00:02 John Daub: Hello everybody, welcome to a beautiful Saturday afternoon here in Odaiba. This is Tokyo, right on Tokyo Bay. You can see in front of us that space boat. It's one of the most unique—that's the Himiko, you can read it right there on the bottom. This is one of the more unique experiences. I think it's taking off. Oh, what a treat.

00:21 John Daub: This comes from Asakusa on the other side up the Sumida River to here. And Odaiba is something of a tourist attraction. There's Leo right there. He's going to say hi to everybody in a second. It's Leo and John's day off, sort of. Mom had to work and we came out here because, again, it's not raining in the rainy season. You kind of want to have some fun. There's the Fuji TV building and the Aqua City shopping mall and the Hilton where all the broadcasters were doing the 2021 Olympic broadcast.

00:52 John Daub: It's quarantined up there. It's one of the better views of the city, actually. How you doing, everybody? Hey, Leo, come here. Leo, Leo, space boat's going. All right, Leo, we bought him some bubbles, so he's going to be doing that for a couple of minutes. Let me show you exactly where we are in the city of Tokyo right now. So if we go down in here, you know, Odaiba is kind of neat. It's one of the places inside the city of Tokyo that has a beach. I brought you here before, but it hasn't been recent.

04:46 John Daub: It's kind of funny going around and play, but they do have kids sizes here, and they have a sale going on over there. Diver City, I don't go in there that much, but it is pretty massive in there. It's a big guy. I saw that it's a pretty big shopping mall. What is like five stories or something like that? There's a round one amusement center at the top of it. It's going there the bubbles next to this Ghibli store where Totoro is there a bunch of these gachapon (capsule toy vending machines) and I tried to avoid it because I know what's happening.

05:15 John Daub: We ended up playing around and trying to get this Anpanman, which is what he wanted to do here. You see that alright. We wanted to get Anpanman. He ended up getting Dokin-chan. I think that's Dokin-chan and then you know that's the one Anpanman you could see he's not really happy. Like oh, what are you supposed to do here alright, so? If you've got kids be aware gachapon is gonna drain your account so make sure you got a bunch of hundred yen coins. Which I just happened to do I said okay? Let's give it we ended up getting three of them. We didn't get Anpanman.

05:52 John Daub: Who is the main character of the series Anpanman which has the most characters? It's a Guinness Book of World Record thing, the most characters in a series. You know what was cool about this. I didn't help him at all. You know I said here's the money you go do it, and he did it. I was pretty impressed. Gotcha gotcha Anpanman and then Shokapan, which is one of the main characters. It's better than Dokin-chan I think.

06:17 John Daub: We also got Baikinman which is black and it doesn't work well with the light is a red light in there. Which is kind of creepy which I guess Baikinman is right. There's always the next time to try to get that Anpanman. That's right. It was fun. We walked around there. I noticed there's something else a lot of stores were out of business but there are stores like this these are this is like a virtual reality kind of laser tag shop and then there's all these like these virtual reality fun houses like a haunted carnival.

06:53 John Daub: That was pretty creepy the prices were what was it like is they it's like 3,000 yen or something for 30 minutes. It's a little pricey, but I guess if you're on your vacation. Why not just splurge for to get creeped out a little bit. I don't think that's what Leo's looking for though right now. That's pretty creepy clown. That's why I don't like clowns at all. Or the circus for that matter. Clowns just get rid of the clowns.

07:20 John Daub: There the price is right up there 28 minutes. This is the most expensive one. 25 minutes it was what was that 2800 yen like was that 18 bucks or something? It's not too bad. I think if you want to get scared and try a virtual reality experience, that's good and over here. There's another one this one had walking through hell with a baby and I don't know that's a what anyone would want to do if that's what anybody would want to do but that's what was available. So kind of creepy.

07:51 John Daub: Lightly, but yeah, let's go get it. Okay, but you can see the Lego man here. This is he was blinking. Did you see that that kind of creeped me out because I did a double take on that wasn't sure what exactly that was. The food court is pretty good here. So you get a bunch of food as well as Aqua City and some of the other places we got really good food courts in the area, but this is always impressive the backside on the ground floor of the Diver City you come out and you see the mega robot here. That's just cool.

08:25 John Daub: There he is and we were we were at a good time because like I saw all the people here and like okay something must be coming and indeed it there was. There was something the unicorn he actually actually opened up while we were there. I just got Leo a drink here. We are that's a thumbnail shot and then there you go.

08:54 John Daub: So we're about to the the Gundam Unicorn's about to open up here. It's kind of cool now. He looks I guess I call it a unicorn because he's got that spikes. There you go his kneecaps opened up and then the top part of it opens up right now look at that and turns into I guess like antenna you remember on those Lincoln Continentals back in the 1980s you could tell that's the ones that had the portable telephones inside or the TV reception and they closed back up again and went back into a unicorn pretty cool. I don't know it doesn't move or anything like the other one. It's pretty basic.

09:27 John Daub: So then here we are we walk back to the beach and the walk from Diver City back to the beach is kind of cool. It's a little far. But I don't know hot day, but it's kind of neat to see that all and there you go. That was our day today. That's not what Leo you're supposed to drink it. Is he kicking the water? Sometimes you know what don't say anything just let him do his thing and observe and see what happens.

10:09 John Daub: Can he open it himself? Don't play it Leo. What does that mean? Alright, let's open it up for him. Yeah, I can open it for you. Can you drink it all? Okay. Yeah, we're kind of dry. We're kind of parched from the salty burger. You want to say hi to everybody?

10:29 Leo: Hello. Hi.

10:40 John Daub: There you go. That's hot done. There you go. It's June. This is typically the rainy season we typically, I think it rained last night pretty heavy in the morning. We got up a little cloudy and then the Sun came out and I can't complain whatsoever. It's just a beautiful full day. Space boat it'll be coming back and forth again.

11:01 John Daub: If you want to get here the best way is started at Asakusa or across the bay. There's um, what is it? What is the name of the port there? It's near Hamamatsucho. There's another pier where you can just it's maybe about half price but you can just go across the bay and come over here instead of taking the train to come across the Rainbow Bridge and that's a pretty cool experience. By the way, you can also walk underneath there to the other side on a bicycle. You can't ride your bicycle underneath there. At least I don't think you can but you can walk your bicycle to the other side.

11:36 John Daub: They put they put it on last time. I did it with my friend Greg Lam. They put it on this kind of cart the back wheel and then we could push the bicycle across the bridge and then they picked up the cart there was a guy on the other side. The entrance is over there on the other side of the beach.

11:50 John Daub: And just one last thing to point out, after Commodore Perry with the black ship came to visit, he built this, you can see the train going across right now, they built this gun port in case the Westerners, in particular the Americans, came to invade again. So they put a bunch of cannons and stuff like that. But Perry's black ship squadron was just too powerful and in the end Japan had to open up.

12:16 John Daub: But it's still a piece of history that the Shogun at the time made these islands, Daiba Battery, to fight off people coming into Tokyo Bay. So they wouldn't be able to attack Edo, which was all wood. Edo Castle eventually burned down a few decades later and it was never rebuilt again in the Meiji era. Was it a little bit after the Meiji era? But yeah, they probably would have knocked down the castle. The Shogunate was a little bit after the Meiji era. But yeah, they probably would have knocked down the castle anyway because it was a sign of feudal Japan.

12:47 John Daub: But these batteries are still here and it's kind of a neat little history. You can go on to this one here. There's nobody there. So you can take a bento, have a picnic, watch the boats go by from a different side, look at the city. It's kind of romantic. But not when you have Leo. Save some water for me, buddy.

13:05 John Daub: All right, that's our trip here to beautiful, sunny Odaiba. We're going to go to the beach where there's absolutely no signal whatsoever. We've got the Aloha spirit going on with the Kua 'Aina burger in the stomach right now. If you have any questions about this place, leave them in the comments below. I'll take you to another part of Tokyo tomorrow.

13:19 John Daub: I was going to do something else, but Grandpa, Kanae's dad got busy and at the last minute, Mom had to go to work. And so I said, without any hesitation, all right, Leo and I are going to spend the day in Odaiba. And we're going to bring everybody with us for 15 minutes or so just to hang out a little bit. But that's what you got. We're going to take a look at the pier for the space boat, and there'll be another one coming in about 10 minutes.

13:43 John Daub: But we have a bicycle parked over there. It's about a 20-minute bicycle ride, which is crazy. I can rent my bicycle from my house to here in 20 minutes. What is going on here? I picked a pretty good area to live in. And the rent's pretty good, actually. Not as good as smaller regional cities, but it's still a lot better than the rest of Tokyo to be so close to Haneda Airport and Tokyo Station.

14:12 John Daub: All right, everybody, take care. Little Leo and I are heading back home. Get out of the sun because we're feeling a little charcoal burned here. It's starting to sting from all of it. All right, everybody, I'll see you in another live stream soon. Matane.