00:03 John Daub: Welcome to a scene of West Tokyo. This is the western side of this—I guess you could call it city—but Tokyo is much more than a city. And I think a lot of you might know that, but maybe you've never really seen it before. This is the Tama River. It flows into the city of Tokyo here. Very natural. You can get ayu (sweetfish) out of here as well as other things. I've heard of unagi (eel) and other delicious small fish living here.

00:33 John Daub: But it is a really beautiful hot day—if you can call a hot day beautiful. How you doing everybody? I drove here from the city of Tokyo and in this episode I just wanted to give you a peek into this. I guess you could call it the Mitake region because Mitake Station is just down there. It's on the Chuo Line from Shinjuku. You could take it out to here. It takes a little bit of time. Let me show you the map here so you get an idea. Here is Tokyo Station. On the top you can see the whole route to get to this area. It takes by car an hour and 35 minutes, which is what I did. It took, trust me, more like two hours thanks to the traffic. But by train it's only an hour and 51 minutes to Mitake Station. A very good ride. And this is interesting. If you were to walk it, it's like 13 hours. Isn't that too bad? One day. What's really cool about that walk though is you're coming from urban landscape, from city to city, out into this with the birds chirping, the rivers flowing, fresh air—except for maybe my shirt here—and nature.

01:33 John Daub: It's really incredible here. Let's take a look at the water, get closer into this. It's a feeling, right? When you come out of the city and you come into the countryside, so much changes. Over there, I think it's a trout farm. There's a lot of experiences near Mitake Station as well. I thought that was interesting. There's a wasabi farm nearby. There's also a cable car that'll take you to a really small village. I'm planning to stay over there during the autumn season to give you a look into their kind of rapids. Right now the rivers are low. It's been a while since some rain has come in here. In the spring, this is a lot higher. Let me show you exactly on the map where we are in relation to the city of Tokyo. Now, in this map, you can see just how big Tokyo is. The map is really big. It's a metropolitan area. Again, 47 prefectures in Japan. Tokyo is one of them. By the way, there's two syllables for Tokyo. It's Tōkyō, technically. There's the city center on the right side. You can see it goes all the way to where there is no more asphalt. That's the green area where there's a lot of mountains. The Hinohara and the Okutama regions. Again, this area, the west side of Tokyo is called the Tama region. Mount Kumotori is the largest, the highest peak in the metropolitan area of Tokyo. It's a pretty good hike. Actually, it's not even nearly as hiked as Mount Fuji. It offers really good views of Fuji, which I think is a lot better. It is something of a challenging hike, I've been told. I haven't done it yet.

03:09 John Daub: This is where I am right now, the bend on the Tama River. It's really neat. I think it's about a 15-minute walk from Mitake Station to here. There's another one called Kawai Station, which is one station away from here. I'm going to show you what attractions there are over there, which is really interesting. There's Mitake Station down there, right across that bridge. It's not too far away from here. Again, the river region, there's a lot of places to stay. I think this is much more established for tourists in terms of Japanese countryside because it is so close to the city of Tokyo. But still, it's not. Let's just say they get a lot more people coming to visit here than they would like some of the other regional areas of Japan.

04:15 John Daub: Sorry about that. It just kind of slipped off for a second. You can get here by ZR or RAV4 if you really wanted some comfort. But the Prius is okay. I usually go with the Toyota Rent a Car cars. Usually.

04:58 John Daub: Okay, let me talk about some of the attractions here. One of the things that I found. First, I picked this point because there was parking and I could use the drone a little bit here. You can see from the sky just how green it is out here. And again, the image of Tokyo is so urban, isn't it? I'm looking forward this fall to showing you a lot more of this side of the city of Tokyo and bring you out here. And maybe if you don't have a lot of time, this might be a pretty good alternative to those that don't want to get a rail pass. You could again, like walk here in 13 hours from Shinjuku. I mean, you're out here, which is just so cool. And the thing is, there's a lot of hamlets. I'm going by here because it's kind of boring mountains. There's a lot of hamlets, little villages with very narrow roads to get to them. So you drive through them. These are probably ancient paths that people would walk through to get to them. And you'd walk through these narrow paths and wow, it would open up into this village.

05:59 John Daub: And that was one of the places that I went to because I wanted to try the local food. That was just a really quick shot before I decided to do this live stream. So I said, well, I'm going to go to this place. I got the drone up. Let's get everybody out here to take a look at it. So there is this kama-meshi place. Kama (stone pot) is, I believe it's like a stone bowl or pot. And meshi is like rice, fried rice. And this is like grilled in the rice. I've had it before, but it's just particularly good here because they're using the local vegetables and the local mushrooms as well as they have unagi. But on the menu, it said the unagi came from Aichi Prefecture. So it's a little different from the Mitake region which is curious. It's like, why not use it here. But I guess Tokyo doesn't have unagi in the area. But this is the restaurant that I went to for lunch. I had to wait an hour, on a Monday. So this place must be really packed. But it came like this. Check it out. It's really good. A lot of flavor. I mean, it makes rice come alive. Although I like white rice, it's nice. This is a completely different thing here. The steam coming right at the camera. So tasty. I was there for like 20 minutes because I just was trying it because I'm going to go back there and film it. I got a permit for that later on in the year.

07:27 John Daub: This place is just so nice. And there's like maybe a dozen places like this around. Yeah, that was really messy. Here, I'm trying my best to be a YouTuber here. So the soup was good. I think you had to pay another 100 yen to get some tomato paste in there, which made it more flavorful, a little bit more vitamins perhaps. And then you eat the rice, I guess, with a spoon. You know what? It's hot. That's why. But you could use chopsticks as well. And there was this gelatinous, like, sashimi type of thing with wasabi. I was a little bit disappointed with the wasabi. I thought it would be local. It tasted like it was squeezed out of a jar. There's the end of my vlogging. I'm not a vlogger. I like to make long-form programs and stuff, so that's the best I could do.

08:32 John Daub: The meal cost about 2,000 yen or about $14, which is reasonable. But for me, 2,000 yen is a little bit pricey, you know, for countryside fare. However, it was good. And the ambiance is great. And we're still in Tokyo. And people got to live, so I don't mind. And there's no tipping. So, hey, a meal for one, and it filled my gut for $14 in a beautiful location. Good deal. You can walk there from the next station after Mitake, which I believe is Kawai. K-A-W-A-I. It's about a 20 to 30-minute walk. But your reward is that lunch. So it's a good way to walk. You build up an appetite and then walk it off coming back to the train. And then take in some of the ambiance.

09:19 John Daub: I wanted to pick up somebody, but nobody was really interested in hitchhiking. There were a lot of tourists going up and down. Because I also had hitchhiked in my day. And, you know, if anybody had said, hey, take me to the station, I would have gladly stopped because I have an empty car besides just me. Not cute. Not kawaii. Kawai. That's the station. So, yeah, you can get there. It's a next stop from Mitake, which is right there at the end of the road. I still can't believe it's 13 hours. I should do that. Does anybody want to do that? Walk across? Thank you, Mike. Kawa is river and i. So Kawai. If anybody wants to walk across Tokyo with me, let's set this up. That might be kind of fun. We leave Shinjuku or Tokyo Station and just keep walking until we get to the mountains. And then we have dinner and then take the train back. Hey, it says 13 hours. So if we leave at 5 a.m., we'd be having dinner at six. I don't know. Maybe overnight. Let's think about it. I think it could be fun. That could be something. Why not? Let's walk across Tokyo. But the long way, maybe that's all I got for you today.

10:43 John Daub: Hey, Tokyo, Paul. Nice to see you. I just wanted to bring you a little bit and share some of the Tokyo countryside with you. Leave me a comment below. If you've ever stayed in this area before, leave a comment to let everybody know what it's like. What was your experience like staying in western Tokyo in the Tama region? The Showa region [?] is the other one that's worth the islands. And I've been there extensively. So it's nice to be somewhere else.

11:12 John Daub: Clouds could be a little bit better. But for me, it's time to get back into this miniature rent-a-car. It is small, but it's cheap. Cheap, but it is small. I haven't seen any rafters or anybody going down the river. I think it's just too low for that. But there are some companies that will take you rafting in the high seasons for this and not just this river, but a lot of other places. Michael Sassano is here. Hey, brother. Nice to see you. Thank you. I will actually next up. I'm done with the scouting for this. I'm going to be going to Costco to stop and pick up some dinner for Kanae and Leo, perhaps.

12:03 John Daub: So is that a fire engine? That is. That's pretty cool. Where's the fire? It's in this car because it's so bloody hot. Well, see you later. I don't know how they're so compact. The fire trucks are so compact because they have to go through really narrow places. So. I'm pretty impressed because that bridge is small. That fire truck just went over. It's extra red.

12:39 John Daub: It's so freaking hot. You just have no idea. I thought the US was hot when we had a heat wave. But when you add in the humidity levels of western Tokyo, no matter where you are in Japan, I think Osaka might even be worse. Like, you just start sweating. And the black shirt can hide it until the salt stains come. And as you dry and re-salt and sweat through the black shirts, you can see the waves of salt. How hot it was is how far the salt wave got. And then at the end of the day, you could actually lick your shirt if you needed extra flavoring for your food. I'm just saying that's kind of gross. It's like Florida, but I think this is worse because it's not Florida. Tokyo just feels worse than Florida. I don't know why. Maybe because Florida, we expect it in Tokyo. We don't. Or maybe our bodies are conditioned for it. But Tokyo feels worse than Singapore. My Singapore friends come here and go, this sucks like they can't even go outside. Well, actually, Singaporeans handle this probably a little bit better than the rest of the world in that sense. But they don't like it either. And there's no breeze right now, which makes it even worse, maybe because the mountains are pulling it down. I don't know. But Vegas must be pretty bad, too. I don't know. I haven't been to Vegas. But I'll tell you this. The desert seems like a dry heat. This one is not. There's something when you combine the humidity with the heat that just sucks the life out of you. You can't even breathe the air. It's like breathing in soup. That makes it even worse. You can't catch your breath, it feels like.

14:25 John Daub: And I'll do another episode on summer. On the hottest day in August, I'll struggle and take you outside, and I'll show you my sweat stains. This will break the internet. I don't know. Anyways, I got to get off. It was a pretty good day of scouting. I got to see a lot. I got to understand this area that I'm filming in really soon, which is going to be very important because, again, it's really hard to fly drones to find a safe place to do it that adheres to the law, as well as finding places to park for cars. So that's also a reason, perhaps, to take the train because, again, parking a little bit tight here, the roads do go into one lanes where you have to let cars pass you, and you have to kind of have this Japan road IQ sometimes to get through it, but you pick it up pretty quickly. 50 Seabiscuit. Aloha. Thank you. I will stay hydrated for sure. I'm going to hit a convenience store down the road and get something with that. Thank you, as well as Michael. Get some dinner for everybody.

15:24 John Daub: Yeah, you know, I keep asking questions about travel in Japan because I want to get you outside of the cities, outside of Tokyo, and find that ideal place. And there are so many ryokan (Japanese traditional inns), as well as onsen (hot springs) in Tokyo that are pretty good. I hope that... Wait, did you read about the weather in Tohoku? I did. There's a lot of stuff going on around the world, man. It's hard to keep up nowadays. But I will try to get into the podcast and bring you some of the news that's been going on because there's a lot going on around Japan, as well as the world. But the news in Japan is more positive than, I guess, outside. We can tune out the political stuff, in particular, my friends in America. And simply...

16:06 John Daub: I'm trying to turn the air conditioning on. Holy smokes. Oh my goodness. Oh, this feels so good. You can see it. It's like glistening. We do have to come to the Philippines as well. Anyways, thanks guys for watching. I'll see you in another episode, probably tomorrow. I thought I would do more than one today, but again, I couldn't find parking spots at a lot of places. It's kind of tight, and the traffic was hideous. I'm dropping a video probably tomorrow now that Naritasan Daihonzan (Naritasan Shinshoji Temple), which used to be the biggest wooden building in Japan, but now it's a little bit smaller. It's a little bit bigger than the biggest wooden building in the world. They clean it once a year. The little teeny people in the hand of the statue. It's really an amazing sight. How do Japanese clean one of the biggest statues in the world? Well, I don't know. Maybe not the biggest in the world, but it's pretty amazing to see it. I'm doing this claw of death because... It's not the claw of death, but it's the claw of life, maybe. You'll see in the video. It's coming really soon. It's super interesting. Mata ne. See you, everybody.

17:06 John Daub: Check out the river. Give you a look at this for the next couple of seconds. I guess I'll see you in the next couple of days. I guess they're enjoying something out there, but stay in the shade, people, because it is hot once that sun hits you like solar laser hitting your retinas. Mata ne. See you.