00:01:00 John Daub: Hey everybody, welcome to Minakami Station in Gunma Prefecture. We're kind of out there. If you look in the mountains surrounding it, the clouds or steam coming up from the mountains or the clouds coming down to the mountains gives it a very mysterious look. This is a hot spring town, very famous in the winter and in the autumn. Not so much at this time of the year. You can see it's very quiet. Over there in the distance, we have some steam coming out of the store there.

00:34:00 John Daub: I don't know, what does that look like? Potatoes steaming or something like that. We'll go check it out. But in this episode, I wanted to take you around a place in Japan that you normally, ordinarily wouldn't be going to. I mean, a lot of people have been going to Tokyo and Kyoto and Osaka and all this. Gunma is sort of out there. Let me show you on the map exactly where we are. It's about a 90-minute drive from Tokyo. We came yesterday. My wife and I just wanted to get out of the city for a day.

01:06:00 John Daub: And I was actually going to go camping, but you can see it's raining right now. We made the right choice to find a place to settle inside. And I'm going to show you where we stayed last night as well. This is where we are, like right on the Tone River, which dumps into the Arakawa and becomes all the rivers down in Tokyo. They all come from the mountains here. We could get on a raft and go all the way to Tokyo, perhaps. This is where we stayed last night. You can see it's pretty close to the river. They have these, I guess, kind of bungalows. They're more like little townhouses, I suppose. Not that comfortable, but it was clean and it was nice. And we made it a last-minute choice to stay there. I'll show you what that place looks like in a second. We could also barbecue, which is one of the criteria. We wanted to start a fire and something we can't really do in the city, a campfire.

01:59:00 John Daub: This is where we are right now. This is Minakami Station. It's a town, of course, with a declining population. You can see the Tone River right there. There are some restaurants, some things to do, see and eat, and you're going to get a feeling through this live stream. But there's also a ton of onsen (hot springs), a ton of hot springs. This is a hot spring town. So we're going to take a look at that as well in this live stream.

02:21:00 John Daub: Now, the JR Station, check this out. Here's the schedule for the trains coming into Minakami. They arrive in the morning, but you can see it's one train an hour. And then going the other way, it's a lot of people. So it's a lot of people. There's like five a day. There's not a lot of trains coming and going into Minakami Station. Just be warned, this is the Joetsu Line. It's an old train line cutting across the center of Japan from Tokyo going over to Niigata. Most people take the Shinkansen. You don't have to take the local trains, but if you do take the Shinkansen, you're going to want to take the local trains to get to a place like here.

03:05:00 John Daub: The train line is inside the station. You can see there's the Yamanote Line right there, that green circle on the bottom right. And you can see it takes you, it'll eventually take you here, but you have to change trains a couple of times. In particular, at Takasaki from, I guess it's from Ueno, the Takasaki Line will leave in this direction. Most of the trains from Ueno, you go through Omiya, which is in the center. Then that orange line starts. And then eventually, you get to Minakami. It's not that easy by local train. Basically, you're going to want to come here by Shinkansen, one of the closer stations. But if you do get to Minakami, there's also buses as well from Takasaki. Takasaki is like the gateway to Gunma Prefecture, one of the 47 here in Japan. And that'll probably be the most convenient way. But if you do come to the station, a lot of the hotels, you can see there's one right there. They'll pick you up and take you to the onsen.

04:07:00 John Daub: I was [at] the famous one that my wife and I have stayed at in the past. I've been going there for 25 years since I came to Japan. It was the first amazing onsen that I stayed at. That is in this area. And in the winter, it's absolutely beautiful. The ryokan (Japanese inn), if you make a reservation there, will come and pick you up. There's some shops, of course, in the center of the town. And I wanted to take it. That ramen place looks like where we might have some lunch. Kimura Ramen. Starting to waft out into the streets. Let's go say hi to Kanae and Leo and take a look at the map here.

04:41:00 John Daub: They do have rental cycles. I noticed this as well. And if you're going to go around a place like this, the roads have almost no traffic. It is absolutely stunning out in the countryside. These have batteries in there. So they're battery-assist bikes. Of course, you have to pedal. There's a little place for your smartphone, too. You have to pedal, of course, but it's not as hard with these types of bikes. Oh, these are like rideshare. You don't have to check in in an office or anything like that. You can see the onsen town. It's usually like this really quaint place. Really cute little town.

05:30:00 John Daub: Where are we? I guess we're over there by where the train station is. Probably in the middle, right? I can't quite find exactly where we are. I guess we're somewhere in the middle right there. But you can see the train line going back there. What we're going to do is walk over right here. So what we're going to do is walk over to this area a little bit, okay? And then we're going to call it a day because the rain is starting to come down. And this is all part of number one, which scared us into not wanting to camp, which is probably the right call. Let's say hi to Kanae and Leo. Leo doesn't want to go outside. He doesn't want to walk around. So he's going to stay in the car. It's just going to be us. But we can do a little ton ton. Hello. Hello, Leo. You stay here? You coming? You want to come with me? No? You hungry? Okay, Mama's hungry. All right, we got to make this quick then. I'm not that hungry. We got to build up an appetite. Leo's not. He doesn't want to be interviewed right now. All right, let's walk around the town.

06:25:00 John Daub: While we're going over to that other side, the other side of the town, I want to show you while we're walking here where we stayed. It's about a four-minute video that'll eat up a little bit of the time here. You can see the river rushing through there. A lot of these places that have camping zones are also whitewater rafting companies. And they've set up these, I guess, cottages. Cottages where you can stay. This is the one where we stayed at. It was the number one. Nobody else was staying here. So it's a little bit quiet. But it's nice. The kitchen area, you can wear shoes. Usually if you're coming in from rafting, you don't want to take off your shoes sometimes. You can do it. But the upstairs is where our bedroom was. I think this was about $100 a night, a little bit over $100 a night. Again, last minute. There's like 20 beds in here. There's more beds downstairs. Leo said he's taking this one. But the mountains are there. You can see the whitewater rafting rafts as well as the barbecue space, which is our main selling point.

07:36:00 John Daub: They said if we bring our own grill, they'll give us a discount. And we had to pay an extra 5,000 yen or was it like 35 bucks for the barbecue space. But it's all going to the local economy. So we're good with that, whatever. I got this barbecue for, what, 25 bucks off of Amazon or something. We went to the supermarket. We bought some local vegetables from Gunma. We bought some local wagyu, which is really good. It's a long drive to get out here. So I'm kind of enjoying this. We bought some nice lounge chairs as well to try to do some camping. Again, we had to switch to this cottage because of the typhoon incoming. Didn't know what it was going to be like. Leo got a chance to, we wanted to get him out of the city as well. He got a chance to eat some food and that was fun to do that with Mama.

08:26:00 John Daub: We got some green peppers on the grill. We had some, what else did we have? Some mushrooms, shiitake from the area. And I got the fire going. It took us about 30 minutes. Nice barbecue. You can't have an open flame in the city of Tokyo. So even down by the river, you can't have barbecue. Okay, I might have burned them as well. It happens. What are you going to do? It went pretty good though. We cut them open and got a little bit of that burn thing. Oh, we also had eggplants as well. And we made a pretty good dinner out of it. You can see Leo's having fun eating. I got a chance to eat too from barbecuing. You know, you're either standing in front of the grill the whole time. Kanae took over for a second to make sure it's not burning so I can eat. But we barbecued it all pretty quickly. It wasn't very long and it was a fun time. I mean, I think this is something we can't really do in Tokyo unless you're at a designated barbecue.

09:32:00 John Daub: But we really wanted to be a place where the birds were chirping in the morning to get out of the city, you know, day trip. There's that piece of wagyu we got from the butcher shop, local beef. I think it was a 250-gram cut. It's pretty good. This is pretty nice marbling in there too. It's not, I think it was an A4 and it came out, we didn't overcook it. It came out pretty good. I cut it up bite-sized pieces so that we can enjoy that together. Add a good meal out of it.

10:12:00 John Daub: There's an excavator in the back, a purple one. Leo kind of liked that. Why is it purple? He asked. I said, I had no idea. But you know, the campfire is something that we really wanted to do. And I just put a bunch of logs in there. You have to pay for the wood. I think it was about $4 for a stack of it, little stack of it. So we have about eight or nine logs that we only used half of it. So I can use the other half later. And we had a good time. I got an Ebisu beer and just one. And chilled out and we had some fun in the chairs and playing around. No TV for Leo. He doesn't watch a lot of it, but he's asking, where's the TV? I like this cottage does not have it on purpose. We don't want any TV, which is no digital screens, except for this smartphone. And right now when I'm streaming here and a couple of you sending messages, I might've responded, sorry. I'm not supposed to do that, but we had fun. These hammock chairs are really nice. So that's sort of what we're doing here.

11:15:00 John Daub: And this is sort of one of the things I like with Gunma. And at night we get a chance to get the glow sticks out from the hundred yen shop. You know, and I think this is one of the reasons why living in Japan and Tokyo, you need a car to get out to places like this. And it really does make a nice relaxing trip. I think it's important to do stuff like that.

11:41:00 John Daub: I'm completely lost now. So this is bridge here, but that's for the interchange. Do I keep going? I guess I just keep going. We walk kind of a ways. I think I'm supposed to go over there. There's not a car in sight. Oh, thankfully I brought this brochure here. Hold on. I'm going the right way. There's no map in the brochure. What? There's no map in the brochure. Okay.

12:26:00 John Daub: So I guess I could tell you a little bit about this here to get here driving from Tokyo. It's about two and a half hours, a little bit longer if you stop at service areas and traffic getting out of Tokyo, there's always a bunch of traffic here. But once you get onto the Kan-Etsu Expressway, it's usually a clear shot, no traffic, very relaxing. It's nice to get out there. The tolls cost about 5,200 yen. What is that? I don't know, like 35, $36. It's definitely not cheap. You can see there's a ton of hotels on the other side. Whether or not you take the train, that's up to you. But I think it's going to be a little bit more to drive with the gasoline thrown in there. I think though that the freedom to get around and to go to places is certainly worth it. Having the car is absolutely good to have.

13:33:00 John Daub: No, Leo took my paper map. That's why. But nobody really uses them, but you can get them inside of the station. It's not that far from Kusatsu. Kusatsu is also in Gunma, but I think Kusatsu, it was overrun with tourists. They did a tourism push about, I don't know, seven, eight years ago. They got a bunch of money from a grant from the Japanese government to push Kusatsu onsen as a day trip from Tokyo to foreign tourists. And it worked out pretty good for Kusatsu. Most people will go there and it is a really cool town. But this one, I think in particular, the Takaragawa onsen, that's the one where I was outside in the snow. I think if you remember an episode on the old one.

14:43:00 John Daub: You can see that you're getting a kind of the vibe of the town, right? There's not much out here, which is perfectly awesome. Little onsen towns are very nice to travel around in because you get a chance to really unwind. And I think that I might have taken a wrong turn. Maybe I didn't, I don't know. But you can see on the other side, there's some resort-looking places. And then there's some smaller family-run places. And I always go for the family-run places. This rafting place certainly could, whoa, little rain won't stop these dudes. Oh, there's a couple of them screaming. I don't know if you can hear that. There's the guide in the back. That looks so much fun. Whoa. Reminds me of a Burt Reynolds movie. There's some screaming going on. Did you see that? I want to do that. That looks like a lot of fun. There's a lot of rafting companies here and going down the Tone River, especially after the rain. Shoot. I wish Leo was just a little bit older. Just a little bit older.

16:30:00 John Daub: Oh, man. And this is right after the typhoon. I bet you these rapids are so much better right now. That looks like a lot of fun. Oh, man, that was awesome. At the hotel that we stayed at, the bungalow or whatever they called it, there was a guy from Nepal who comes and he works seasonally here and he's going back to Nepal in a month or so. I guess this spring is the best time to come for whitewater rafting in this area. Yeah. Basically, all of the buildings around here look a little rusted. It looks kind of old. I think that this gives it a lot of character and it makes it really authentic. This is a place where people absolutely live. It's a resort, but it's a really authentic one.

17:35:00 John Daub: It's also so cold that these things will come out and spray hot water to melt the roads. So in the winter, the hot spring water goes out. There's a pipe underneath there that melts the snow and ice off of the roads 24 hours a day. That water is just pumping out, which is kind of cool. You might not notice it, but in particular, they're at certain points that are quite slippery. This is an incline going up to the station, so it would need something like that so people don't slide off of the road. This is not a place where you want to get into an accident. That's an unagi (eel) restaurant. I bet you there's some places on the Tone River for unagi, but the rapids don't make it easy to do that. I'm sure it's dammed up somewhere. Nice little wildflowers on the side of the road as well. The air is so fresh out here. Oh, here comes a train. Check it out. You don't see that that often. That was kind of good to see.

19:13:00 John Daub: You don't get out that often. Champagne Sumo's in the house. I'm sort of driving, buddy. It might not be good to get a beer just quite yet. Let's call that the otsukaresama (good work today) beer. At the end of the day, I will be enjoying one for sure. Never mind the diet. Beer it is. Thank you, buddy. Look at that. That's really neat with a lot of colors here. These bridges, I'm a little curious. Where are they going to take us?

20:27:00 John Daub: Okay. So this is the ramp. I guess people walking to the other side of the town here. But if the rafters come, we got a pretty good view. But Kanae and Leo are waiting, so I got to get back to them. Let me just zoom into the town here. Minakami Gunma. Very nice with the rapids going down the river. A very fun whitewater rafting experience. Especially in the spring, probably during the rainy season. I don't know if I'm allowed to jump to the other side. Population, not very high. They'll do that. And you can see the train going by from this platform. But there's like one now. There's not a lot of trains here. There's the schedule. It's so infrequent. I think I took a wrong turn. I should have found... All right, let's head back. Look at this wooden statue. Okay. Showing you the beauty of the town. It's slightly weathered. I guess this takes you down to the river. Sorry guys, you fell down there. That's nice. Whoa! Check out that ancient broken-down bridge that crosses the river. That's pretty cool. That's like an Indiana Jones type of thing. Try to get across that thing, but you can feel it. The sound of the rushing river, really relaxing. There's a park down there. Do you see it over there? I wonder if you could just barbecue here. I bet you can. If you bring your own barbecue, you could barbecue anywhere, right? Something I'm going to have to check that out. Here comes a tour group, probably going to the hotel. Or is it some students here? They look like they're students.

23:29:00 John Daub: Yeah, this is the Tonegawa, the Tone River that goes all the way down to Tokyo, I believe. Dumps into also makes the Arakawa River. I believe it also branches off into the Sumida. It's been a while since I looked at the maps. But this, I've ridden my bicycle. Check it out. So you didn't see this part because I was showing the video of where we stayed. But this SLs are steam locomotives. There is a replica of it on the other side of the station. And that's kind of cool to see. There's some history behind it, behind the Joetsu Line. There's a train right now on the platform. Again, they don't stop here too long. But you see that? It's like this really old, rusted town. No high-rises, just business fronts. It's so peaceful. This is what you look for when you're trying to escape Tokyo and you're trying to get away out of the Japanese countryside. This is what you're going to get. It's really authentic. Not a lot of people. Very, very relaxed. Gunma's got it, man. And this is like not a PR piece for Gunma. It's just it's so close to Tokyo.

24:53:00 John Daub: I used to live in Tochigi. They have a free foot bath over there. There's Onsen Street. That's where I wanted to go. I wonder why I couldn't find it. Maybe I had to keep going. Doesn't tell you how many meters you had to walk. There's the mascot for Gunma Prefecture. I forget his name there. And there's the car. Kanae's waiting for me. Speed limit 20. Good to know. Foot baths are nice. They washed it out every day. I noticed when we were driving by there, there was a guy. He'd emptied it and cleaned it out. So if you're wondering if they clean the foot baths, they do. This is no Gordon Ramsay's kitchen nightmare here. You know, they actually clean all the foot baths and the restaurants in Japan. They're pretty good with that. I haven't seen too many poorly run onsen towns. A lot of them are quite busy. That's the one thing that I think people will always be interested in. Onsen hot resorts in Japan. There's so many of them and they're all quite, quite well organized. Some of them smaller than others. Some of them bigger than others, I should say.

26:18:00 John Daub: Yeah, I've been watching that Gordon Ramsay's Nightmare Kitchen show. I came to Japan so many years ago. I never saw that. And then I saw it on YouTube the other day. I started watching like, darn, this is fun. There's a lot of nightmares. Makes you not want to go to restaurants and eat out. I waved to them. They didn't wave back. I think they're a little shy. Look at this cafe. It's open. There's a lot of people in there. What's the menu? Maybe I'll take Kanae here. It's mostly drinks. There's the beer on the menu, but I'm driving. Oh, they have some food. Gapao rice, which is, I believe that's Thai cuisine. That's pretty reasonable. All right, let's support local businesses. Nobody in there. Got to find a place to park. I doubt Gordon Ramsay will say much about the food and service of Japan. I don't know if he's ever been to Japan. I haven't seen. I'm sure he has. There's more Michelin stars here than anywhere else, except in maybe France.

27:36:00 John Daub: Well, if he did, maybe he could turn around this place. Look at this abandoned hotel. Hotel Omiya. This looks like it's had better days. Like in the 1980s. Holy smokes. Wow, that is a mess. I'm sure that there's going to be some people coming to explore the inside of this, but looks real dangerous in there. A lot of these onsen towns are somewhat beat up. You can tell they were really big in the 1980s in the bubble era so they built a lot of these hotels and then they ended up turning into stuff like this. They were okay hotels but they had access to that hot spring water which is what everybody wanted and eventually it became Hotel Omiya to Otto yeah oh oh yeah oh Hotel Omiya okay it's got a lot of character it's certainly rusty but nobody you know most of the resorts are not around the station.

29:03:00 John Daub: All right most of the resorts are out into the countryside like uh several you know like 10-minute drive from here out by the river different areas they want it more secluded they want more space to be able to build bigger properties and that's where we stayed we were about a 10-15 minute drive from here and we're back at this at the Minakami JR station to wrap up our tour it's going to be about a three-hour trip to go back the thing with the car when we drove around here we found this place this this is a nice little uh cafe that also makes baumkuchen (layer cake) which is this kind of a cake and there's a butcher shop at the end there as well i mean look how nice it is they out in the countryside they've built really good businesses it just seems like around the station front it's kind of old doesn't it yeah all right everybody you ready to eat now good very good because Champagne Sumo gave me some beer money and Brandy and Ramsey Silence and everybody has made sure that we're gonna have a pretty good lunch all right guys see ya matane hey what did you say Leo matane hey where'd you get that food he couldn't wait oh my gosh i'm late bye everybody