blender does. I know that. I'm still, I feel like a 12-year-old kid looking at something that's just so cool. Like a science project gone completely right. I guess there's cubes of yogurt in there and you can see it getting mixed up by the machine. On the iPhone 14 Pro, of course, doing that stupid macro mode automatically, which I absolutely hate. It tells you it's in the middle of working. It only takes about 20 seconds or so. And then it comes out. And I was just surprised that not everybody was getting one. They're so darn good. There's got to be a catch. It can't be healthy. It says 102, but there just got to be a catch, right?

00:03:34 John Daub: All right, let's look at the flavors here. There's a double blueberry yogurt smoothie. That's the one I got. There's the mango pineapple smoothie on the right there. Green, there's a green smoothie on the top. I guess there's blueberries in there as well. There's a blueberry yogurt one. Okay, that's the one I should have gotten, the double. And then there's an ichigo (strawberry) banana smoothie right there as well. It's hard to read it off of the screen. That one with the green one in the center looks pretty interesting. So how does it taste? This is really freaking good. I think, how did they have this last year? Did I just completely miss this? I'm not a big smoothie person. I think fruits spike your insulin and you know, it's not good for you in that sense. A little bit goes a long way. Certain fruits you should probably avoid, but I'm not going to ruin the party, man. I'll take a little insulin spike just a little bit. It's really good.

00:04:42 John Daub: That's all I really wanted to share with you today. It's not a lot of information. I just wanted to show you where the machine is on the corner. I can see what the door is open. It's right there. That's it right there. So you can see that's the smoothie machine right there. That's so cool. It is sweet, but it's not sugar sweet. I don't know if they added any sugar. It should say here. Hold on, I should have read the ingredients. So what are the ingredients here? Ichigo, which is strawberry yogurt. So there it's in cubes here, blueberries, bananas. The yogurt has some sugar in it in the form of sugar and hachimitsu (honey) and then other stuff, but they don't list that there's the catch. So there is sugar in here, but it's not a lot. It does taste naturally sweet. Then the bananas. And then there's some orange, there's tofu. Ommi (soybeans?), I don't know what, I guess that's kind of like soybeans and there's apple something. It's mostly natural, which is good. 102 calories. Yeah. There's a little bit of sugar in here and a little bit of salt. Hey, it's a convenience store drink. It's a beverage. It's a soft drink and soft drinks in general are not good. Water, that's where it's at. Good old water, but a little bit of this, oh, the chunks of fruit is really good. They give you a little bit bigger straw. The chunks of fruit really good.

00:07:03 John Daub: All right, well, I got you all here for a little bit. I just want to go over this story really quickly. This is a reason why you guys subscribe. This comes with the Tokyo Weekender. Tourists have found a new Mount Fuji Lawson's to swarm. I don't get it exactly, but there's more than one Mount Fuji with a Lawson's. There wasn't just the one in front. The reason why this was an issue was because it was right next to the train station. So easy access. The other ones, you probably need a car. You got to hike a little bit to get there, but there was another Lawson's not too far away from this one that had maybe even more of a better view, basically because there weren't as many tourists there. But as I drove past it, I noticed that there were more tourists coming into that area. And it is a little bit concerning. I mean, Lawson's put out a statement apologizing a couple of weeks ago. Hold on a second. A lot of talk and a slight delay construction. They finished a construction yesterday or two days ago. I was going to go there, but it was supposed to get cloudy in the afternoon. So instead I went and I took you all to the other Mount Fuji site. Mount Fuji disappeared around 12 o'clock and I was able to do a pretty, we had a pretty good time. If you want to take a look at that live stream, you could see it. It's the live stream right before this one.

00:08:36 John Daub: But this, the other ones, I don't know if they're gonna, they can't really block the view, but that's not the purpose of it. And hey, Danny B, thank you. I just wanted to, because this is getting really big in the news, the over-tourism stuff. So as I enjoy the smoothie, I can take some of your questions. Some of you might be concerned. Look, Japan wants tourists. It's not what the media is making it out to be. There's something in the middle. All right. You see it from the tourist side. I see it from the Japan side and the church side. So I can kind of break this down a little bit better, but this had nothing to do with blocking the view. Lawson's had nothing to do with it. It had everything to do with locals complaining about near misses of hitting tourists. There were so many near misses. Even when I was there about three weeks ago, there's a live stream on that too. I showed you what it looked like before the black tarp was put in place. There were so many near misses. It was pretty calm until Mount Fuji came out of the clouds and then it became really dangerous. And I can see why people, like a pack of rabid dogs, they just wanted to get the shot. So you'd give your camera to one person and then that person would cross the street illegally, right? There's two crosswalks on a green light, like within 30 seconds of that place. So you can just cross at crosswalks on a red light, but there's no crosswalk in the middle.

00:09:47 John Daub: So people were doing this because they thought that, oh, this is like, this is Asia and you can just cross the street. I don't know what people were thinking. It wasn't just tourists from China. We're talking about North Americans. We're talking about Europeans, people who should know better. And I'm not blaming because my mother's from India. I've seen people, we just cross the street, which is super dangerous, but sometimes that's the only way to do it because there are no crosswalks in some places on major highways. And it's kind of scary in certain places. I think it's gotten a lot better. So if you're from India watching this, don't get offended. My experience comes from, you know, like 20 years ago, it's quite a different country now in some respects. I still love it. Bottom line is, this isn't one of those countries. This is the country of rules. And there's crosswalks. You can see it. It's marked. It's on the roads. They have signs and people still did it. And they put the black tarp there to try to prevent people from crossing illegally and thus preventing the near misses. They're not blocking the view. They're trying to do crowd control. They hired old guys and it's cost effective. They hired old guys to police it. Some patrols, they don't speak English and the tourists shrugged them off. Cause they were like, as I said, they're like a pack of rabid dogs. They want to get the shot. So the guy has no power to enforce it. He can't actually, you know, whip you or pull out a gun or fine you. He's not a police officer. The police have better things to do than ticket jaywalkers, which is probably not good for tourism. It's a tough spot for the city. You have to understand that this isn't the only place where this has happened. I'll be making an episode on this.

00:11:40 John Daub: I'll go back to Kawaguchiko next week. Make sure you subscribe. I'm taking you with me. We're going to go see Mount Fuji and see how good or how bad this is. And perhaps I'll take you to another Lawson's and see if the view, what's it like at that other Lawson's. I'm really curious about this. So I'll take you next week. So this will be really interesting as I finish a smoothie here. But for everybody who's watching and worried about this, first of all, the majority of the people here probably weren't going to get that shot. They didn't really care about it. I looked at the comments. Many people thought it was silly. But then two days ago I went to another Instagram spot and it was kind of fun to share with other people. Just taking a picture, which is something we do too much on our smartphones and enjoying kind of the view and talking with people and all joined in this kind of crazy thing. I thought that was kind of fun. So I sometimes I'm a little bit overly harsh on this kind of stuff, but I did get the shot. You guys want to see the shot? Hold on. All right. I got the shot here on my phone. It's kind of fun. So I mean, I can't knock it completely, but yeah. Actually, here it is. You want to see the shot? Here's a shot. There you go. That's the shot. I jumped. Actually, I didn't jump that high, but it looks a lot higher than I thought I jumped, but maybe it's not that high. If it was like Jordan, he'd probably be jumping off of the platform. Looking pretty good in the middle of the mountain. You need a trampoline. Don't do it, tourists, if you're coming here. Don't bring a trampoline to get that shot.

00:13:27 John Daub: But what's really fun, when I was there, this is on Instagram as well. I put it on a tripod. That's it shaking like a cheap tripod. People got in the shot which I loved because I like people and this gentleman was from the Philippines. I don't know who he is. And he came out to say hello, and I said hi to him, and I asked him where he was from. It's just like meeting people with Mount Fuji in the background. This summarizes the channel to me so much, and this live streaming channel, because I love to meet all you guys when you're here. So that was fun. He's saying, I'm from the Philippines. I'm like, rock on. And I guess he's waving to the other people. There's like a group of people at the base of this. I don't know what to do. I didn't really think. I forgot the poses that I wanted to do, so I was kind of lost. So I'm just doing the classical poses. But in the end, I did the jump. So it was kind of fun. Is it worth it? So it took me about three hours to go there and come back from Tokyo. Was it worth it? I don't know. If you have nothing better to do and you really wanted to see Mount Fuji, I think so.

00:14:51 John Daub: The thing is, from the station, you could rent a bicycle for 200 yen. That's $1.30 or something like that, the exchange rate. You can rent a bike for the day. And then you can take that bike and you can ride around Fuji City and you can see that and you can ride to lunch and you can go to a green tea plantation and you can enjoy drinking green tea right from the farm. There's places like that. I think it's a pretty good day trip. And incorporate that in there. And there's also the shot where Mount Fuji is in the background and the Shinkansen is going by. That's right there too. I don't know why the bridge gets more popular than that shot with the Shinkansen going by, but what do I know. And in the end, it turned out to be a pretty fun day. So if you want to spend your afternoon like that, it takes one hour to get from Tokyo to get to Shin Fuji Station. The tourism office has battery-powered bicycles, battery-assisted bicycles, which make it easier to pedal around. I think they were 750 yen, which is $5. It's ridiculous. And then they had sports bikes, which you can go quite fast on, and those are about $10 a day. And you can make a day out of it and get active. I liked it. So kudos. Shout out to the people at Shin Fuji. And I only say this because I was there. I wish I could bring this up. I was there and I filmed the Mount Fuji cup of green tea episode, the perfect cup. In there, I ride a bicycle around there with the help of Fuji City. And I wanted to show up some of the stuff that they had. That was a cool experience. So you can get that at Shin Fuji.

00:16:31 John Daub: But how much for a kei car? You can rent cars from about $30 a day from the Smile Rent a Car. But the insurance kind of pumps that up a little bit. They're kind of fun to drive for like a couple of hours. You know, bicycles are not allowed on the expressway, and neither are hitchhikers. All right. That's all I got for you today. Again, it's a pretty good smoothie. It's melting now. I would recommend it if you're in Japan. I like what 7-Eleven is doing. I don't eat all of your meals at convenience stores. Please don't do that. You can find better homemade restaurants and support mom and pop shops as much as convenience store food is good. But not bad. I'm going to try some of the other ones. All right, everybody. Mata ne. Have a good day. Oh, you can see Yamato. You can see, you leave your suitcases at the 7-Eleven, and they'll send it to your next hotel. And you can see a lot of people have left luggage to send off. Smart. Mata ne.