01:23 John Daub: Welcome to Okayama. It was a really long trip. I left at 7:21 in the morning from Tokyo Station and got here to Okayama. I'm going to be making an interchange, a change, switch from here in the Shinkansen somehow through the local station to get to the Marine Liner, which will take me across the Great Seto Bridge to Shikoku. I'm wearing a long-sleeve shirt despite it being like 100 degrees outside because the Shinkansen air conditioning is really cold. It was a pretty good trip. Let's say goodbye to this Tokaido Shinkansen and then hello to the station.

02:00 John Daub: We're up here. This is the main entrance. Boy, already I can see the Okayama culture from the platform. You see that? That's a peach. The Okayama peach, one of the shotengai (covered shopping arcade) guys. I spent the first night in a capsule hotel in the first ever Only in Japan episode in 2013, the Naked Man Festival. It was down there. Crazy.

02:27 John Daub: All right, let's say goodbye to this Shinkansen. I love the fact that they put this auto door to keep people from falling onto the platform. That's kind of important. I have so many tickets. Sometimes it's quite intimidating to receive so many. But hey, part of the adventure. It's okay if you make a mistake. Just don't miss that train. Bye bye, Shinkansen. Thank you. It was a sweet ride.

02:59 John Daub: Now it's just you and me. It's quiet. It's really quiet. All right, let's go down here. Look, there's already a Shinkansen coming the other direction. They're nonstop. The Tokaido Shinkansen. Hello, Shinkansen. But I'm not going that way. All right. So basically, we have 20 minutes to get to the Marine Liner.

03:34 John Daub: Here's my next ticket. It's car 1, row 14, seat D. Okayama to Takamatsu. So let's see if we can find this Marine Liner. So I should get my tickets ready. There are three tickets I need to exit, which is crazy. One of them is an express ticket. One of them is the overall ticket. And the other one is the Marine Liner ticket.

04:09 John Daub: All right, this makes it easy. There's actually a transfer gate sign. Whoa! You can already see the white peaches of Okayama. Look at that. That's 1,300 yen for one peach. They're so beautiful and white. And the muscat grapes are also a thing of beauty right there. These are very famous in Okayama. All right. No time for games. We must get to the Marine Liner.

04:50 John Daub: Okay. Transfer to local train lines. All right. Before you do something like this, it's good to check that your train is all over there. So there is a signboard here. So let's look for the Marine Liner. Oh, there it is right there. Platform 6, right on the top. That was so easy. That's too easy.

05:17 John Daub: I guess I need all three tickets. So this is the part that always confused me. Let's see what happens. All three at the same time. You get back two. It took the Shinkansen one. So that is an important lesson for you. Lesson number one. Get off the train. Make sure you have a smile. Lesson number two. You have to put all three of your tickets at the exact same time into there. And the computers in there shuffle it out and find the ones. And it gives you back the tickets that you need. It's pretty smart.

05:56 John Daub: All right. Platform number six. This should be pretty easy. Let's make our way. Oh, 7-Eleven. I got 13 minutes. Shall we? Just a quick look-see here.

06:15 John Daub: Oh, wow. They have the Okayama Premium. I think I sent it to my Daimyo supporters. Premium haichu (boiled chicken breast). White peach. They really play up the white peach angle here. I've been getting these recently. They're just chicken breasts. Low fat. Boiled. Healthy. I think. I just eat this sometimes. In fact, I might get one for the train. That'd be a pretty good lunch item. Wow. Broccoli, chicken, honey, mustard. Wow. Spicy chicken, onion, lettuce, habanero sauce. 7-Eleven is outdoing itself.

07:06 John Daub: I'm just going to go chicken breast. Herb chicken breast. I've got some cash.

07:27 John Daub: What's this? Mochi [?] chocolate banana crepe. Oh, don't do it, John. Diet. Healthy.

07:42 John Daub: Ice coffee. That's enough, isn't it? 467 yen. Yes. I'll use 1000 yen. I'll take the receipt. 233 yen. Did you like the fork and chopsticks? It's okay. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Ice coffee. Thank you very much. Large size.

08:51 John Daub: Minus two points. Plus two points. Net positive. Maybe. All right. It takes a little bit of time for the ice coffee to go in there. Oh, I better get this here. Ice coffee has an ice coffee lid you can take from here. Well, thank you, Ramsey Silent [?]. One of the things I love about 7-Eleven is that they have plastic straws. I'm all for that. Japan recycles the plastic straws. You can put them in the plastic department, I think, sometimes. So, hey now. Am I the only one? I never wait for the beep, beep, beep. I just, I always try the lid to try to save a few seconds.

09:41 John Daub: All right. I just cluttered my, not bad. Not bad at all. All right. Let's go do this. Okayama Station is really rocking at Platform 6. I'm guessing the Marine Liner is a nice train. The platform's over there. They even have more gift items. There's another gift store in the local train line area. But I don't got a lot of time. This one's even bigger. Oh, this looks good. Ice bar, ice cream. White peach ice cream bar. I'm kind of looking for my Daimyo supporters. Maybe there's something I can send from here. There's a, look at this peach jelly. I'm always looking for something. I'm looking for something regional to send to my Daimyo supporters.

10:46 John Daub: All right, let's go down here. We don't got a lot of time. Let's not play with fire. It was that easy? It was too easy. This is way too easy. We need some sort of dilemma. Some sort of like conundrum. Some sort of issue that challenges me. This is too simple. It's not fair. It's boring. But it's informational.

11:23 John Daub: Oh, look at this train. I'm glad I came. Is this mine? No, it's not. Look at this Anpanman train. Oh, Leo's gonna love this. Check it out. This one I think is going to Kochi. It's Anpanman drinking my coffee. Anpanman, oh, don't drink it, Anpanman. Look, it's pudding. This series is in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the most characters. Pudding Hat Man, Dokin-chan and Kokin-chan. Oh, it's a big, look at this one. It's a mega Baikinman [?] and Dokin-chan. That is awesomeness. That's just too cool.

12:26 John Daub: It's gotta be a play area. Am I going in the right way? I think my train is coming. Look, I saw Tomato Man, Baikinman [?] flying. Dokin-chan doing a UFO. That's just so awesome. Oh, there's some tourists. Sometimes I have to find out, is this car number one or car. Okay, I'm in the right place. The Marine Liner right there, it's coming in platform six. We're all good.

13:08 John Daub: But what kind of sings is the front of the Anpanman train doesn't. Oh, there's like a part two. Look, look at the Anpanman train. That's so cute. Do we have time to investigate? Let's do it. We have time to go and investigate a little bit. Oh, this is so cute. We got like one minute. Hey, Saya, if you're watching, give me a heads up if my train is coming. This is so awesome. I think that's it. Yeah, this is it. So I got about 30 seconds. But that's just enough time to just take a quick look-see. Look at this. The windows are open. Anpanman, what is this train? It looks like a school. This looks like some sort of school train. Wooden benches. That is so awesome. Look at the kids getting ready to go on it. So cool. Leo has to take this train. And look, they're washing it down too. That's very nice.

14:32 John Daub: All right, I got no time here. All right, get that train. You have to add in some drama. All right, bye bye, Anpanman. See you. Bye. You have a cold coffee in your hand. Don't spill it and make an embarrassment out of yourself.

15:01 John Daub: It's a green car. Hello. Nice to meet you too. So you go into Takamatsu, car 1, seat 15. I'm in front. So not green car. Yeah, it was pretty long. I'm actually streaming right now. You want to say hi? Yeah. Oh yeah, okay. This is a chani in Japan, is that right? It's a tsugaru so you can see that. Very good. We're going to be exploring Takamatsu together.

15:43 John Daub: But as you can see, it is extremely easy to get on the Shinkansen along, get off it, and find your connecting train. However, do not get distracted by the other trains or the food or everything else in the station which is just so cool. I'm glad that they're wiping it down. Look at that, JR doing the best that they can here. This is JR West. So there's so many divisions of JR it's sometimes quite confusing but what is really weird about this train, check this out, the one on the bottom is reserved and the one on the top is green car. And I don't have green car, which is okay, but I don't know, low is pretty low. I think because we're going over the Great Seto Bridge, I think it's a pretty good thing to have the green car.

16:42 John Daub: Let me show you how confusing Okayama Station is. So if you look at this map, it scares the crud out of you. I mean, how are you going to get from A to B, right? So here's where we are right now. Just so you have, you can see there's a long Shinkansen ride from Tokyo. I left 7:21, I got here at 10:36 I think. Got off. Go past to Himeji. We didn't stop there. We stopped at Shin-Kobe then to Okayama. And you can see now there's the Great Seto Bridge that crosses the Seto Inland Sea going over to Kagawa, the Sanuki region, going around Kurashiki. So we got about an hour I think on this train.

17:26 John Daub: The Great Seto Bridge is really cool and I haven't actually ridden it. You can see the Great Seto Bridge and then getting into Shikoku right there. I'm not going to livestream the whole thing there, get you over to Shikoku. However, and there's Zentsuji [?] where I'm going to be spending the night eventually. But I drove this trip, the one that I'm going on to get to Shikoku. There's many ways to get to Shikoku. This is one of them. The train. But I prefer to drive it actually, right? From Okayama Station. And this is the experience. I did a time lapse of the, from my dash cam.

18:08 John Daub: I'm going to try to get to Shikoku. You can see I'm going super fast here. But we're going to go over to the bridge in about three seconds. And it's really cool because there's different styles of the Great Seto Bridge. Like they've connected it over decades. That one's kind of the brute architectural style. This is more what 1980s looking. And this is crossing over. Now you can see Shikoku right there. We've made it to those popcorn sugar gum hills. So you can see the train. But it's a really cool experience.

18:47 John Daub: Oh look at this. I can show you a little bit of this train before we sign off. That's kind of a nice little touch here. It's going up to first class though. So there you go. I'm making my way to Shikoku. And you can see the, it's not that intimidating to change from one train to another. You can do that pretty easily. And I hope that this gives you some confidence that if you decide to take the local trains and get off of the Shinkansen. That you can do it in a proper time. I mean the Japanese stations are well marked in English. And I don't think it's anything to be worried about. So despite the fact that the station map looks really scary. Don't worry about it. I think you're going to be fine. Try to be adventurous. I had loads of time to get a coffee and a chicken breast.

19:48 John Daub: We're going to be eating. I hope you tune into these. We're going to be eating at the shukubo (temple stay) which is a temple stay. We're going to be eating shojin ryori (Buddhist vegetarian cuisine) so there's no meat. So this chicken is probably my last meat item for the next couple of days. But I'm going to be taking video of it and trying to live stream some of the insert video of it. Because the signal's not too good. So let's see what we can do with some live streams. I'll probably be back tomorrow around dinner time. Which is great for the Hawaiians but not so much for everybody else. And I'll see you in another live stream. Whoa we're starting to pick up steam. Another live stream really soon as now we make our way to Shikoku. To like another world.

21:12 John Daub: Alright everybody take care and see you on the other side.